Office

Bitchy hushes in the pink corner. Low laughter rings like a metal, sonorous and crystal clear. The swishing of a pair of bell-bottom denims, the sudden gust of Chanel 9 air melts into the tippetty-tappetty of the Dell keyboards. The cell phones cry out in myriad tunes, high-pitched voices drown the soft murmurs of a nearby coffee corner. L tries to concentrate hard on the monitor. The screen flickers into life in the same monotone. Little voices within her head makes her cast a sideways glance onto the next cubicle. A's busy with his work, a little too busy perhaps, feels L. The remnants of a half-eaten role stares back at her. Chicken eyes thickly wrapped in stir-fried capsicum.
'D's wearing the top at least three sizes small,' muses L with a thin smile. She starts sifting through the spams in her mailbox. One gets a little tired, doing the same thing over and over and over again in a mechanical, routinous way. Oddly, the way she throws her chappals after logging in, the left one kissing the tip of the right always at the same angle, is a small miracle taking place with an almost boring regularity.
Some feat, this, thinks L. To be able to do things with such precision without even thinking about them! Perfectly commonplace, mind you, but there they are. The mouse always held with the last three fingers, the other two lying in casual abandon. The cell phone kept at 45 degrees, landline 15 centimetres to her right, legs crossed with the left resting ever so lightly over the right, the spams which promise millions of dollars in an African bank, unclaimed, waiting to be picked up, the boss barking in the same moronic voice, colleagues conspiring, hating, teaming up, falling apart, cuddling close, licking off tears, slapping the back — the sameness of an eternal cycle spinning round a sphere... Even the flirty glances of casual eyes brings a sense of Deja Vu.
It's very easy to read about great men who have broken away from the dumbing down-ness of a ghetto. K recently threw away his job for a career in music. S loves trekking, so she took a two-month leave and never returned. G wears g-strings under the matronly suit. P threw the R-letter at his boss for bad-mouthing him. Great men, women, peers. But L loves being roasted in her own juices. Of recalling what a mistake it had been to join the job. A bit like scratching a mole. Truth is, the moribund existence of a ghetto-ised life promises a security that seems dangerously elusive outside it.
L snaps back into the words that are forming into sentences as if all on their own. The office crackles into life with the sure, heavy footsteps of confident men who have neither the time nor the intention of lazing away, day-dreaming with words. L smiles, inwardly. It's good to be human.