Stan waited for the office bus at the place were he regularly waited. The junction where the narrow road leading to the too low subway joined the highway. It was dusty and hot as usual. The construction of a flyover to counter the hour-long traffic jams had begun and Stan had crossed the road with difficulty because he had to negotiate the tin sheet dividers and the now shallow pit they had dug in the middle of the road. A motorcycle had almost him and he had exchanged profanities with the motorcyclist and had withdrawn from the quarrel on the brink of a physical fight. Stan decided he was going to have a bad day and mustered an appropriate facial ex-pression. He decided that everyone else was going to be against him today as they are on most days and decided to give the cold shoulder to anyone who he met that day. He looked inside himself and channeled his anger to the memories of being insulted and treated like vermin in the earlier days of his life and was slowly starting to slip into self pity. It was for this reason that he did not notice the girl who was standing beside him.

She was wearing a red tee-shirt and blue jeans and was slightly plump and looked happy for no particular reason. She was the type who could be happy for no particular reason. But being happy most of the time did not stop her from being bored and anxious at times. It was the first day of her first real job. She was told the office bus will pick her up at 830 in the morning. She had reached the junction at 820. She had been standing there for 40 minutes and it was nine now and there was still no sign of the bus. The only distraction she had in 40 minutes of boredom was a quarrel between the man who was standing near her and a motorcyclist. The quarrel was funny because the motorcyclist wanted to stop it and go to wherever he was going, but the woman who was with him egged him onto fighting. She was even yelling Maro salei ko. The other man looked hurt and angry at the same time and now looked rather sorrowful. He had come and stood near her and had not even looked in her direction, not even a sly glance. She thought that this was very unusual for a man as most men x-rayed her with side-way glances and she was slightly proud of it although it was at times irritating.

“Excuse me; are you waiting for the Tectonica bus?”

Stan was comparing himself to a spine-less comic character in the movie he saw last weekend. His only purpose in the movie was to be a slapping pad for the hero and later for the villain. Stan had stopped identifying with the heroes long back and now watched movies only to see the side-kicks and find satisfaction that side-kicks are also a part of life. But sometimes side-kickifying oneself had unhealthy side-effects and one of them was self-pity as deep as the Arabian sea.

Stan did not comprehend the question first and turned his face towards the source of the voice and let out an “Eh…. ?”

“Are you waiting for the Tectonica bus?”

“Yes, I am.”

Stan stared at her as if she was a green alien with antennae on top of her head and compensated at a very high rate of compound interest for not looking at her earlier.

“I was told it will reach here at 830 and now it is 9.”

She said that after covering her usual ex-pression of happiness with an I-know-you-are-staring-at-me-and-take-the-compound-interest-back ex-pression.  

Stan stopped staring and tried to bring on to his face the I-am-civilized-and-not-overwhelmed-by-you ex-pression.

“Oh, well. It usually comes at 915. Gets stuck at the junction before this one before getting stuck here. Never seen you waiting for bus here.”

A bit disappointed by the ‘time-less-ness’ of the bus and relieved that the bus is finally going to come she replied to him with a slight smile because she had become a little more happy than her usual happiness.

“I am joining today.”

 “Oh, that is good. Where were you working before?”

“Oh, this is my first job.” She replied cheerily.

“Oh, that is good. I am Stan.”

She offered him a hand and he took it looking a bit unsure of himself which was the way he usually looked.

“I am Tamanna.”

“Tamanna, nice name. There is a movie by Mahesh Bhatt that has the same name, right?” Stan mentally patted himself on the back and became a bit surprised of conversation coming easily to him.

“But I am not like the Tamanna in the movie.” She gave him what he thought was a slightly naughty smile.

It was then that Stan noticed the office bus that had idly stopped near them. The driver was looking at them both and was getting a bit envious of the loser in crumpled jeans and tee-shirt.

Tamanna got into the bus and the bus tried to take off without Stan but was able to move only half a metre of the 10 metres it was about to move in the next five minutes. Stan did not notice it and got in the bus after Tamanna who immediately went to the back of the bus as if she did it everyday. She got hardly a look from her new colleagues as they all seemed to be in some sort of suspended animation aided by liquid nitrogen. Silence hung like a wet carpet in the bus. Tamanna thought it stank a little as she settled on to the right window seat at the back of the bus. She later thought the stink might have been from Stan’s socks that had been colonized by a very rare form of anaerobic bacteria. He had come and sat near her maintaining the respectable five inches distance to be maintained when there was enough space to maintain it.

“Which department do you work for?”

Stan was plotting how to continue the conversation and did not hear Tamanna properly.

“Err… what?” He asked, turning his face to her.

“Which department do you work for? And what do you do?”

“Oh… I am a content developer. Naturally, works in the content department.”

He said with a smile that he hoped will make him look witty. Then he remembered he should be asking her about what she is going to join as.

“What are you going join as?”

“I am going to be a code fish.”

“What?”

“A software developer… a coder, software engineer, cyber carpet weaver, whatever you choose to call it.”

Stan remained silent for a moment and then reminded himself to laugh.

“You do not seem to love it much,” he said after finishing the laugh.

“No, I don’t love it at all,” she said fixing her eyes on a couple kissing inside an autorickshaw that had stopped near the bus. She wondered if Stan noticed it.

“I was very excited on the first day of my first job,” said Stan while male-gazing a girl in semi-transparent white trousers who always sat in the second seat from the back of the bus. He wondered if Tamanna noticed it.

“I wanted to be an actor.”

“Oh, even I wanted to be an actor. I thought I looked like Sharukh Khan when I was a teenager and used to mutter Tu ha kar ya na kar too hei mera kiran at girls from a safe distance. I even styled my hair like him.”

Tamanna laughed and her laughter ricocheted of the wet mat of silence that hung in the bus and caused a few drops of laughter to fall on the zombies suspended in liquid nitrogen, which made them notice Tamanna laughing. Stan thought their ex-pression matched that of the hostages getting shot in Counterstrike. He remembered with a tinge of disappointment that he has never been able to save any of the hostages in the game he started playing two weeks back.

“I don’t want to be an actor in movies,” she turned to look at him. Her eyes were still laughing and Stan felt her persistent happiness invading him a bit and he liked it.

“Then?”

“I wanted to be an actor in a play, no not a play, plays.”

“Then why didn’t you become an actor in a play, sorry plays?”

“There is no money in it. I am not rich enough to be an actor in a play.”

Stan sensed a streak of unhappiness in her and he thought a streak of unhappiness is like salt is to porridge to a mind full of happiness.

“Even I wanted to be an actor,” said Stan after some moments of silence. “But I did not know that till recently.”

“Happens with most people.” Tamanna said with a lovely seriousness, but laughed with her eyes. “I knew it all along, right from the time I was in the first grade.”

They sat in silence for a while. The bus was now nearing their office.

“Acting always used to escape from me. I was the one chosen for the comedian’s role in every school play. And for weeks afterwards others used to laugh whenever they saw me. So, I guess I gave a good performance every time I was given an opportunity… no, when forced to act.”

“From your performance in the morning, I must admit you make a fine comedian,” She laughed and made the wet curtain of silence wobble.

Stan did not laugh, but pretended he was looking at the water hyacinth that covered the lake to the left of the road. Tamanna stopped laughing and said.

“I was just kidding. You can be a serious actor as well. Only a very good actor can play a comic role and make people laugh. You must have been really good.”

“I once won a mono-act competition after just one rehearsal and I had not even written the script down.” Stan stopped to give the sentence what he thought was the required emphasis. “And I enjoyed it immensely. That is when I realized I could act and it was something I enjoyed.”

The bus stopped in front of the entrance to the building with huge roman columns and housed their office. The zombies suddenly woke up and scrambled to the front of the bus to get down as if the back of the bus was in fire. Tamanna stood up and tried to follow the zombies but Stan remained seated.

“No one is distributing sweets outside nor we are going to Disneyland,” he said.

Tamanna looked at him and started laughing. This time the zombies took no notice as they were busy pushing and shoving each other to get out of the bus.

Tamanna stopped laughing when they reached the lifts that took them to the reception where they parted. Stan gave her his extension number and told her to call if she needed any help.

“I will call even if I don’t need any help.”

“Anyways, I won’t be of much help.”

Tamanna laughed and went away.

There was not much for work for Stan that day. He did what he usually did. He checked his blog to see if there were any new comments, found there was none. Then opened Wikipedia and went on a reading spree. He clicked on all the links that interested him and read about Australian aborigines, Papua New Guinea, The Matrix, and artificial intelligence. He was reading about the wall of sand in Morocco when his phone rang. He picked it up absent mindedly and said ‘hello’ in his usual lethargic, unenthusiastic way.

“Did they fire you?”

Tamanna’s voice shook him up, created a heavy sand storm in the wall of sand and he came crashing down to the real world.

“Why, why did you think so?”

“You sounded as if you had just fallen into a pit filled with Mumbai garbage.”

“Oh, everyone says so. How is your first day going?”

“Will tell you in the evening.”

Just then Stan saw his project manager coming at him. He wondered what was so different with her. Then he noticed what she was carrying. A meat cleaver, which looked just like the one wielded by the criminal in Grand Theft Auto. She swung it heavily at him. He ducked and his head hit the side of his desk. The world blacked out in front of him.

“Stan, get up. We have reached.”

Stan opened his eyes. All the other members of the theatre troupe had got down from the bus.

“What happened? Why are you looking at me like this?”

Tamanna was puzzled to see Stan staring at her like that. They had to get ready for the play and everyone must be waiting for Stan and her.

“Nothing, just a weird dream.”