Page 27 - You Only Live Once [BooksLD]

humble. He slides the cabin door and peeps into the room. ‘Lunch at 2
p.m.?’

‘Where?’ I get excited as I wonder if he’s taking me out to the fancy
newly inaugurated fine-dine restaurant Colorin near our office. He has this
habit of surprising the team with elaborate gestures.
‘Cafeteria,’ he says without an expression and walks off silently.

‘I guess he is going to take the information out of me,’ I whisper under
my breath.

The gentleman that he is, he would be more concerned about me joining
a drug cartel than not meeting the sales targets, I know. However, I am
never absent at work. So he ideally has no way to raise the topic and warn
me against the same. His expressions reveal that finding about my stand-up
act in Goa is the only thing.

A poster with an Oscar Wilde quote that reads, ‘Be yourself; everyone
else is already taken’ hangs on a wall of the cafeteria, right below which I
sit to talk to Akshaye. I have been looking at the poster since day one. It’s
funny that this quote adorns the wall of a bank’s corporate office where

hardly anyone is being themselves.
I point to the poster as I start a casual conversation with Akshaye.

‘Be yourself. Am I being myself since the day I started taking my own
decisions?’
‘You were always being yourself. Even if you’re doing what others want

you to, you’re taking the final call.’
‘You mean to say that I’m being myself since the day I was born.’
‘Yes.’

‘Of course not!’

I wanted to bring a significant change to my life, a change that would
empower me to live the way I would love to. But I have had a fading
interest in everything. Nothing had excited me for more than a certain time
period. It had happened to me in the classroom as well. My love for Math
was not natural but fueled by the fact that my dad would have freaked out if
he came to know that I didn’t perform well. I would not have been able to
get a well-paid job if I dare not be a top scorer in Math. I loved Geography

like no other subject, but there were no conventional careers in Geography,
not to my family’s knowledge at least. Biology had grown on me at one