Suruchi Dinshaw - Part 1

Trrrrrrrrrring.. “Suruchiiii.. Please get the door dear!”.. Suruchi breaks out of her reverie amidst the medley of doorbell and her mom’s shrill shriek. Trrrrrrrrrrrrrrring… ‘Have some damn patience.$%*..’, she mutters incoherently as she makes her way downstairs It’s the friendly neighborhood postman, Patel kaka delivering a registered letter. She signs while glancing at it nonchalantly. Another share certificate! ‘Why doesn’t dad demat all his shares once and for all’, she wonders aloud while going upstairs in search of him.

She finds him in the balcony sitting cross-legged on the chatai, his brows furrowed in deep concentration as he pours over last week’s crossword puzzle. Suruchi smiles as she hands him the letter that he tosses aside without so much as a slightest glance. ‘Even a tsunami around the corner couldn’t make him budge from in front of that paper!’, she thinks fondly and ruffles his hair, or what was left of it. Mr. Dinshaw is only 53 but started balding rather early, at the tender age of 27! It’s a miracle he still has a few strands left which he combs meticulously every morning. And wonder of wonders, its still jet black! “No dye!”, he proudly explains to people at work, who inquire after it. Mr. Dinshaw is Branch Manager at the SBI, Udipi Gardens. An industrious worker, he climbed his way up the social and work ladder so he could ensure a good future (and present) for all his three children.

Suruchi is the middle one, or almost! Kartik, the oldest at 28, is a software engineer posted at TCS, Bombay. He is followed by the twins. Suruchi, a bully from the word go, proved her qualities quite early, when she pushed aside her brother Rohit to come bawling into the bright blue world! So much so that, even the nurse who held the 3kg baby – a remarkable weight for a twin – exclaimed, “This one sure is a tough cookie!”. Much to Suruchi’s chagrin, her mother doesn’t miss an opportunity to relate that at every family gathering! ‘So its true, but for heavens sake, does she really have to say it EACH and EVERY time!!’, she fumes silently as Mrs Dinshaw turns to smile at her indulgently.

Suruchi found her calling in life very early. She is a creative designer with Lintas, one of the top advertising agencies in the country. Creative juices flow through her as easily as the Ganges down the Himalayas. While a student at the St. Francis school, Suruchi drew and won in every art competition there was. You could pick out the most obscure theme and she would have a masterpiece ready in less than an hour. Her teachers admired her talent and her friends ooh-ed and aah-ed at every thing she created. Suruchi was brilliant…and she knew it. It didn’t come as a surprise to anyone when she topped the qualifying exam at the prestigious ‘NID Ahmedabad’ soon after her 12th. She breezed through her coursework all the while adding to the feathers in her already-brimming hat! Barring the ‘little incident’ in her 2nd year, when her torrid affair with the hunky-dory stud Karan made headlines in the college newsletter, Suruchi breezed through her class magna-cum-laude. Suruchi’s parents had been scandalized when the ‘incident’ reached their ears, thanks to Mrs D’Souza the colony rumormonger, whose elephantine ears snaked all the way to Ahmedabad!. “You wouldn’t believe Mrs Mirza, what I just heard about that arty kid Suruchi. Apparently the hostel warden found her in bed with a ‘dirty’ boy, when she came to her room in search of her. And Mrs Mirza, how do I say this, its all so chee-chee…”, and lowering her voice 2 notches “they say the two were wrapped around each other tighter than Milind Soman and Madhu Sapre in that python wala ad!!”. “You mean the shoe ad..?” interjected the ever helpful Mrs Mirza. “Haan Haan, the same one! I tell you, that kid is a disgrace to her poor parents. Shame-shame”. By the next morning the whole colony spoke about it in hushed whispers and Mr. and Mrs. Dinshaw ordered home-delivery every day for the next 2 weeks. Besides the frantic calls her mom and dad made every day for a whole month to check on their errant daughter, Suruchi received a scathing letter from Kartik, the contents of which best remain under wraps. Rohit on the other hand - at IIT Bombay then – thought it a hoot but was in fact secretly miffed that his so-far decorous sister had managed to outdo him, for Rohit’s tales were enough to put a playboy to shame, but then that is another story in itself!

Suruchi joined Lintas as soon as she graduated. They had actually been thrilled when she choose them over their arch rivals Satchi & Satchi, for Suruchi, the only one in her batch to have six offers in hand even before her final semester results were announced, had made an enormous impact on the panel members during her campus interview. One reason Suruchi chose Lintas was because it gave her the opportunity to return home to Bangalore. ‘The heart is where the home is’ was pretty true in her case, for inspite of her ‘little affair’, Suruchi was pretty much a ‘decent’ kid and loved staying with her parents and the luxury of garam-garam chappatis and lip smacking ‘baingan ka bharata’ that her mom made. Suruchi slipped back into the old familiarity of family life with considerable ease, unlike most of her friends who hated being ‘told what to do’ after 4 years of total freedom, and compared living with their folks to ‘Alcatraz’.

When Kissan launched its hot and spicy tomato sauce, Suruchi was the brain behind the ‘Tomchi’ ad “tomchi aaja, tomchi aaja’. Her fame found its way to her colony when the neighborhood kids started yelling “Suruchi didi aaja..a-a-aaja.” every evening as she walked home from work. In the beginning, she preened her feathers each time she heard it, but after a while she admitted to her mom that it did get a tad annoying. “Well beta, fame comes at a cost you know” was Mrs Dinshaws sage reply.

At 25, Suruchi had been working for 3 years now and was a popular and loved figure at Lintas.

Suruchi goes back to the book she had been reading before she was interrupted. ‘The diary of a young girl – Anne Frank’. It was the third time she was reading it and as always she was amazed at the brutal honestly, sincerity and maturity with which the young Jewish girl wrote. “I cannot imagine what it must be like to live with a machine gun to your head, that threatens to go off at any moment”, she wonders with unconcealed awe and respect. ‘How can one so young be filled with wisdom so profound? How can one be so rational in a world ruled by irrationality? How does bravery survive in a cold-blooded environment’…. Her thoughts trail off as her dad calls out to her.

“Suruchiiii, what's ‘On a pillar, half a circle, nearby full a circle, what is it and where is it?’” “Oh come on dad!!! You’ve been doing the crossword for a gazillion years now and you can’t crack one simple line of code! It’s the word ‘PO’ and its a river in Italy”. “That was a tough one”, grumbled Mr. Dinshaw as he went back to his scratching pad.

Feeling like ‘Girl Interrupted’, Suruchi kept her book aside and trained her thoughts towards the Diwali holidays. The five of them were going to be together after what seemed to be aeons. She hadn’t seen Kartik in 4 years. While she had been home for three, Kartik had managed to come down just once and that too only when she was out of town on an office tour for 3 days! Suruchi had been awfully disappointed. While they remained close through emails and phone calls, Suruchi wondered how much he must have changed in all these years. After all they say the ‘Big Bad City’ of Bombay really does things to a person! Although only 3 years older than Suruchi and Rohit, Kartik was a typical older brother. As kids, Suruchi and Rohit pretty much kept to their ‘hip and happening’ crowd while Kartik’s friends were always an enigma. For the last 3 or odd years though, Suruchi found herself closer to her older brother. She told him all her stories, and sobbed on his shoulders, virtually of course! He humored her, heard her out, offered his 2 paise worth advice whenever needed and was enormously proud of her achievements. She secretly admired him too, though she would die rather than admit it on his face!

Rohit hadn’t changed a teeny bumblebee bit! He was as crazy as ever and Suruchi thoroughly enjoyed listening to his wild racy stories. ‘My gosh! The things these IITians did in the hostels!! Mrs. D’Souza would have a heart attack if she knew!’ Rohit was now at Satyam, Hyderabad and absolutely detested the slow paced city.


...to be continued