am not disturbing you.> Aditya was enjoying the thrill of their exchange. Middle age had set in faster than he would have liked. Maya and he had long stopped giving this sort of attention to each other. Those leisurely morning cups of coffee and eating lunch out had been replaced by fretting over Aryan. This left little time for overt display of romance. Aditya lied about not being busy, because he didn’t want this attention to stop. Books could wait. Aditya didn’t respond. He had walked to the refrigerator to get himself a glass of water. It was a warm night. Shreya’s next SMS read. They went on chatting for a long time that night, for over an hour. Only when Aryan woke up and groaned for his dad did Aditya realise what the time was and called it a night. Maya woke up sensing him slither into the quilt. ‘You need to take care of your health, Adi. You need at least seven hours of sleep.’ Aditya felt a touch guilty. He loved her, and Aryan too. But he was beginning to enjoy his tryst with Shreya, a bit too much.
19 W HEN T IM CALLED for a follow-up meeting on the shut down of the wealth management business, he was joined by his boss; the CEO of National Bank, Sanjay; a representative of group HR, and the heads of the other businesses of the bank. The agenda was to come out with a working plan and timelines for communicating the redundancy of the 300 employees to the bank in general and the impacted employees in particular. National Bank had, of late, been in the news for adopting a flip-flop business strategy on various business lines. Aditya had his favourites within the wealth management team, those whose jobs he wanted to protect. He derived enormous comfort from the fact that Sanjay was there and would be able to pull some strings to make sure that people he wanted to ring-fence would be largely insulated. It was upon his recommendation that Tim had invited the heads of other businesses too, for he wanted to impress upon them to hire as many people from the wealth management team as possible. Sanjay was driving the meeting and the discussion. Beep. It was Aditya’s phone. Hurriedly he put it on silent and glanced at the screen. It was Maya. Typical Maya. It is not that he would have thrown a fit if the box didn’t have what he liked. The meeting went on. They debated and agreed on the number of wealth managers to be moved out—297 of them. The CEO instructed the other businesses to hire as many people as possible from the wealth management team so that they could save people from getting sacked. ‘We can train them for different roles. So go ahead and hire them to fill the vacancies in your respective teams. We need to take care of our people,’ he reiterated. ‘With immediate effect all recruitment from outside, at the Manager and Deputy Manager levels, are frozen.’ Sanjay smiled. This is what he had wanted the CEO to say, and the CEO had effectively delivered the message. Aditya’s mobile vibrated in his pocket. He pulled it out and looked at it. It was a message. He swiped it open. He smiled. he typed back into his smartphone and pressed the send button. He had just pressed the send button when his phone