The Accidental Apprentice Read Free Page B

interest a puzzled-looking shopper with a potbelly in the latest full-HD camcorder from Samsung, but he seems more interested in my legs sticking out of the short red skirt. Whoever designed this risqué costume (and the finger of suspicion has always pointed at Raja Gulati, the owner’s wastrel son) meant to make us salesgirls look like air hostesses. Except, as my colleague Prachi says, ‘We get the propositions, but not the pay.’
    To be honest, I don’t have to contend with as many lecherous advances as the other three salesgirls. They are the ones who look like flight attendants, with their coiffured hair, impeccable makeup and glowing skins. I look like an advertisement for Fair and Lovely cream with my awkward smile and a complexion that is described in matrimonial ads as ‘wheatish’, a polite way of saying ‘not fair’. I was always the ugly duckling of the family. My two younger sisters, Alka and Neha, got their milky white complexions from Ma. I inherited my father’s darker skin. And, in this part of the world, skin colour is destiny.
    Only when I started working at the showroom did I discover that being dark and plain-looking also has its advantages. Wealthy women customers get intimidated by competition and can’t stand it when other beautiful women are around. They feel more comfortable with me. And, since most family purchase decisions are made by women, I invariably reach my monthly sales targets faster than everyone else.
    Another thing I’ve learnt is never to judge customers by their appearance. They come in all shapes, sizes and dresses. Like the middle-aged man who walks into the showroom just after 3 p.m. dressed incongruously in a turban and dhoti. He looks like a bodybuilder, with a huge upper body, thick arms and a handlebar moustache he has teased and twirled into a work of art. He wanders through the aisles like a lost child, overwhelmed by the shop’s glitter. Finding the other salesgirls sniggering at his rustic dress and manners, he latches onto me. Within ten minutes I have extracted his entire life story. His name is Kuldip Singh and he is the patriarch of a prosperous agricultural family from a village called Chandangarh, located in the Karnal district of Haryana, approximately 140 kilometres from Delhi. His eighteen-year-old daughter Babli is getting married next week and he has come to the capital to buy goods for her dowry.
    It is another matter that his knowledge of machines extends only to tractors and tube wells. He has never seen a microwave oven in his life, and thinks the LG, 15-kg, top-loading washer is an ingenious device for churning lassi! He also wants to bargain with me for the price of things. I try to explain to him that all items in the showroom have a fixed price, but he refuses to accept it.
    â€˜ Dekh chhori. Look here, girl,’ he drawls in his homespun vernacular. ‘We have a saying in our Haryana. However stubborn a goat may be, in the end it has to yield milk.’
    He is so insistent that eventually I have to prevail upon the manager to offer him a 5 per cent discount, and he ends up buying a truckload worth of goods, including a 42-inch plasma TV, a three-door fridge, a washing machine, a DVD player and a music system. The other salesgirls look on in hushed awe as he pulls out a thick wad of thousand-rupee notes to pay for his buying spree. Their country bumpkin has turned out to be a shopaholic baron. And I have notched up yet another sales record!
    The rest of the day passes in a blur. I leave the showroom as usual at 8.15 p.m. and board the metro, as always, from Rajiv Chowk station.
    The forty-five-minute journey takes me to Rohini, a sprawling middle-class suburb in northwest Delhi. Reputed to be the second biggest residential colony in Asia, it is a cheap, ugly tentacle of the capital, crammed with dismal, unimaginative concrete apartment blocks and chaotic markets.
    I disembark at Rithala, the last