Travails of a WFH Life

'Tis a myth indeed, I tell you, the freelancer's fancy life without a spot of bother or boredom. That life of freedom and options and days that dawn with shitloads of possibility. Most of the time it just means the same as your workday: Drudgery, with a whip in hand. Except us freelancers got an extra dollop of cost-cutting in the Convenience and Glam departments.

Okay, you office-goers. I've seen that mock-'huh?' expression of yours; oh I know that smug belief of knowing you've already won the argument elaborated in this Facebook note of most oxymoronic title. I don't grudge you, no. I smile sweetly because I was in your chair once (pun intended). And I know that you're not gonna be in my corner-of-the-bed spot anytime soon. You have no choice but to hear out my little list of pros and cons, because you have to tell me how you win the argument hands down, doncha?

1. So, to begin, there's that little bit about starting your workday. Have you ever walked into your workday morning, only to see a wet towel on your chair or a stinky t-shirt on your desk? Odd. These things happen here. No matter how much you love clutter, am sure you really do need to fold and put away a zillion washed and sundried garments to make enough workspace. No, your workchair doesn't double as overnight mobile almirah. If the airconditioning stops working you just call Maintenance. Or Admin. Or holler for whoever. No need to step out into the blistering heat and shove a pipe through watercooler slats in the middle of the workday.

2. Then there are the doorbells. They're worse than the phone calls at work, because there ain't no missed calls system here. People who need to get work done just call again. Maids however, are not so persistent or interested in doing your dishes or clearing your trash. Ignore them once, and spend precious productive worktime at the sink or shooing cockroaches away from the overflowing dustbin. The next day you'll sprint to the door when she rings, even if that means abandoning The Muse in mid-orgasmic delight.

3. You can't play office politics to get your obnoxious colleague fired. You just gotta live with him. I know, I know. He does nothing except bark, sit around naked all day, lick his balls, and fart away in his sleep from an unshiftable perch in front of the single source of cooling. When he's not doing that, he's shoving his mouth into your lunch or bugging you to take him to the balcony where he does things that fill up your entire office with the foulest smell of that chemical manufactured in laboratories located in doggie bladders. What's dog lingo for 'Stopppitt! Haven't you read the recently amended Employee Etiquette Guide?' File it under 'Most Urgent' please.

4. There's no Kamla ji you can pataao to replenish the hot beverage on your desk all day (adrak chai at 11am, beaten coffee after lunch, elaichi chai at 5 pm, until office timings do us part). There isn't even the coffee dispenser you can walk to (and indulge in daily whiff of narcissism by checking yourself out in a reflective surface on the way), or a water dispenser you can huddle around and whisper lush new office gossip. It's all rather practical and routine. If you want a glass of water, you'd better fill the bottle and put it back in the fridge, or there won't be any more where that came from. If you want chai, you gotta make a trip to the kitchen, put your OCD slab-cleaning self on a tight leash, make some chai, spend some earthshatteringly irritating moments clinking spoon against walls of cup to dissolve the sugar, and walk back to your desk, utterly bereft of any goss rewards.

5. Okay so you're not the goss type. You prefer donning your headphones and making a statement about how you're just barely tolerating the goss-lapping coworkers (who you're checking out on facebook while they goss anyway). The theatrical satifaction of this asocial routine too dies a whimpering death in the freelancer's life. Try the it's-irritating-me-that-you're-interrupting-but-i'll-be-civil look (slow mo removal of headphones teamed up with 'huh?') on the courier guy and suffer the non-reaction.

6. Self image takes a hit because after a point, you forget what it's like to dress for effect. That little perfectly creative mix-n-match wardrobe squeal of the day passes into oblivion, because frankly speaking, there isn't much you can do with mix n match when it comes to floral prints for nighties. You start uploading ancient photos on your Facebook profile, because social networking is fickle and your friends might just delete you if they see the reality of your frumpy-nightie-oily-face daily look. You start wondering why your jeans have suddenly lost their elasticity and why people are staring at your upper lip goggle-eyedly and compulsively when you step out in the day to buy some sabzi. Then you catch your reflection in one of the car windows while crossing the parking lot and realise you've been flashing people with muchhein Natwarlal jaisi.

7. You sort of, er, begin to miss the point of working, really. Earlier, in that mad scramble of a 14-hours-on-a-chair day, you knew you were slaving over that stupid comma in the proof that this text-lingo world doesn't even care for anymore, because there was money to be had at the end of the month. With that money you would eat expensive weekend dinners at your favourite restaurant, buy gorgeous books for your bookshelf that you'd sigh about never having enough time to read, buy lotsa new workwear that you'd hope would lift your Monday blues and inspire you to get cracking on that mile-long To Do list. The viscious circle is complete. You're a materialistic blinkered horse and you love to hate the life. When you're freelancing, you get disgustingly philosophical about things, because that's the only way to lose some of the pain of not having the materialistic life you actually want-but-don't-want. You're still working for the cheque at the end of the month, but you begin to wonder what to do with it. Weekends restaurant dinners aren't cathartic anymore simply because weekends aren't work-proof anymore; there's no one to lock the office entrance shut on Friday nights. There's no point buying books because you'll be writhing under the guilt of not reading them despite being at home and not bound by a routine. There's no workwear to be bought as consolation, because, you'd rather smoke 100-rupee-bill cigars that spend hard-earned money on floral print nighties, right?

8. Okay, so what. There's always that 'choice' that us darned freelancers have, of walking into office and working from the couch at the reception. The boss is impressed with the attendance, and we get to lounge about on the couch while you lot suffer spondylitis with your faulty rickety prehistoric chairs. But even on those days when our gtalk status reads 'WFO', we're not really rubbing our hands in glee with an evil look at you (Lets face it. It gets a tad boring after the first hour). We're still wailing because we're still unproductive and bored as ever. Our To Do lists are still the length of a toilet roll, and as ready for shit as ever. Coming to office just makes you feel like a social outcast loser, because (apart from the fact that you're out of the fashion loop and are dressed like a relic even by your highest fashionista standards), you realise that you came here because you'd started missing conversation. No I don't mean meaningful, warmed-by-shared-woe heart-to-hearts with colleagues. I mean the real stuff. The parallel conversations where you can just speak aloud all kinds of inane things and not feel like 'no one's listening. Oops I forgot, there's no one in the house'. How ardently I desire the opportunity to walk into a room full of people and say things like 'the weirdest thing happened on my drive to work today', and have the power to make their chairs turn. Actually, scratch that. I just wish some weirdest things would happen to me on a daily basis. There's only so much virtual thrill Facebook notifications can provide.

So, after the chair-turning declaration, what to do? Same old shit. Staring at To do list, facebooking, checking gmail every two minutes for mythical mails (deadline reminders/ job vacancies at Naukri.com/ mails titled 'do you have any ideas for this issue?' are not mails. They're just spam until they're resent to me 5 times). Except that there will be a thousand more distractions: the coming and goings of people; the peculiar dress sense of aforementioned coming and going people; the work-shirking longlost accounts people who ask you with an idiotic grin, 'aur, kaise hain?' five times in quick succession and then walk away, unsatisfied with the same answer you've given them five times already; the pre-lunch gossip-gatherers who make you want to vanish into the crevices of the sofa with their longdrawn, witch-like 'how are you?'s. It's when you long to be back in your room, doing justice to the 'lap' bit in laptop as you change 50,000 work positions on the bed/ bean bag, contemplate the Laptop Sutra and wonder if money can be made from this extracurricular joke.

Back to square one. My vicious circle is complete too. And we're still where we were when we started. We've both wasted precious workhours to read/ write utter crap that isn't going to make the slightest dent in our To Do lists. Time to get back to work. You click the little cross on the right corner of this window, while I come back to my desk after a quick daily business meeting and routine quality check with the neighbourhood golguppe wala. I shall await your writhing, snorting, 'you're all wrong!' comments, liberally prefixed with 'you have NO idea...'. As I said before, I'll do anything for a bit of an event in my work-a-day life.

In Which Punky Learns How to Break a Man. Literally, this time.

Toh beta, agar kisi aadmi ki backbone todhni ho, toh aise karna hai...

She's a witty, loud, strict but sweet, shaaka-polaa wearing lady. She could be my neighbour eating moongphali in the winter sun, and I won't bat an eyelid at that. But when she throws this opening line from a loudspeaker at a groggy me stifling an 8 am yawn, It's A Moment. Something snaps. 'Whatttt?? Woah.'


Memory Interlude. Scene from Kill Bill.

Pai Mei: [punches through a block of wood from three inches away] Since your arm now belongs to me, I want it strong. Can you do that?
The Bride: I can, but not that close.
Pai Mei: Then you can't do it. What if your enemy is three inches in front of you, what do you do then? Curl into a ball? Or do you put your fist through him?


That was just the first day. 10 days later, I don't bat an eyelid when she orders me, 'Aadmi ke paet ka maalpani bahar nikaal ke laana hai', while I practice the Fingertip Short Punch. I don't flinch when she tells me how to identify the effectiveness of my thwack by the length of the man's big, heaving, breathless gulp. No, I don't think it's odd when she tells me that what a man deserves for getting closer than I'd like, is a swift, dagger-sharp yanking of his elbow joint. There's a thin line between self-defence and goondi-gardi at the Delhi Police Self Defence camp for women that I'm attending. And frankly my dear, I'll be the last one to complain.


For me, that first day was a revelation. Revelation that I could actually do away with a lot of the 'but's that chased my oft-repeated 'I love being a woman' line. A bit of a eureka! moment. The kind that you get, say for instance, when you discover much after you've been at it, that sex can be fun --- not just 'Awkwardddd!!' or something one ought to Figure the Fuss About, or to follow diligently, like a flowchart progression titled 'This is How it's Done'. 'Twas my Hey-I'm-A-Woman-No-You-Don't-Mess-With-Me moment. Here I was, standing in a playground, along with 300 girls and women, some still in frocks while others were wearing their hair grey. And we were not being asked to be sweet, loving, peacemaking, 'adjisting' women. We were being asked to be jaw-snapping, fire-spitting, hot-fiery-lava-bursting angry. So angry, we could kill a man who'd wronged us. Pierce our nails into his eyes, dig our elbows into his temples, shatter his nose, batter his chin with our knuckles, make him writhe in agony with a precise, effective, swift kick in the groin.



'APNA GUSSAA NIKAALO!', my instructor bellowed. And right there, I suffered a tiny, silent, momentuous second of shock. Because I realised that no one had ever said that to me. Despite my liberal upbringing, my loving parents who always encouraged me to express myself, experience everything (even let me do all the nasty things as long I didn't tell them). Despite my loving girlfriends who gathered me together on zillions of teary broken-heart nights and sterile-disappointment days. My mentors, my lovers, my rolemodels. Nobody ever asked me to let my anger out (hell, not even Madonna, I'm thinking, hurt, in retrospect). To think that all that pent-up anger I'd carried with me all these years, had just been rotting, pulsing, lashing under a growing, groaning weight. A moment of recognition too: So this was that muffled stab I felt every time my rational self told me to 'not create a scene', every time I read about 18-month-old girls being raped, every time I looked at a man backpacking alone, unobserved, unassaulted.



What I'd needed all along, was for a Delhi Police woman inspector to tell me, grinning, as she demonstrated a crisp, whack-away chin-elbow punch, 'yeh jo aapki nazuk-nazuk kalaiyaan hain na, in ko aise use karna hai .'What I needed was a situation in which I didn't have to check my internal 'haww' if she told me, "Aise punch maaro ki aadmi ko pataa bhi na chaley. Jab naak se khoon bahegaa na, tab pataa chalega us ko..." What I needed, was a kind, stern woman who'd yell at me 'Gussaa nikaalo!!' in ear-stinging, angry, Caps Lock mode, so I could yell back an undiluted reaction without chasing even a split-second of thinking. I screamed. So hard that I had to dam up the tears, so hard that I felt a rush of indescribably happy relief and blink-blink surprise-shock at how so many volatile memories had come tumbling out of nowhere, found form, and dissipated into thin air.



When was the last time an aunty (hell, even a shrink) asked you to scream the living daylights out of everyone around you? Like, a holler as loud as Hero Hiralal against the banyan tree? Rapidly fading memory, eh? I had to jog my memory far back too, through half a dozen previous lives and countless virtual nightmares, before I could remember how to do it, how to push the 'reasonable' limits. And when I did yell that guttural 'hey!!' it came out so angry, so red, so trembling-pulsing with emotional release, the ghissu in me came to terms with the fact that Aristotelian catharsis is SHIT if it isn't exactly this.



A little less of the turbulence of adolescence in me now. But the methodical OCD aunty in me isn't ready to yield yet. She loves making lists, and at the moment her To Do list reads thus, dangerously so: Find Pai Mei, learn the Five Point Exploding Heart maneouvre, put on a yellow jumpsuit, go on a Crazy 88 slaughter rampage! I've even got my killer Bride liner ready, all the pauses and stresses practiced in front of the mirror even: 'You and I have unfinished business.'