Short fiction: Vibha is perplexed by the people and philosophy of the design firm she works at

Alighting from the bus, Vibha could see the frosted-glass door, with the firm’s name embossed in ice-blue lettering, suspended above the dusty street – cool, mysterious, a magic portal guarding a sanctuary.

The design firm Vibha worked for – by Bappa’s blessings, as her mother never failed to add, pulling her ears to ward off the evil eye – wasn’t big but it had carved out a niche for itself with minimalist designs, a light colour palette and striking art pieces sourced from countries whose names Vibha had never heard. We are proud of the work we do, our style is international, cosmopolitan, it starts conversations, the firm’s co-founder had said over a Zoom call from her home in Dubai, the dizzying, dazzling city-skyline framed in the window behind her distracting Vibha, people might say that doing interiors is a rich woman’s hobby and, sure, our first clients were friends and family but we have built a business for ourselves, we have clients in Mumbai, Dubai and London, we are profitable, we have an ethos – we only hire women, we give opportunities to freelancers, we are completely egalitarian, no hierarchy, no big-small-high-low, you can call or email anytime you like, ask questions, discuss ideas, even our office is open-plan, no doors.

Money, profit, capitalism, add to it nepotism, no fucks given for feminism, the junior designer had chanted after the call. The junior and senior designers as well as the head of marketing were all related to the Dubai-based founder, who also owned the low-rise building that housed the firm’s office. The open-door speech is hokum too, the junior designer warned Vibha, don’t call her unless she calls you first and never ever send her anything without showing it to us first.

There’s a process, the senior designer had offered, process is important. Process-shmocess, the junior designer had tossed her helmet towards the hook on the wall, it’s called hierarchy.

The senior designer’s eloquent eyebrows had flickered up and down. They were the most beautiful eyebrows Vibha had ever seen, dark and arched like bird wings, rising in a perfect wave from nose bridge to temples. She had learnt later that a woman flew in from Delhi every month to attend to the eyebrows of the fastidious women of Bombay. An eyebrow artist like none other, the junior designer had said, with a price tag like none other too!

To Vibha, the senior and junior designers were fantastical creatures. They both had glossy hair, foreign degrees and unfamiliar accents, but were different in other ways. The senior designer, with those wondrous eyebrows and a sing-song way of speaking, an occasional Hindi word rising like an effervescent bubble in the silver flow, was from the city, born and brought up in one of the old, elegant buildings along the sea, not far from Worli Naka, where Vibha herself grew up. She was devoted to her toy-like curly-haired dog – my baby jaan, my messy goofball, can’t tell his nose from his toes but super sweet.

The junior designer’s curly-haired dog was folk arts, climate change and, as she put it, “not giving a fuck”, she rode an electric scooter, sported a strawberry pink helmet with a yellow-haired Marilyn Monroe cheekily winking at the world, and said fuck a lot. She was born and raised in America and fashioned objects from a mixture of clay, straw and jaggery, materials she termed traditional. The objects she made – book holders shaped like a pair of moon-like buttocks, wall hooks like a hand with the middle finger raised – perplexed and confused Vibha. They weren’t beautiful to her and yet she found it difficult to look away. My way of saying make art and fuck climate deniers, she said to Vibha, by the way, I am relying on you to teach me about the art from your village. She brushed aside Vibha’s explanation of being born in Worli Naka and never having been farther than Thane in her life.

You’ve access to traditional design knowledge through the women in your family, she insisted, your mother, your grandmother, your aunts. Vibha did not contradict her, did not say that her mother too was raised in Mumbai, in a slum not far from the one she herself was born in, that the only traditional knowledge her grandmother, visiting occasionally from the village in Ratnagiri, a two-day journey by tempo–bus–auto, shared was that of traditional injustices – of the village sarpanch, the tehsildar, the block development officer colluding to allow neighbours to encroach on their meagre land.

Instead, Vibha wondered silently at the junior designer navigating the crowded streets of the city on her little scooter, dressed in flimsy crop tops and rainbow leggings. How did she manage with the men on the streets, with their impudent gaze, their lewd comments that Vibha herself weathered every day, even without bare shoulders and an exposed midriff? Perhaps the streets were different for her and for the senior designer, who arrived in a chauffeur-driven car the colour of watered tea and crossed the street negligently, looking neither left nor right, expecting the autos and motorcycles to manoeuvre around her.

Excerpted with permission from ‘Vibha’ by Anukrti Upadhyay in Hell Hath No Fury, edited by Shinie Antony, Hachette India.