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Teenager's Anguish-14

by Bala
(Mumbai)

Chapter 14 : God Is Harsh For Some People

From Vijaya's friend Smita's statement to the police inspector Kulkarni, that some boy had followed her from her boss's house some 3 months back, and the police not being able to solve the problem, to her current condition of lying in coma for so long, Shinde's family could not reconcile themselves in any way they tried. They kept crying in frustration.

They kept asking themselves whether the boy, who was found dead at the accident spot in Pune, was the person who followed her from her boss's house or was it somebody else and why was he doing it. What was his intentions in doing it?

They were not able to get any answers to such questions.

But they did not know that he was not that person. He was a different person.

When Vijaya was taken as a trainee in Mr. Walawalkar's event management firm, the boss asked a supervisor, Nitin Malwankar, age 25, with a working experience of more than 5 years in the firm, to train her for the job - what was event management, how to identify potential customers, how to approach them, how to convince them to give their business to the firm etc.

He gave her an orientation lecture and took her along with him for her first assignment to a potential client.

After she picked up the basic facts that way, he told her that for the following 2 assignments, he would accompany her to their next potential customers, but she would have to do all the work like preparing the documents, writing to the clients, meeting them, discussing with them, get the orders from them etc under his watchful gaze and that he would help her only if she made any mistakes or if she was puzzled as how to proceed further.

Since she completed the 2 assignments satisfactorily, without needing any help from him, the boss told Nitin to give the next 3 or 4 assignments to her with only the targets to be achieved by her and leaving the rest to her judgement.

Nitin very happily gave a feedback to the boss after the completion of those 3 or 4 assignments handled by her, stating that she did a marvellous job entirely independent of him.

Highly impressed by her work, the boss said that from now onwards, she would directly work under him and took her away from Nitin.

She was made a supervisor herself and some 5 trainees were assigned to her, with a responsibility to train them, just as Nitin was training some trainees like Vijaya, when she had joined the firm.

Nitin was completely jolted by this development. Vijaya had hardly completed 6 months of working in the firm and she had already reached this status. It had taken Nitin more than 2 years to reach such a level. Other supervisors took even longer time than him.

Not only this, the boss started praising Vijaya in training and orientation meetings and predicted that she would be a star performer in the near future.

Nitin was burning with intense jealousy. He just could not digest this development.

He began to think that he would have to teach a lesson to this upstart at the earliest. He wanted to see that she would cut a very sorry figure in front of the boss so that her importance would be lost forever, so that she would be demoted or thrown out of the company as unsuitable if possible.

But he was puzzled as how to do it, what to do, where to begin etc.

A few days before Vijaya went to meet Meena madam in her house for the first time, Nitin had to urgently deliver some government notice to his boss, so that he went to his building. To his surprise, he found his old school friend, Bhupinder Singh, sitting in the watchman's cabin, chit chatting with him.

Nitin learnt from him that the watchman was his cousin and so whenever he was free he would drop in to his cabin for spending his time with him. There was no other relative of his in the city other than the watchman.

After exchanging their experiences from their school days for some time, Nitin shared his grievances about Vijaya's super rise in his firm and told him how his boss was cutting his own importance in the firm. He felt small in front of her due to his boss's partially towards her.

He said that Vijaya was not that good as claimed by the boss but she had somehow managed to impress him. He did not like it one bit etc. He showed her photo to Bhupinder from his mobile phone also.

When Vijaya visited the building within the next few days, Bhupinder was present there but was outside the gate, watching some people on the road. When he came in a little later, he saw that she had entered her name in the register and was to meet the boss's wife.

Immediately he rang up Nitin and told him about her visit to the building.

Even though he did not have any particular plans about her at that time, Nitin told him to take her pictures as she was coming out of the building and also asked him to follow her to wherever she was to go after finishing her visit to the boss's flat. He would think about further moves afterwards.

Bhupinder Singh's elder brother was working in Saudi Arabia for the past 12 years or so and he had recently presented him with a nice and costly gift of an excellent mobile phone with several smart features.

As Vijaya came out of the lift, Bhupinder Singh did exactly what he was told and reported the matter to Nitin. He gave the particulars of her address, her flat, the structure of her building and other relevant details after following her to her building in his motor cycle.

Nitin wanted to think further what to do next after getting such information.

But before he could take any further action, things happened and she was lying in a coma in a Pune hospital.

In a way, it was a very satisfactory development for Nitin. He thought that one competitor of his got incapacitated due to god's grace. He was relieved in a way to find that nobody would connect his enmity towards Vijaya for her tragedy.

He hoped that she would never come out of her coma!

But for Shinde’s family members nothing else mattered other than her well being.

It seemed to them that their nightmare would never end and that they were the most unfortunate people in the world to face such unending miseries in their lives.

They kept thinking about the various incidents that had taken place in Vijaya's life the past few months and tried to figure out some meaning from them.

The only question which kept coming up in their minds was whether their family was cursed by bad karma of past births.

Their doubt was due to the fact that before the birth of Vijaya, they had lost 3 children within 1 year of their birth each time.

Even though after her birth, Vijaya was a normal and a healthy child, god was testing the family now, after she was making progress in her studies and in her job, as she was lying in coma for almost 3 months, with the doctors unable to give them any guarantee about whether she would recover from her coma and if her recovery would be back to normal health and how soon.

Nobody was able to console them when they kept crying all the time looking at the inert body of Vijaya lying on the hospital bed with all the tubes and bandages on her.

God is certainly harsh on some people.

The End

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