Pressure

Those first weeks at the press, Lekha hid out in the Udupi hotel until Karan, her male colleague, arrived. She had been ashamed to admit it, but she didn’t want to walk in alone. She wasn’t a coward, she told herself. She was just being practical.

Once she spotted Karan, she would leave a few coins next to her chai cup and rush out, pretending she’d just arrived. Sometimes, she didn’t even drink the chai.

“Miss Lekha Gopal, always on the dot!” Karan would say, smirking, and she wondered if he knew. He was a habitual flirt and she didn’t yet know if he was of the harmless variety. He would stop a bit theatrically when they reached the press entrance and allow her to walk in first.

There were two entrances to the wedge-shaped corner building that housed the historic Dainik Press. The one the writers and journalists used was on MK Road. It boasted of a towering archway topped with a Union Jack in stained glass, and sat next to expensive cafes and music stores. Right across was Ring Park with its Victorian fountain. Old men thronged the benches in the mornings, reading their newspapers and, as the day wore on, tourists would come by with cameras.

The entrance to the printing press section, which Lekha and Karan used, was far less photogenic. On this side, the pavement was packed with stalls selling lottery tickets, cigarettes and paan. The brick doorway and iron gate could well have been the entrance to a prison. At the very top of the gate, dust had settled on the grill in layers so thick that they looked like matted locks. Lekha was repulsed by the sight but sometimes found herself wanting to touch them, wanting to examine their texture. The watchman sat on a wooden stool inside, near the punch-card station, and only let in those he could recognise by sight. By now, he was used to young engineers coming in from PrimaTech. One year into the new millennium, once the Y2K clouds had dispersed, Dainik Press had decided they would go digital. It was an ambitious project and had taken months of effort. This was the last phase.

#

Once inside, Karan and Lekha would have a few meetings and then part ways. Karan would head off to the printing machinery section—the heart of the press—where he worked on digitising the last few machines. Lekha’s work was in the desktop publishing section.

Her chief contact was the pre-press manager, Hitesh-ji. He was a middle-aged man who’d worked his way up to management.

Hitesh-ji liked to tell stories about the old days. “In those days, the paper-cutting machines were pretty deadly,” he said the first time they met. Then, he held up his left hand. She looked at the missing finger in horror, but he simply laughed. He had worked in every department, he said, and even claimed to have subbed in once for the cartoonist.

She worked with Hitesh-ji to set up approvals and other press workflows on PrimaTech’s software. She was also going to train his team to create a newspaper page on a computer—scan and place photographs and cartoons, flow in the text and headlines from the editors, advertisements from the agencies, and so on. There were six people that she had to train and nearly all of them were older than her. They were not new to technology, only to this software. And although it wasn’t going to replace their jobs, they still seemed wary of her and her new ways.

#

It was a Friday when Lekha encountered Mr. Dilafrooz, the owner of the press. She had met him during the project launch, but at that time, she had mostly stood quietly beside her boss from PrimaTech.

Mr. Dilafrooz wasn’t a technical man, nor was he involved in daily operations, but he made sure his eyes were everywhere. The press was a family empire and Mr. Dilafrooz, like his forefathers, was born to be king. Fittingly, his office was on a higher floor, atop a curving teak staircase. And like a king, he sometimes descended from it to mingle with his subjects.

That afternoon, she first heard the harsh sound of a walking stick on the wooden floorboards. One of the peons went running around like an old-time messenger, announcing: “Sir is coming on rounds!”

Suddenly things were being shoved into drawers, papers were being tidied, and little groups of gossip-mongers were starting to disperse. Even Hitesh-ji lost his usual composure and started whispering instructions.

“This time, the focus will be on you!” he said to Lekha.

Mr. Dilafrooz soon appeared in the doorway, almost filling it with his width and a certain brightness owing to his pale skin and beige safari suit. His walking stick was antique but had a steel tripod fitted to its foot. He leaned on it now and stepped over the threshold. Another man followed him closely, like a bodyguard.

Hitesh-ji stepped up to introduce her properly, and then spoke about the new machines and software. He could barely contain his excitement.

“Launch is in August, sir. Fully digital, modern Dainik.”

Mr. Dilafrooz looked at Lekha over his glasses. His name reminded her of Roohafza, the pink sherbet from her childhood. But there was nothing rosy or sweet about this man.

“Engineer Lekha Gopal from PrimaTech,” he said, “Please show me the button.”

“Sir?” Lekha felt lost.

“The button. Where is the button?”

Was this some printing term she was ignorant of? “Um, sir, we have lots of new equipment here.”

Mr. Dilafrooz sighed. “That, I can see.”

“Well, sir—”

“Your people said that when we go digital, everything will become automatic. You press one button, and, Kataak! The digital newspaper will get made.”

Lekha realised that the first thing to do was agree. She gestured to the scanner, and said, “You are right, sir, here is the first button. To make photos into digital files.”

She then moved to Hitesh-ji’s workstation and showed him how the text would flow in, how each page would now be a diagram on a monitor rather than a piece of film. As for breaking news? Why, you could wait until late at night to add a story, she said, channelling the company’s marketing spiel.

Mr. Dilafrooz only glanced perfunctorily at the things she was showing him. Mostly he looked at her face, as though waiting for her to let something slip.

When she finished, Mr. Dilafrooz frowned and said, “I will need a weekly report. Every Friday at 3 o’clock. Don’t be late.”

Before Lekha could say anything, he gestured to his handler and tock-tocked away on his cane.

#

Lekha usually went to meet Karan around noon for lunch. In the press, the building opened up into high ceilings and ventilators. It was a place full of men, and the soft scents of their sweat mingled with the sharper ones of paper and ink. Sometimes, Lekha thought it was pheromones telegraphing a warning. Still, she liked it there, among the machines.

Her favourite one was the newspaper folding machine. She liked the simplicity of it, the way it guided flat sheets of paper onto an ever-narrowing shelf. By the time the sheets reached the edge, they had been gently coerced into folding onto themselves. The perfect halves fell down on a conveyor belt and were swept again into another shelf. At the end, they would emerge with the headlines staring up towards the sky.

“How’s it going with the DTP people? Hitesh-ji?” asked Karan.

“Good, yaar. He’s curious, open.”

“Really?” said Karan, “He looked like an uncle-type to me.”

Lekha hastened to explain that it wasn’t so, telling him how Hitesh-ji had worked his way up and managed to survive every stage of modernisation.

“Not bad for the old man,” said Karan, “Maybe your charms are working on him.” He laughed and pretended to bat his eyelashes. Was he laughing because Lekha was nothing like that? Or was he just being his flirtatious self? It was hard to tell.

“Just dazzling him with my knowledge, Karan,” she said, returning to him one of his many sly smiles.

Lekha also let it slip casually that she’d met Mr. Dilafrooz. The small flicker of envy on Karan’s face delighted her.

She resolved to stop hiding out at the Udupi hotel.

#

What Lekha had omitted to tell Karan was that she was struggling with the training. Hitesh-ji was good and lovely, but his team, her chief trainees, didn’t pay much heed to her.

No one listened to what she said until Hitesh-ji repeated it. It wasn’t just her youth. She found herself wondering if it was her femininity—or rather, her lack of it.

At her all-girls school and college, Lekha had been slotted as a tomboy by the others. It wasn’t how she would’ve described herself but, true to the stereotype, she was good at subjects like electronics and maths, and bad at embroidery, dance and singing. At home too, she grew up her father’s daughter, helping him fix broken chairs or bring down boxes from the loft. By the time she hit adolescence, she began to take solace in the phrase. It let her escape from tasks like shaping her nails or trimming her eyebrows.

Once she entered the world of work, a world of mostly men, she was regarded differently. At her first internship, she had overheard some male colleagues talking about her sports bra and how it didn’t let them estimate her breast size. Another time, she had worn a saree to an office party, tying her in-skirt high and winding the saree snugly around her. A man who she had thought was a friend had said, “Lekha, what’s the use of a saree if you don’t show something?” It wasn’t the scrutiny that surprised her, she realised, but the annoyed reaction. Men disliked women who made no effort to look attractive.

When men weren’t annoyed with her, they ignored her. She was definitely being ignored by the men at the press, she thought. This problem consumed her and made her question several parts of her life. Should she have learnt some feminine wiles? Was that how other women balanced the tipped scales? What else had she forgotten to learn?

#

One evening, on a whim, Lekha went to Chor Bazaar in search of photos to use for the scanner demo. She had a standard set of pictures she used to train people on the gadget, but they were mostly photos of nature or children.

She found a picture of Amitabh Bachchan on the set of the movie Coolie. In the picture, the actor wore a midnight blue shirt with the top buttons left open. A cotton rope, draped over his shoulder, snaked over his torso and echoed the long lines of his body. A brass plate was fastened to his upper arm.

“Who can tell me why this is a good picture for testing the colour?” she asked the team and didn’t wait for an answer. She scanned it and showed them how to correct for the blue and for his skin tone. She pointed out details to check, like the lines of the rope and the shine on the brass plate.

Lekha felt that the exercise ignited a small spark of interest. She went to the bazaar and found more photos. She tried the Khans (too young), Shashi Kapoor (too elite) and then struck gold with Akshay Kumar. Everyone wanted a turn scanning it.

“Why don’t we scan Raveena Tandon ka photo?” someone sniggered.

“I prefer photos of men,” said Lekha, guilelessly. She explained that women’s pictures were all shot with soft-focus filters and had little to no detail. On the men’s you could see different skin tones and pores. “If they have chest hair, it’s perfect,” she was saying, looking at the monitor, when she realised that there was a new silence in the room. She turned to bemused faces. She let herself smile too, biting her lip like a child, and they all erupted into laughter. She laughed with them, a little unsure, a little disarmed.

And then, on a slow-news day, Hitesh-ji made a joke about her. She didn’t quite catch it, but it was something about the DTP section being a school and her being their “Teacher Miss.” She flushed with embarrassment before she realised it was in good humour.

Soon, they started to call her “Lekha Miss” instead of “Madam.” They teased her by asking permission for everything.

“Miss, can I go to toilet?”

“Miss, as I am suffering from grandmother dying, I need leave.”

She too, leaned into this nostalgia, once tapping a wooden ruler on her palm, an act which left them in splits. She edited all her PowerPoints so that they said “teaching” instead of “training.”

#

Meanwhile, Fridays with Mr. Dilafrooz had become a ritual. Lekha would start gathering her files by 2.45pm. There was much teasing from the team, now on more casual terms with her.

“Lekha Miss, does he give you teabag chai? From those English teapots?”

“Is it better than our chai?”

“Arrey, it’s our Kamal bhai’s chai only. He just adds one Lipton tea bag for effect.”

“His big thing is sandwiches,” Hitesh-ji said, “If he likes someone, he will offer that with the chai. You know those sandwiches, right? Triangle-triangle, with Amul butter, green-chutney, cucumber.”

Lekha’s meetings were too brief for all this fuss. “He doesn’t even offer me water, Hitesh-ji!”

She usually took Mr. Dilafrooz a file of flowcharts and mock-ups, and he glanced at them without picking them up. Sometimes, while Lekha spoke, he would walk over to the giant picture-windows at the end of his room. Mr. Dilafrooz’s office looked out on the corner where two streets met. The window facing the fountain framed the colonial city, all red brick and sloping roofs. On the other side was a mess of flat-topped buildings, all streaked by the monsoon rains like kajal on the morning after. A set of cables ran right across from one window to the other.

At exactly 3.15pm, Mr. Dilafrooz would interrupt her to say, “Miss Lekha, thank you,” and, without waiting for her to answer, nod and sit back.

Some Fridays he asked her to explain concepts. Digital versus Analog. Dots per inch versus pixels per inch. It was hard at first. She had no idea what his level of understanding was, and she had to be careful not to talk down to him.

“Do you think it’s a test?” she asked Hitesh-ji.

“Who knows how sir’s mind works?” he said, gesturing upwards as if he were talking about a god.

#

One Friday, Mr. Dilafrooz seemed more distracted than usual. “Enough, enough,” he said, standing at the window. “You know Miss Lekha, when my grandfather first started the press, not even one page would go out to print until he had seen it.”

Lekha tried to imagine what a laid-out page would have looked like in those times. Bulky, physical things. Words and lines cast in metal, pictures carved into wood. Everything bolted into a frame like a painting.

“I do a check myself, just once or twice a year,” he continued.

By the time Mr. Dilafrooz took over, the page would have been set in film and then, through a series of photographic processes, etched on a giant metal plate. This was what PrimaTech was here to revolutionise. Computer to plate, they called it.

“So, you check the films, sir?”

“I do. They are so close to the final versions. And with film, I can do this,” he said, yanking back a part of the curtain. Lekha’s mouth fell open. The entire window was lined with films from top to bottom. Front pages of the Dainik. A shaft of sunlight streamed into the room and cast the headlines on the floor: assassinations, elections, riots, tragedies.

“Damn it, that’s beautiful!” Lekha said, sighing, forgetting, for once, to be professional.

“Engineer Lekha Gopal, I have a request. You are taking us from film to computers. All fine. But I would like a film printer just for me, just for my office.”

#

“Ridiculous,” her boss said on the phone, “What’s the point of going digital then?”

“He’s right. It would show us up so badly,” said Karan, shaking his head.

By then, his phase of the work was ending. He showed her how the new computers etched the pages onto the plates. The plate was then draped and fitted around a giant geared cylinder. She watched as the cylinder turned, first making contact with ink, and then with rolls of paper.

“The pressure of this contact is crucial,” said Karan, “They call it kiss-pressure.”

If Lekha hadn’t heard the term before, she would’ve thought it was one of Karan’s inventions. She tried to keep a poker face when he winked.

#

Back at PrimaTech, Mr. Dilafrooz’s request was taken to be an order. They researched a widget from Israel and planned a new workflow just for this. It would be expensive, it always was to go backwards. No one liked it.

“That’s because they, you, you’re all young,” said Hitesh-ji, “And you don’t see how imaginary this new world feels.”

“What do you mean?” asked Lekha.

Hitesh-ji sighed. “We used to be artists, Lekha Miss. When I joined the paste-up room, it took me a month to learn how to cut the text precisely and lay it in columns. Everything was like this. How to mix the ink, how to handle the chemicals. And now, well, Lekha Miss, we all sit on the same computers. We move boxes on a screen.”

“It’s not real…” said Lekha, half to herself.

#

Lekha argued with her team. What about the old slide-printers? she asked. Hmm, they said. With archival ink? And now the technicians groaned. More research, more testing.

And then, they did it. A month before the launch, they shipped it to the press, this white elephant of a machine. When the workers lifted the box up the staircase, she hastened to hold one edge.

Karan followed, frowning. “Smile,” she mouthed to him. She knocked on Mr. Dilafrooz’s door before he could.

They found a place for it in a corner and, when it was all connected, they did a test print. The printer cartridge made loud humming noises as it moved from left to right over the plastic sheet, shifting down each line like an old typewriter. When the ink was dry, Lekha walked over to the window and held it up against the light, this digital-analog-hybrid piece of film. From here, she could see a vista of the city, the two halves of it laid out as if on a platter for her.

Mr. Dilafrooz smiled for the first time.

“This is perfect! But sit, sit, both of you,” he said. As Lekha pulled out chairs for Karan and herself, Mr. Dilafrooz picked up the telephone and placed an order for chai and sandwiches.

The room suddenly felt quiet. Lekha sat back in the chair. She looked past Mr. Dilafrooz and imagined chai being poured into a ceramic kettle. She imagined a kitchen where someone slathered green chutney and butter on bread, then pressed cucumber slices gently between them. She wondered who it was that first decided to cut a sandwich across the diagonal.

#-#