Chapter 2 -- Akshata and Sundar -- The Proposal
| 3 years earlier |
When Akshata joined GloboDynamics Technologies as a Media Intern, it was like a breath of fresh air for the company. Sundar still recalled how she thought, on her first day, that formal clothing would be mandatory at work and showed up in an elaborate kurta-pyjama with odhni. Her oval face, ready smile, clear skin, and taller-than-average height made her the object of the attentions of both genders and all sorts of corporate rungs. Everyone at GD Tech wanted to get to know her better.
She was an intern in Sundar's team, who headed the Marketing department. In his entire career at GD Tech, he had not had as many at-desk visits from his colleagues in a single day as he did the day Akshata joined. As for Akshata herself, she took her place next to Sundar and immediately asked for work so her 3-month internship could get a kick-start. She was a fast learner and after being trained for a day or two, she was handling as much work as a full-timer and doing it with flair. For the three months she was there, she never allowed any guy to approach her to flirt. They kept at it for days, but soon realized the futility and gave up after a while.
As days went by, Sundar learned that Akshata Kurien was a native of Karnataka, a state in Southern India. She lived here, in Mumbai, in a flat that she shared with four other girls, who were all at various stages of their corporate careers and had come to Mumbai to pursue better careers than their home towns would be able to give them. Akshata, at 19, was the youngest of the five and was pursuing Journalism. She was in the second year of the 3-year Bachelor in Mass Media (BMM) program. It was due to this program that she thought of doing a Media internship in her vacations from college, and that was how she landed at GD Tech.
During the months that Akshata was interning at GD Tech, Sundar was in a committed relationship that had lasted nearly a year. Sundar, who was 27 years old at the time and a self-aware sexual masochist for 13 of those, had only recently come clean about his need for physical pain to feel sexually stimulated, and his girlfriend had taken it well. She was his fifth GF in seven years of dating.
In his experience, they all acted as if they weren't shocked at first. But when they came to fully realize what it meant to have a masochist for a boyfriend, they found that they were better off without the hassle of play-acting sadistically while in bed, even if it was just on the weekend. Nevertheless, because he was with another woman, Sundar never flirted with Akshata. However, the thought of Akshata demanding a quick smooch on her rear every afternoon as she entered the office premises did flash through his mind more times than was healthy.
--
About 2 months into Akshata's internship, GD Tech took on a new client and they liked what Sundar's team was doing for their brand image. Work piled, and Sundar's team members were soon pulling all-nighters. Akshata voluntarily stayed until 9 pm when her official timings were 2 - 7 pm. Sundar was very busy, but he did notice this and urged Akshata to keep to her usual timings more than once.
One evening, as Akshata was drafting an email for the CorpComm at 8:30 PM, Sundar once again offhandedly asked her to pack off and be gone by 7 PM every day. She refused point-blank and informed him that she was very much a part of the team and felt equally responsible for pending work. She said this a bit sharply, and Sundar stopped looking into his laptop to look into her eyes, only to find her glaring fiercely back at him. The look they shared lasted a bit longer than was strictly necessary. Any Marketing Head worth his salt in India knows how to read eyes; knows how to decipher them for what lay within the mind. As Sundar looked into Akshata's, it suddenly dawned on him that maybe, just maybe, for the first time in his life, he was gazing into a pair of female eyes that were truly capable of dominance; truly capable of achieving independence by seizing control.
--
A couple of days later, as Sundar returned to his seat after a long-winded conference call with the well-paying client, Akshata was waiting with his phone in her hand.
"Sundar, there were calls you missed while you were inside. Someone named 'Domme' was calling. I did not pick up. They called thrice."
"Oh, that's my girlfriend," said Sundar, grinning lopsidedly at the internal joke and rubbing his tired eyes. He took the phone and had turned to go to the lobby and call his girlfriend back when Akshata asked, "But what's 'Domme' mean?"
"Google 'power exchange', yaar." Sundar said distractedly. "You'll know." He went outside to place that call. He did not know whether she Googled or not, and never asked.
But what Sundar did not know was that 'power exchange, domme' was the first thing she typed into her phone's search bar as soon as she was sure he was in the lobby. Somehow, she knew it wasn't something she should type out on her work computer. Yet another matter Sundar did not know was that Akshata fancied him. Of all the males at GD Tech, only Sundar had not attempted to flirt with her or ogled at her parts inappropriately.
Being a beautiful 19-year-old in India, she knew this type of man was rare. Akshata had been grabbed at in a public transport train, molested openly in a public transport bus, pinched in the rear, wolf-whistled at by dozens of street hooligans, eve-teased brutally until she was in tears -- and all of this before she was 16. No, Akshata Kurien did not know too many decent men. Which was why she was more inclined towards women...
But Sundar wasn't like most other men -- he was decent, and she looked up to him. Additionally, he was very good at his job. He was manager cadre at 27 and could be so much more in his career. Unlike her male peers at college, who still talked about immature things like Bollywood, rock bands, and cricket, Sundar discussed ideas, his thoughts on how Journalism was going downhill in the country and what could be done about it, and could speak knowledgeably on any topic under the sun. Akshata found that she wanted to spend more and more time at GD Tech and lesser with her academic peers. And this was why she had snapped when Sundar asked her to leave for home at the stipulated time -- to leave HIM a couple of hours earlier every day.
On reading three lines of the first blog post that popped up on Googling 'power exchange, domme', Akshata knew it was not office-appropriate. She bookmarked it for later and read it at leisure at her flat that night. She soon realized that the more she read about it, the more it explained Sundar's behaviour at work. He always hurried to open doors for women (and never for men), he always stood when a woman came to talk to him at his desk (and never for men), he asked whether he could fill her water bottle as soon as it was half-empty ("we don't want kidney stones, do we?!"), and he was generally more available for his female colleagues.
