The road to QvisionTech was littered with obstacles, like merging from the ramp onto interstate I-85, then getting into the third lane that took her directly to Jimmy Carter Boulevard, peering into her driver’s-side mirror, making sure—then doubly sure—no other car was within disaster range in those lanes. Once she had passed the busy Spaghetti Junction, which looked like a massive, impossibly complicated intertwining of roads that left her awestruck, she then had the task of moving over to her right, which was trickier, with the traffic merging from I-285. She breathed a little easier once she was safely off the interstate and on the relatively non-overwhelming Jimmy Carter Boulevard. Overall, though, driving wasn’t nearly as nerve-racking as she had imagined it to be. Or maybe fears became easier to grapple with when not facing them was no longer an option.
Her instructor, Samuel Varghese, was an amiable, stocky, bespectacled Indian. The first day of class, he took the time to learn the names of his eight students, seven of them Indian, and the eighth a Hispanic guy. He then introduced himself, waxed eloquent about his wonderful years of experience in QA, four of them at Qvision, and chatted with his students, asking each of them about their backgrounds and their former careers. Tara learned that most of her classmates had minimal knowledge of computers, and were, like her, wide-eyed, anxious, and looking for new careers. Her classmates had gleaned little about her, except that she had a background in print journalism and she had never worked in the US. The embarrassing bit about her job at the cleaning agency she kept to herself.
Tara willed her mind to be receptive as Samuel started his first class with the basics of software quality, the difference between software testing and software quality assurance, and the necessity of testing. When she loosened her grip over her thoughts, her mind wandered, but it was surprisingly stripped of emotion. Her mind created fleeting snapshots—Sanjay and Liz having lunch at a fancy Italian restaurant, giggling, holding hands; Sanjay and Liz kissing in his car; Sanjay saying “I love you” to Liz—and still, she felt no emotion. She pushed her stray thoughts away and brought her focus back to Samuel. He had progressed to bug reporting, bug tracking, and release certification—what they meant, she had no clue. She saw a teenage girl in a blue skirt and white shirt, her head bent, eyes moist, a report card in hand, and Daddy yelling in the background, “You are only fit to clean pots and pans.”
She snapped out of the scene. Tara, focus, she reprimanded herself. Daddy, I will prove you wrong. Her mind had to stay on Samuel, on his full lips as they formed words, on his slight Kerala accent, on the words he had written, in neat round letters, on the blackboard.
Tara’s days were divided into class mornings, work afternoons, and study nights, each segment filled to the brim with a routine that she was slowly getting used to. She got home from class, kicked off her shoes, changed into her comfortable work uniform, and waited, a bit impatiently, for the honk of Nadya’s horn. She cleaned offices with the same zest—Nadya now trusted her to clean entire offices on her own—and her mind was filled with thoughts that did not always involve her husband the Romeo and his beautiful Juliet. Often, they involved recent experiences of the morning and new challenges of the evening assignments. Sometimes, Sanjay and Liz came to the fore, and sometimes they lingered on, but she could will herself to think of other things.
She spent three hours of her weekday mornings at the institute, where she and the three other Indian girls in class ended up forming a clique. Shyamala was a housewife who was anxious to start a career in QA. Her two kids were in middle school and no longer needed her all the time. Anita had given up her job as a teacher’s assistant at the county school system to get into the better paying IT world. Yasmin had been a doctor in India, who didn’t want to go through the three-year residency program and the strict US medical license requirements, after she married and moved to Atlanta. Sometimes, the all-girl clique went to the nearby Indian mall for lunch after classes, where they gossiped, poked fun at the way Samuel held his chalk up like a school teacher and started almost every sentence with a singsong “see,” and sighed at the assignments they had to work on every night. They were a motley crew, richly different from one another. Shyamala was traditional and took pride in her home, kids, and kitchen. Anita was outgoing, fun-loving, and talkative. Yasmin was graceful, health conscious, and spent a considerable amount of time every day on yoga and exercise. But their differences didn’t matter as they bonded over QA and dosas, tests and kababs, virtual bugs and Chinese Indian lo mein at the food court.
Some days, after lunch, the girls walked the mall at a leisurely pace, stopping at the display windows at the stores. They oohed and aahed at the colorful, embellished salwar suits, saris, and jewelry that beckoned, and raised their eyebrows in exaggerated horror at the price tags. “Better to get from India,” they said. Still, they walked in and looked around for good deals. Tara never bought anything and seldom contributed to the excitement of the window shoppers, but it felt good to just hang out with her new friends. Once, on a whim, her three friends draped a rose pink, crystal-encrusted, chiffon sari around her pink blouse and jean-clad self. She giggled as they marveled at her tall, slender figure, and went a little red when they wondered aloud if she had been a sultry model back in India.
To her family, she was too tall, too thin, and her complexion was two shades darker than Amma’s. It amused her to think that her friends were marveling at these very flaws in her appearance.
Chapter 14
It was a regular weekday when, after a particularly boring class, Anita had a deep craving for chaat. The rest of the group agreed that tangy chaat was exactly what they needed to spice up their day. They trooped to the chaat corner at the Indian mall, chitchatting, waiting for their orders to be called out.
As was usual with Shyamala, the topic veered around to her difficult mother-in-law who was visiting from Hyderabad. Anita had pitched in with relish, about how conservative her in-laws were. Yasmin said little, but laughed at the girls’ stories with delight. She had never known her in-laws; they had passed long before she married. Tara didn’t know her in-laws much, having spent less than a week with them. In the earlier days, when Sanjay called them once or twice a month, she spoke to them briefly, only exchanging pleasantries. Sanjay was rather brusque, cutting them off midway through their reports on family matters, offering them no glimpses of life in America. Tara felt sorry for her in-laws and wished Sanjay would show some love toward them. Now, she did not participate in the in-law bashing; she only raised her eyebrows and shook her head at appropriate junctures.
At first, when the lean, bearded guy with the thick, black-framed glasses approached their table and said, “Hello, miss,” she didn’t even realize he was talking to her. She pushed a whole pani puri into her mouth. It took a nudge from Yasmin for her to notice that the man had extended a hand in her direction. She shook it, mildly confused, her mouth full.
“Hi, I’m Abhi. I have a photo studio at the mall, Picture Me Photography. You may have seen it, it’s in the left wing.” Tara blinked and chewed surreptitiously, covering her mouth with her hand.
“Miss,” he said, undeterred by her lack of response, “one of our clients, Raj Jewelers, the largest Indian jewelry store in the Southeast, is planning an advertising campaign in the local media. I am in charge of the photography for their creative. I’ve seen you a few times at the mall, and I think you have the perfect face for the kind of look I have in mind.”