I was feeling cold, so I opened my eyes to find myself in a cold room. It was an unfamiliar room, and I could not recollect how I got here. The room was dimly lit. I did not know what time it was; the curtains were open, and it was dark outside. I needed to pee. I took a deep breath, turned onto my left side and pushed myself into a sitting position. My arms trembled with the effort, and I felt a pain in my left shoulder. The pain brought back some memories. I knew this room. I had been sleeping in this hotel room for a few days, but I wasn’t sure for how long.
I pushed myself off the bed and started shuffling towards the bathroom. The grey socks I was wearing were making it harder to shuffle on the carpeted floor. Every muscle and bone in my body was aching.
The bathroom door was so heavy that I couldn’t even push it with one hand. I had to put my shoulder to it while holding the door frame for support. The sight of the toilet was intensifying my urge to pee. I didn’t know if I could hold it long enough to make it to the toilet. Again, I shuffled towards the toilet. I could barely hold it; I struggled to pull my pants down with my good hand and managed to sit down on the toilet just as a stream of pee pushed itself out. Phew, that was close.
I was already dreading getting up after I was done peeing. I heard someone knocking on the door of the room. “I am in the bathroom!” I tried to yell, but I doubted my voice reached beyond the bathroom door.
I heard the door opening. “Hellooo? Sir?” said the person that opened the door. It was a man’s voice. I tried to hurry, pulling my pants up and shuffling to the bathroom door. I pulled open the heavy door and saw a man with a wheelchair. He was standing in the hallway of what appeared to be a hotel.
“Hello Mr. Niyogi,” he said, “did you manage to get some sleep?”
“No, I did not,” I said. “The pain was too much. Is it time to go already?”
“Yes sir,” he said, not surprised by the question. “I was told to take you to the conference room at this time.”
“Huh.” I hate this routine. I hate that I have to depend on all these people, all these strangers to take me places. “What do you want me to do now?” I asked.
“Well sir,” he said patiently, “let’s get your sweater and sandals on, and let’s go and get you some breakfast.”
“I hate the food that you guys give me,” I said. “I hate it that I have to take my food through this tube sticking out of my nose,” I added, pointing to the small tube poking out of my left nostril.
“Nonetheless, you need the food sir,” said the man. “You have a lot of work to do today. I was told that it is only for another week. So not for long.”
Hearing that brought back some memories from the day before. The stacks of printed paper on a large oval table in a spacious conference room. The white walls and white chairs. “I would much rather be in my house with my wife than this hotel,” I said, the irritation clear in my voice while I pulled myself towards the wheelchair that the man in the suit had placed near me.
It took a while to sit down in the wheelchair, but the guy waited patiently. Once seated, I asked him to bring me my glasses. With my glasses in hand, we set off to the conference room again. We descended five floors down to floor forty-three, where the conference room was. In the room I found my former colleague Kiran Singh already waiting for me, his computer open in front of him. Singh was very handy with computers and could do everything that I needed help with. I had lost the knowledge and patience to deal with computers a long time ago.
Seeing me, he came over and thanked the guy in the suit. Kiran then wheeled me to the other end of the table, where I had been sitting the day before. He handed me my green-ink ballpoint pen and headed back to his computer.
Seeing the huge stacks of documents in front of me, I felt so lost. “I don’t know where to begin, Kiran. I don’t know where I left off yesterday,” I said to him.
“Mr. Niyogi, look at the yellow notepad on your right,” he said cheerily. “It has information about what we are doing and where you left off last night.”
To my right was a yellow notepad on which he had written the high-level objective of our task and some notes about where we left off the day before. I read the note once, twice, thrice, and by the fourth time, I started remembering the events of the previous day.
While I was reading the note, Kiran tapped on my shoulder and said, “Mr. Niyogi, let’s get you some breakfast.” He nodded to the back of the room, where I saw a floor-to-ceiling curtain. He wheeled me around the table and pushed my wheelchair towards the curtain. Behind the curtain was a young man standing next to a small table. On the table were two tall glasses containing a brown liquid, and next to the glasses was a largish syringe.
As my chair reached the table, the young man opened the stopper on the tube sticking out of my nose. He then sucked some of the liquid from the first glass into the syringe and attached the syringe to the tube. He lifted the syringe higher than the level of my nose and said, “Are you ready sir?”
I nodded, and he started squirting the liquid into the tube a little bit at a time. I felt the warm liquid in my feeding tube, but I didn’t know what it tasted like. Slowly he emptied both the glasses, and I felt full, my belly warm on the inside.
I think there was coffee in the concoction because I started feeling my spirits lifting ever so slightly. After detaching the syringe and closing the stopper on the feeding tube, the young man gave me warm wet towel, and I dabbed my face with it. He then said to Kiran from across the room, “Mr. Niyogi’s breakfast is done.”
I heard Kiran’s chair creaking, and then, after a few beats, I saw him pull back the curtain. He wheeled me back to the table with the stacks of documents. I had no interest in doing this work, but I had to do it; they needed me to do this audit. And so, my day of auditing began. I took the sheets of paper that I had been working on the night before, picked up my pen, put my glasses on and started at the top of the page.
I started reviewing the procedures that Saran Airlines followed when it came to their financial reporting practices. The audit that Kiran and I were performing was in preparation of an external audit that was to be performed by KPMG very soon. We had to finish the audit this week and then hand over the final reports to Mr. Saran.
Performing this audit had been hard so far. I had trouble reading, maintaining my focus and keeping my mind from wandering. It was extremely boring work; I found no joy in it. In fact, I found no joy in anything lately. Ever since this disease started ravaging my body and my ability to control my movements, joy had left me and moved on. It had been pain, despair and more pain since then.
Multiple times an hour, I had to remind myself of my reasons for doing this work just so I could keep going. I was making a lot of mistakes that Kiran was able to catch, thankfully. I only hoped that I would continue to be useful in doing this work and that Kiran’s efforts in correcting my mistakes would not exceed my worth.
Before this audit started, I had helped Kiran with identifying some fraudulent transactions that had helped the airline to recover a lot of money—or at least trace the lost money. I had been able to do that by working with Kiran a few hours every week, but this task required a much more significant time commitment.
I did not need to do this work while I struggled with my ailment, but I had to do it. I was hoping that it would give me bargaining power to get Mr. Saran to agree to what I was going to ask him once I finished the audit. Saran Airlines already had to accommodate my numerous needs by providing a full-time nurse, a therapist and all the equipment that I needed to stay in this hotel so I could do this work. I would have to give him enough value to make up for all the extra money they had to spend to allow me to work and to make what I was going to ask him seem like reasonable compensation.
“Kiran, can you come here one second?” I said to Kiran. I had noticed something. “I am looking at the list of people that are to be involved in the payment-release process. I see that it is possible for one person from the accounts payable department to receive an invoice from a vendor, enter it into the system and even approve the payment after uploading the invoice. We should separate those duties. We should have a junior associate enter the invoices received, but have a senior team member review the same before payment can be approved.”
“Understood sir. What about releasing the payment?”
“That is a good point. It would be good to limit that to a manager who can actually release the payments. And we should standardize all payments so that only direct deposits to the vendor’s bank account are allowed. No payments by cheque or cash.”
“Well sir, as you know, we work with a lot of small vendors, many of whom are located in rural areas with no easy access to bank accounts. Direct deposits may not always work.”
“Yes, agreed. In that case, we should have a cap on the cash payments that can be released. Anything above ₹10,000 should only be paid out via bank transfer to a single vendor. Or even better, send them the money via UPI to their mobile wallets.”
“Noted, sir. I will update that in the procedural recommendations document and share it with the CFO for review.”
Kiran went back to his computer, and I resumed going through the document in front of me.
Saran Airlines had started out as a bus transport company and slowly grew into offering passenger transit via small aircrafts and small boats and ferries. Before I retired from working with the company, I was head of their finance department. After I retired from work, I took care of my wife Ramani for many years.
The last few years, Parkinson’s disease started creeping up on me, and slowly but surely, even the most basic things like walking became difficult. I used to spend hours reading the Deccan Herald, my favourite newspaper, but soon, reading and then writing also became difficult. And slowly I went from taking care of Ramani to being taken care of by Ramani, my daughter Archana and even a full-time nurse.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic arrived and locked us all down in the house, bringing an end to the little bit of walking I used to do.
I tried to put aside all that troubled me to help Saran Airlines with this audit. While I was in the conference room doing this work, I would sometimes stop to take a look out at the horizon. The view from the forty-third floor showed me the whole northeast side of Bengaluru. This building did not exist when I was working for Saran Airlines before my retirement. As Bengaluru expanded and the need for office space grew in the city, many older factories that had stopped being profitable became the locations for tall office buildings and hotels.
The building I was in housed a hotel spread across twenty floors, private residences that occupied another twenty floors and offices that took up the remaining thirty floors. Saran Airlines had its offices in this building in addition to the main office in the heart of old Bengaluru.
I felt a tap on my shoulder, and my focus snapped back to the work I was supposed to be doing. I looked to my left and saw Kiran standing there with a sheet of paper.
“Sir, I have a question about this process of filing the documentation that we expect from the vendors…” Kiran continued with his question, and I tried my best to answer him. We continued working for two more hours before I said that I wanted to take a bathroom break and that I then needed to lie down. The conference room had an attached bathroom. The nurse who had helped feed me earlier came to my side when he heard what I needed. He unlocked the wheels of my chair and took me to the bathroom.
After I was done in the bathroom, he then wheeled me to a couch behind the curtain that was on one side of the room. With help from the nurse, I lay down on the couch and tried to stretch my legs. My need to take regular breaks to lie down was surely slowing us down, but Kiran and Mr. Saran tolerated it.
Since I knew how the company operated when it was much smaller than it was now, I understood the historical context as to why certain decisions were taken. Thus, what I brought to the table was helping Kiran and Saran Airlines understand why the company operated the way it did and what needed to be done before it would clear the external audits required to become a publicly traded company.
I was about to drift off to sleep on the couch when an alarm went off on the nurse’s phone. He looked at it and started pounding some tablets into powder before mixing them into a glass of water.
“Time for your medicine, Mr. Niyogi,” he said. He took out a syringe from his bag, sucked the water into it and injected the same into my feeding tube. I had to take the medicine four times a day, as it helped to keep my Parkinson’s symptoms in check. My doctors had told me that it was all I could do. I had to keep taking the medicine to control the symptoms of this disease, but there was no cure.
I had started with taking the medication once a day, then it became twice and eventually increased to four times a day. The medicine was horrible and caused all kinds of side effects, but if I stopped taking it, I would not be able to function at all; if what I had become could even be called functioning.
There was nothing I could do about it, and I had spent many months worrying about it already. Now all that I wanted to do was focus on this work and try to finish it in the next seven days so I could ask for what I wanted from Mr. Saran.
