It was awesome. Her legs were brown but not too brown … Thandi Newton brown if you ask me. Her knees were perfect… not too bony, slight depressions on either side of her kneecaps. And waxed so smooth you could see the reflection of the tubelight off her shins.

And then suddenly I started thinking like I tend to:

What if there was an earthquake that very moment, and the building was destroyed, the office reduced to rubble and everyone dead except this beautiful lady and me, trapped. We would wait for days for the fire force to come and rescue us. Meanwhile, she’d get cold and desperate and then finally, after a day or two of polite distance, she’d snuggle up to me and then in another day or so, after we’d made some conversation, we’d make wild animal love. And then just before the fire force people found us I’d manage to take all the Dufresne petty cash and then I’d take her to my flat in Wadala where she’d confess that she was really only looking for a purely physical relationship and wanted to move in with me.

I could picture every detail… the smell of Pond’s Dreamflower deo, the lacy underwear, her husky voice that she used liberally while we did it.

Around lunchtime in the real world she turned to me and asked if I wanted to go down with her to the canteen for a bite. I almost choked on my own tongue. She actually had a husky voice. And it was a perfect husky voice too. Not like Rani Mukherjee’s or anything. More like Raveena Tandon’s in her heyday.

In the lift she told me that her name was Shreya Pandit and that she was a senior analyst in the Delhi office. Yes, Diary. Senior analyst. No MBA. Just BA. My subordinate. I should add that detail to the fantasy story next time.

She’d been with Dufresne for two years and had recently joined the oil and gas team. She’d come to Mumbai for a client presentation. She said she was happy to see the new bunch and told me to come to Delhi some time even though the Mumbai office was ‘much more happening’. Apparently in Delhi everyone is very work oriented and no one has time to chat over lunch or go out for a quick smoke. But Shreya, it turned out, was a Mumbai girl from Walkeshwar—rich!—who’d been hired for the Delhi office.

Walking with her across the lobby to the canteen was an experience in itself. She walked briskly but with such poise that her heels barely made noise on the marble floor. How classy is that! I hate those pretentious women who work in the building who run around the canteen sounding like typewriters in their rip-off heels. Shreya is not like that at all.

She ate with small bites. And she didn’t even finish her veg cheese toast sandwich. She just ate half of it and said she was full. Of course she would be. She was slender and a little short even in heels. But that meant she was light and I could carry her easily and she could ride piggyback while I took her around during our extended three-day weekend in Lonavla over the Puja holidays.