‘Megha-a-a-a it’s me!’ Neil yelled, completely ignoring my opening lines. ‘Listen there’s a problem!’

‘Problem? What problem?’ I shrieked. ‘You’ve missed the flight, haven’t you?’

‘Huh? What flight? Oh, the flight to Delhi! Oh no, dude, I’m on the flight as we speak. Worry not. There’s, uh, another problem. The thing is—I’d arranged the stimulus material into five separate packets, for the five focus groups, you know. I just thought it would be more convenient if there were five separate packets for the five separate focus—’

‘Neil,’ I interrupted in a pleading voice, ‘what’s the problem exactly?’

‘The thing is, Megha,’ Neil said, a hint of desperation in his voice, ‘I’ve forgotten one of the packets back in office and my flight is gonna take off any minute!’

‘Oh no!’ My knees buckled and I slumped back against a wall. ‘What packet was this, Neil? If I send it first thing tomorrow by the first flight out…’

‘No, no, no, Megha!’ I could almost feel Neil vehemently shaking his head through the phone. ‘It’s the packet for the first group; I need it latest by 9 a.m. tomorrow!’

‘Okay, okay,’ I gulped and took a few deep breaths to calm myself down. ‘I’ll figure something out, okay? Just relax and call me when you reach Delhi. And keep a hawk’s eye on the rest of the stimuli; we can’t afford any more goof-ups like this one!’

I hung up and dashed upstairs to my desk to check the flight schedule for Mumbai—Delhi flights for the rest of the evening. Neil was on one of the last flights out but I faintly remembered that there was one more flight scheduled for later that evening. I had to find some way to get the stimulus material on that flight if the research was going to happen on schedule.

I took a few more deep breaths as I waited for the flight schedules to download; thankfully the Internet was not acting up and exhibiting its usual superslow characteristics today and the schedule was on my laptop fairly quickly. I was right—there was one last Delhi-bound flight at midnight. My spirits rose, only to plummet the very next second back into the soles of my getting-sweatier-by-the-minute beaded jootis—who on earth would be boarding a midnight flight to Delhi on a Friday evening?

‘Nobody!’ snapped Gabriella, the travel-desk secretary, when I called to ask her if anyone from GF was travelling to Delhi on the last flight out that night. Gabriella doubled as the travel-desk admin resource in addition to being Puru’s personal assistant, a position that had inflated her ego to ten times the size of the Bahamas. She rarely deigned to talk to small fry like me, reserving that honour only for members of the GF management committee, and she certainly hadn’t sounded happy when I’d called her on her direct line and practically hounded her to give me the information I needed.

‘It’s a Friday, Megha,’ she said icily in a tone one would normally use for a particularly thick-headed imbecile who was insisting on asking dumb questions. ‘I do not think anyone would wish to travel for work on a Friday evening, and even if they had to they wouldn’t want to take the midnight flight.’