I walked into Shiv’s room five minutes later with my laptop and all my papers neatly arranged in a folder. Unlike the midterm appraisal, where I’d been as well-prepared as an undernourished infant about to take on an army of giants, I had put in a lot of hard work to prepare for the year-end appraisal. I was confident the appraisal would go well. For starters, Shiv would be part of this appraisal too and, unlike Varun, Shiv didn’t have a one-point agenda to make my life miserable at every available opportunity. But more importantly, in the last two months I had proved beyond a shadow of doubt that I was capable of handling important projects and handling them well. For the recent Bright Biscuits launch had been a roaring success and fabulous reports had been pouring in from all sides ever since the day we had entered the market. We had done a high-impact launch two months ago and the film had gone on national television almost simultaneously with a heavy media launch across all key channels. I had been working like a maniac over the last two months, travelling to all the key cities for the launch, working the market with the sales guys and meeting consumers for feedback on the product and the ad. My efforts had paid off, and how! Bright Biscuits was being heralded as one of the most successful new launches in the history of GF’s innovations as the sales graph soared skywards and the product flew off the shelves.

The last couple of weeks specially had been a rush of adrenalin-pumping excitement as accolades flowed in from the media and the industry for the new ad. We had received the nomination for best ad of the week in Brand Sense, the leading industry journal, and there was a buzz that we were strong contenders for the top spot in the youth category at an upcoming popular ad awards festival.

We had become overnight superstars within GF as well and the team at Blue Strawberry had started referring to Neil, Suketu and Shubhra as the ‘Biskoot ke Tridev’. I would have been soaring on a cloud of happiness if it hadn’t been for a certain blot on the horizon of my otherwise rose-tinted life. Yudi and I hadn’t been on talking terms since the fateful trip to Delhi and even the success of the film we had created together hadn’t got the guy out of his ice palace. Sure, he’d sent a congratulatory email, but it had been marked to a whole bunch of people, not just to me. He hadn’t bothered approaching me even once, giving me the complete cold shoulder each time we were within sighting distance of each other. Of course, I hadn’t bothered to reach out to him either, but then I wasn’t the drop-dead gorgeous one with a glamorous girlfriend and a slew of award-winning work to my credit. I was the confused, screwed-up, impulsive misfit who never thought before she spoke and whose only saving grace in recent times was the Bright Biscuits launch. There was no way I was going to put my remaining vestiges of self-esteem at stake by taking the initiative to reach out to Yudi. Knowing him, I would probably be spurned with a dose of Yudi’s trademark caustic rejection. And so I hadn’t made any effort to speak to Yudi either, not even when he won the top honours at an international ad festival for some work he’d done for another client. I had sent him what I hoped was a clinical congratulatory message on his cell, though, after agonizing for hours over it. And in true Yudi style, he hadn’t replied.