You see, a competitor - a man in his fifties with two daughters of his own, so he told me - had been hassling me for months to sell my business to him. First he tried to woo me. Then, when I did not take kindly to his advances, he became more and more aggressive and then brutish. And I am a fool because I didn't go to the police? But why should I when I went to them before about Kunal and they practically said it was only to be expected that I would have a male employee trouble me when I fired him? I was a successful female boss, what did I expect? It's like that deodorant commercial points out - a woman isn't a boss, she's bossy; she's not persuasive, she's pushy. It would blow over they said. And it did. They called him, scared him and that was that. But I didn't think this new harasser, this older, sleazy businessman, would be so easily put off by a call from the police, so I didn't bother.
And I didn't want to worry my parents. Or give my brother any excuse for muscling in on my company. And I didn't want those people who thought a woman shouldn't be running a company on her own - meeting businessmen, handing out business cards, dealing with cash on her own - I didn't want them to think they were right. So I kept my mouth shut and hoped it too would blow over.
But then yesterday my security guard called in sick with a very iffy, weak excuse even he didn't sound like he believed. Same space of ten minutes my competitor phones me and asks to see me - he has an offer he knows I won't be able to refuse. I hang up on him. Because it was Friday, I didn't want the machines full of money over the weekend, so I called my mate Vikram and he came with me for most of the runs, but then he had to go pick his aunt up from the airport and I abandoned the last two pick-ups. Instead I worked on my laptop from a busy Cafe Coffee Day until 8pm and then I headed home. And it was there, trying to find a taxi along a well-lit road off busy Connaught Place they grabbed me. First there was a tamasha as one pretended to be my husband and the other my brother, yelling at me that our "baby son" was sick and I should have been at home nursing him and not out meeting other men. I had no idea what they were talking about, but I knew they were trouble, and so I quickly walked away from them. But it was a trap. I went directly in the direction of a waiting car, which they shoved me into.
No one batted an eye. Naturally, who was going to disagree with such sentiments and stop a wayward wife and mother from being pushed in to her "husband's" car?
