Chaos on the Cue: How a kind colleague became a lifelong Rakhi brother

There are some relationships you choose. There are some you inherit. And then there are those you create by tying a Rakhi around an unsuspecting colleague’s wrist every year until he realises resistance is futile.

That is more or less how I acquired a brother at work. His name is Nicholas, though nobody calls him that. To us, he is simply Nick.

To be fair, he puts up with it remarkably well. This may have less to do with his affection for me and more to do with the fact that he is constitutionally incapable of saying no. He is one of those genuinely kind, generous people who make you occasionally worry about their survival in the real world. He has enormous faith in humanity. Humanity, I suspect, periodically sees him coming.

At work, however, the kindness disappears the moment there is an opportunity to roast me.

His sense of humour is nasty, highly developed and frequently exercised at my expense. I complain. He continues. Yet when he takes a day off, the office becomes suspiciously dull. When he goes on holiday, it is worse. Apparently, you can miss someone and simultaneously enjoy the fact that nobody is insulting you before lunch. This, I assume, is what the Rakhi commitment means. We suffer each other for life.

He is also an aspiring horror filmmaker. For years, he has wanted to make a horror film and, rather alarmingly, has decided I should play the lead. I was briefly flattered. Then he explained that his budget was limited and I would not require much make-up.

At one point, he surveyed our office canteen and decided it would make an excellent prison canteen for his film. Somewhere during the development of this masterpiece, I became the ghost of a woman he had murdered. I don’t remember auditioning for any of this.

Cinema, however, is only one of his many expensive interests. He is a very talented, entirely self-taught musician and owns around 20 guitars split between Dubai and Mumbai.

His wife, quite reasonably, does not always greet the arrival of yet another guitar with the enthusiasm he believes it deserves. This is where I occasionally enter the criminal enterprise.

There have been requests to hide a newly acquired guitar with me until conditions at home become favourable for its reintroduction into society. I have never quite established what the long-term strategy is. Perhaps the idea is that one day his wife will see another guitar and assume it has always lived there.

He has also spent years trying to convince me to take his bass guitar, learn to play and jam with him. I have consistently disappointed him.

Then there are the cameras. And lenses. And assorted photography equipment accumulated during another great passion. Photography has taken a back seat lately, so I have no idea what has become of this substantial collection. Given the guitar situation, I hesitate to ask.

And then there was The Case of the Disintegrating Shoes. It began, as many investigations do, with a mysterious trail.

The office cleaners noticed dark debris appearing across the floor. They cleaned it. More appeared. Clearly, someone among us was responsible. So they did the only sensible thing. They followed the evidence.

The trail wound its way through the office, leaving little clues behind like a particularly incompetent criminal who had never heard of covering his tracks.

Eventually, the investigators reached the end of the trail. And that happened to be Nick’s desk. The prime suspect was sitting there, completely unaware that the evidence was literally attached to his feet.

The culprit was a pair of bargain shoes he had bought from a reputed store on sale. They were disintegrating as he walked, depositing themselves piece by piece across the office. Case closed!

Unfortunately, the story was not. That very day, our art director had to accompany a sales colleague to a client pitch. There was no time to conduct a proper burial for the shoes. So off he went in her car.

The shoes continued their final journey there. By the time she discovered what had happened, her car had become the secondary crime scene. She was furious. According to her, traces of the deceased footwear remained for days and eventually required professional intervention. The bargain, one suspects, was no longer a bargain.

So this is my reluctant Rakhi brother: musician, art director, photographer, prospective horror filmmaker, secret guitar trafficker, bargain hunter and full-time tormentor of one particular colleague.

He drives me mad. He makes me laugh. He provides a frankly unreasonable percentage of my entertainment during the working day. And every year, despite knowing exactly what it means, he still lets me tie that Rakhi. Then again, as established earlier, the man really does need to learn how to say no.