Chapter 17: Spark & Co

My first day at Spark & Co, I arrive twenty minutes early and spend fifteen of those minutes in the bathroom trying to remember how to breathe.

Not Sunaina-breathing — the diaphragmatic, intentional breathing that enters your belly and exits through your crown chakra. Panic-breathing. The breathing that happens when your body has decided that re-entering the workforce after twenty-seven years is: a threat equivalent to a tiger in the underbrush, and that the appropriate response is: hyperventilation in a corporate bathroom while a twenty-three-year-old on the other side of the partition makes a phone call about her Bumble date.

"He's an investment banker," she's telling someone. "Which means he's either rich or lying, and honestly, at this point, I'll take either."

I flush. I wash my hands. I look in the mirror — the mirror that shows: a fifty-year-old woman in a white kurta and black trousers, a compromise between the navy dress (too formal) and gym clothes (too casual), the compromise that working women negotiate every morning and that I'm negotiating for the first time in: twenty-seven years.

The office is: exactly as I remember and nothing like I remember. The energy is the same — the particular energy of an advertising agency, which is: controlled chaos, the chaos of people who are paid to have ideas and who produce those ideas in conditions that would give a health-and-safety inspector: palpitations. But the tools are: different. In 1997, we had typewriters, then computers, then email — the technology arriving in stages, each stage a small revolution. Now: everything is screens. Figma. Canva. Google Docs where six people edit simultaneously and the cursor movements look like: ants at a picnic. Slack channels with names like #random and #clients-from-hell and #doosri-chai-campaign.

Prerna introduces me to the team. "Everyone, this is Madhuri. She's our new senior copywriter. She wrote the Surf campaign in '97. Be nice to her and learn everything you can."

Twenty faces look at me. Twenty faces that are, on average, twenty-five years younger than mine. Twenty faces that express: curiosity (who is this aunty?), respect (the Surf campaign — even they've heard of it), and the particular wariness that young people feel when an older person enters their space (is she going to be the one who doesn't understand memes?).

"Hi," I say. "I'm Mar. I don't understand memes. But I can write a sentence that makes you feel something in under ten words. And if anyone can show me how to use Figma without crying, I'll buy you chai. Actual chai, not the matcha situation this office has going on."

Laughter. The laughter that happens when a new person demonstrates: self-awareness, which is: the quality that makes people want to work with you, more than talent, more than experience, more than a twenty-seven-year-old campaign that's taught in advertising schools.

My desk is: a shared workspace, the kind of desk that hot-desking culture has produced — no personal items, no territory, just a surface and a monitor and the understanding that you are: interchangeable, which is simultaneously democratic and: depressing. I set up my laptop (new — purchased with the first month's advance that Prerna offered when I admitted I didn't own one). I open Slack. I stare at the channels. I feel like: an astronaut who's been in cryo-sleep for three decades and has woken up on a spaceship that runs on: technology she's never seen.

"You look lost." The voice belongs to: Zoya. Twenty-six, junior copywriter, assigned as my "digital buddy" — the person who will teach me the tools while I teach her the craft, the exchange being: generational symbiosis.

"I am lost. Where's the channel for the Doosri Chai campaign?"

"It's #doosri-chai. I'll add you." She types something faster than my eyes can track. "Done. Also, I set up your Notion workspace, your Figma access, and your Google Drive folder. Your password for everything is in the password manager — here." She hands me a Post-it. The Post-it has: a URL and a master password and the words "CHANGE THIS IMMEDIATELY" in handwriting that suggests urgency.

"Thank you, Zoya."

"Also, nobody uses email here. Everything is Slack. If you email someone, they'll think you're: a client."

"What's wrong with being a client?"

"Clients are the people who tell us our ideas are wrong and then take credit when the ideas work."

"That hasn't changed since 1997."

"Some things are: eternal."

I learn. The learning that a fifty-year-old does in a twenty-five-year-old's world — slowly, deliberately, with the awareness that every question I ask reveals a gap and every gap is: a vulnerability. But I learn because the alternative is: not learning, and not learning is: what I did for twenty-seven years in Lucknow, where the only new thing I learned was: another way to make dal.

The Doosri Chai campaign becomes: my life. Not in the all-consuming way that Harsh's career was his life (that was obsession; this is: purpose, and the difference between obsession and purpose is: obsession serves the work while purpose serves the person). The campaign requires: a brand story, a visual identity, a social media strategy, a launch event, and — the thing I'm responsible for — the words.

I write. I write taglines: seventeen versions, discarding sixteen, keeping one. I write social media copy: short sentences that must work on a screen the size of a playing card, the constraint being not a limitation but a discipline, the discipline of saying more with less, which is: what advertising has always been. I write the brand manifesto — six hundred words about women who start over, women who brew their second cup on their own terms, women who are: not less than they were but more, because the second version of anything is: refined by the failure of the first.

Zoya reads my manifesto. She reads it slowly — the slow reading that Prerna did, the slow reading of people who take words seriously. When she finishes, she looks up.

"Didi," she says. "This is going to make people cry."

"Good crying or bad crying?"

"The crying that makes them buy chai. Which is: the best kind of crying, commercially."

I laugh. Zoya makes me laugh the way Aditi makes me laugh — with the sharp, unsentimental humour of a generation that has been raised on irony and that uses irony not as defence but as: language.

The second week, I bring chai.

Not from the matcha machine. From the chaiwala on the corner near Seaside Fitness — the chaiwala whose fifteen-rupee cups I've been drinking for five months and whose chai is: the standard against which all other chai is measured. I order twenty-two cups (one for each team member and one for the matcha machine, which deserves: pity). I carry them to the office in a cardboard tray, the tray staining with chai that sloshes because auto-rickshaws on Lower Parel roads do not provide: smooth transport for beverages.

The chai arrives. Twenty-two paper cups, each slightly different in colour (the chaiwala's measurements being: intuitive, not precise, the imprecision being: the whole point), each producing a smell that colonises the Spark & Co office the way the samosa smell colonised the Deccan Queen — completely, mercilessly, without permission.

"What is this?" Prerna emerges from her glass office, drawn by the smell the way organisms are drawn to: light.

"Chai. Real chai. From a real chaiwala. Because this office deserves to know what chai tastes like."

The team gathers. Twenty-two people — each taking a cup, each tasting, each producing the expression that real chai produces when real chai meets a palate that has been: deprived. The expression of: recognition. Of: comfort. Of: the thing that was missing from this office, which was not: technology or talent or ambition but: chai.

"This is the best thing that's happened since I joined," says a designer named Kunal.

"This is better than my appraisal," says the account manager, Sneha.

"This is grounds for a religion," says Zoya.

Prerna drinks. She drinks the way one drinks something that is: not just a beverage but a correction. A correction of the matcha error. A correction that says: we are an Indian advertising agency and we will drink Indian chai and the flat-white-matcha-cold-brew culture that has colonised Indian workplaces will not colonise: this office. Not on Madhuri's watch.

"Every Friday," Prerna says. "Chai Friday. Mar brings the chai. The company pays."

Chai Friday. My contribution to Spark & Co. Not a tagline, not a campaign, not a manifesto. Chai. The thing that I've been making for twenty-seven years — the skill that I thought was: domestic, that I thought was: wifely, that I thought was: the opposite of professional. But that is, in fact: professional. Because bringing people together over a shared experience is: the definition of good advertising. And good chai is: the best shared experience India has ever produced.