The Overcooked Oatmeal You Eat Standing at the Counter

You leave your laptop on the Starbucks table. The walk home is thirty-seven minutes, a route you’ve taken a hundred times, but your attention is split between the call audio in one ear and the rattle of a delivery truck. When the call driver asks for the Q3 projection link, your thumb slips on the phone’s slick glass. You fumble. Someone else reads it out. The heat of the Bangalore afternoon feels personal.

The next week, for a different call, you leave your laptop at the office entirely. You take the call from a plastic chair at a Kwality Walls ice cream cart, eating a Cornetto because it’s something to do with your hands. The audio is terrible. You have to repeat yourself twice. But you realize, midway through explaining a deployment timeline, that you know the sequence by muscle memory. You don’t need the screen.

It becomes a quiet test. Once a fortnight, maybe. You take a minor call from the auto-rickshaw queue, or from the narrow balcony of your apartment while your neighbor’s washing machine thumps through the wall. The stakes are never zero, but they’re low. You learn the shape of your own knowledge without the crutch of tabs and slides. You start drafting bullet points on the backs of Chai Point receipts.

Eight months later, a major system fails on a Thursday. The war room call spins up. You’re at a bus stand on Mosque Road, coming back from the dentist. You join on your phone. When the director asks who can walk through the rollback procedure, you don’t hesitate. You talk for four minutes straight. You name each command, each server cluster, each checkpoint. Your voice is steady. You can hear the keys of someone taking notes on the other end.

You get home and make oatmeal. You let it cook too long. It sticks to the pot. You eat it standing at the kitchen counter, scraping the bottom with a spoon.