My father once told me a good man has no enemies, but I’ve got a bit of a nemesis. It’s not that I’m a hateful person, per se. Hardly so. Still, I found myself sitting at my desk, wishing ill upon her perfect blonde locks, her straight white teeth, her spreadsheet view of the world. If a colleague were to ask who’d misspelled the intern’s name, or why a deadline was missed, I would lie without hesitation that it was Madeline’s fault. No one else saw her the way I did, so I had to help them.
It started during the pandemic. Our tech giant, like all others, became self-conscious overnight about the tsunami of white men on its payroll. The weekly demands on ketchup and mayonnaise in our once-bustling cafeteria should’ve been some indication, but no matter.
A woman of ambiguous race, our very own Vin Diesel, was appointed the Head of DEI. The white guy who appointed her mandated she set up a cohort of young and diverse leaders across the firm, each of whom were appointed by other white guys. We, the young and diverse, called it being “voluntold.”
For our cohort’s kickoff on Zoom, the Head of DEI brought in an external speaker. He called himself “Mark Marksen” and titled himself a “futurist.” I assumed both were jokes. Marksen began to lecture us on the benefits of diversity for powering innovation. His over-the-top expressions reminded me of mimes. He really believed the stuff he was saying.
I scanned the other virtual faces and noticed a few Black people stifling yawns — I could tell by the way their mouths opened just enough, as if they were about to bite a Pop-Tart. There were also Asians like me whose eyes flitted around, checking for others’ reactions. We’re cursed with assimilation.
And then there was our white woman, Madeline. She was rapt. She stayed off mute to laugh at the jokes, just like our leadership did.
Marksen flashed an image of George Floyd on screen and made his face look sad as he talked about the stakes of DEI. He seemed like he’d just discovered the ills of racism. But much of America was, too, in those days, so Mark’s comments resonated with the white people like an episode of Ted Lasso. They nodded at his words, frowning. They wanted a world where such troubles vanished under the aegis of tech. It made me think none of this DEI stuff would stick.
When Marksen finished, to Madeline’s roaring applause, the Head of DEI cheered him on. “That was a public-speaking masterclass, Mark. I loved that one phrase you had. It’s exactly the mission of our Diverse Leaders Cohort here: ‘Inculcating interdisciplinary ingenuity.’”
She went on to say that we’d be establishing “camaraderie with counterparts in the cohort,” which was alliteration-speak for a buddy system, so we could talk about young and diverse things in between the larger group meetings. I was assigned to meet regularly with Madeline, since we were both AI product managers. She waved on screen. I flashed the closed-lip smile that I’d perfected since the death toll of COVID had started climbing.
I shut my laptop. Around me, scattered takeout containers gathered mold in various stages. Empty wine bottles rolled and clinked as I moved my chair. A thin troop of ants marched out from the wall to investigate a tissue full of cum. I took a few steps back and flopped onto my creaking bed. From there, I could feel the eyes of the Ganesh idol on my desk, which blocked the picture frame I didn’t want to see. If I stayed still for long enough, I could hear my roommate Bradley on a sales call. If I kept at it, I could hear my father’s advice. And if I stilled myself even further, until my breath halted like frost upon a window, I could hear all the clocks of the world ticking at once.
***
Madeline sent the invite for our first meeting. She titled it “Inculcating Interdisciplinary Ingenuity!” The body of the e-mail said, “The necessity of this meeting is indicated by the title!” Her voice brimmed with energy and her blonde locks bounced left and right. She’d also attended UCLA, it turned out, and graduated in three years, whereas I’d needed five to get over my uncertainty. I didn’t mention that to her, though. The mention of struggle seemed to be an affront to her positivity.
My foot tapped against an empty wine bottle as we spoke. I imagined her room, even outside the confines of her curated video, was immaculate. She’d have one well-placed succulent, an all-white desk bursting with affirmations, and a bookshelf with the latest tomes on productivity. None of this was enough to make her a nemesis yet, but it made me nauseous when I turned to look at my own room.
“So good to e-meet you, Vikram. Sorry my laundry machine is so loud,” she said.
“Oh, no, not at all.” I thought of joking about our president telling us to inject bleach, but I had the sense she didn’t keep up with the news.
I did, however, feel comfortable joking about our Head of AI after we’d made small talk for a bit. “Did you see Tim Bowen’s LinkedIn?” I asked. “He, like, interviewed his kids about AI just to make content for his page. What a shitty dad. If mine ever did —”
“Actually,” she interrupted, “I love the way he gets people to understand the value and the accessibility of AI. He has such an authentic voice online.”
“Oh, right, yeah.”
We met every other week. There was supposed to be no purpose other than checking in with each other, but Madeline soon brainstormed some “value-added” work, like sending out fun facts and recipes for Eid, or a somber discussion group for Juneteenth. As I grew accustomed to DEI, I noticed some cultures were only ever colorful while others were only ever aggrieved.
After our third or fourth call, I began to really notice her. Her image spread across my large monitor and I couldn’t help but stare at her cleavage, her rosy lips. It was too early to add her on Instagram, so I stalked her on LinkedIn, zoomed in on pictures she’d posted in tight business skirts. As she assigned me tasks, I wondered what it would be like to climb on top of her and bite her dewy white complexion.
“I’m just a Driver-type,” she shrugged, referencing our company’s personality test. “I just love to delegate!”
“Yeah, no, totally.”
When she hung up, I nearly blurted out, “Love you.” Not because I did, but because I saw the pixels comprising her face more than I saw my own family, or friends, or God forbid, a date.
Bradley knocked on my door.
“Come in,” I said.
He had a square jaw and a body built like a juice box, even corners all the way down. “What’s happening, man?”
“Nothing much. Wanna play Call of Duty?” I asked.
“Actually, are you cool with me having a girl over?”
“Oh. I mean, we’re not supposed to be seeing people —”
“Don’t even sweat it. I’ll go over to her place.”
“That’s not really…” I started, but he was already gone.
We were the last two people on Earth as far as I was concerned. I fantasized about him just as I did about Madeline, under my covers. I considered slipping into his strong grip while he watched old basketball highlights, licking his ear, waiting for him to push me against the bare walls. I suppose I’m just not a Driver-type.
***
The days whisked together like egg yolks. The only delineation in life became the screens I spoke to and the screens I watched. The rolling cellar under my bed expanded with more wine bottles. I wished I was a ghost so I could roam free and speak with the dead.
But the work continued. There were daily standups with my product team where little progress occurred. I suspected many of them worked two to three jobs at once. It was hard to blame them when our employer was also hitting record revenues.
For my part, I cared enough about our AI to stay dedicated. We were still cutting-edge back then, before LLMs came along. My team built conversation agents for hospitals. I dreamed of a product that could help patients even while it made money, so I asked the team to move slow, make it right. My boss pointed out that Madeline’s team had been delivering new features in facial recognition at twice the rate. Appealing to ethics was already passé in the Bay, so I lied to my boss that she’d been working her team on weekends. She was officially a nemesis.
***
One day, amid the endless Zooms, when the video of myself seemed to sink into infinity, and my colleague’s words echoed, and I felt the pain of California only ever having one timeless season, I rotated the Ganesha on my desk and suddenly decided to call my mother. As the phone rang, I wondered if Ganesha had put the idea in my head, or if He just didn’t give a damn.
“I think I’m depressed,” I confided to Amma.
“Yes, Viku, it’s terrible. One of my childhood friends, back in Vijayawada, their sister’s husband’s cousin’s best friend just died from COVID. The whole family perished. So terrible.”
“No, Amma, like, I’m actually depressed. I think I need therapy.”
“Have you lost your mind?” she asked.
“That’s kind of what I said.” I stared out my window at the unkempt grasses of Palo Alto.
“But you’re working in such a good position, Viku. Do you know how many people lost their jobs? Saba Aunty’s brother’s relative’s husband is on a ventilator in Michigan.”
“I don’t even know these people! Why can’t you just talk about Dad —”
“Vikram, stop it,” she snapped. “Don’t worry me. When you are feeling low, you should listen to some bhajans.”
“Yeah,” I mumbled, and I heard her mutter something, too, perhaps to my brother, whom she now lived with and preferred. I hung up. It was time for another meeting with Madeline.
***
“Happy Friday.” She beamed and rocked side-to-side as if settling for a photo.
“Hey.”
“Is it cool if I call you Vik, by the way? To make it easier?” Madeline asked.
“Sure,” I heard my pathetic mouth say, as it always did to that question, even though my name was shorter than hers. “Can I call you Maddy?”
“Mm, let’s stick to Madeline.”
I understood then that DEI was misplaced. There were only two types of people in the workplace: those who knew how to step on shoulders and those who didn’t. The latter were the only ones who needed help.
“I’ve been kinda nervous to ask you something, Vik.” She tucked hair behind her ear.
My leg shook, still eager for her approval. “No, don’t be nervous.”
“I don’t want to like, presume, but have you heard of ‘keer-tans’?”
“Sorry?”
“Keer-tans? Spiritual songs with music, clapping, and instruments. I had the most magical time the other day doing them with a few girlfriends. We all signed up for a puppy yoga class in Mountain View, followed by keer-tans.”
“Are you talking about bhajans? Yes, my family sang those when I was growing up.” I thought of my father’s pudgy finger, tracing words on a page to help my young American tongue sound out the chants.
“Buh-johns?” Her face leaned closer to the camera and blinked, her lips parted.
“No, bhajans. With a ‘b-h’ sound. And I think it’s pronounced kirtans, with a soft t. Actually, my mother was just —”
“Oh, it’s definitely keer-tans. The yogi was from Costa Rica, she taught us so much about how to live, Vik.”
I scratched my face. If I threw the monitor out of my window, perhaps she would crash out of my life as well. “I didn’t realize yoga studios were even open.”
“Oh, dude, of course. You have to get out and take care of yourself. You’re young, don’t even worry about it.” She waved a manicured hand in the air.
“I figured the risk of spreading…” I shrugged.
“Anyway, I have an idea.” She grinned. “Instead of just sharing DEI resources, we need to be more active in our cultural engagement. What if you and I led our teams in a joint keer-tan, since we didn’t do anything for Diwali? Oh my God, it would be such a nice way to connect with our souls while we’re cooped up at work.”
“I need to drop,” I said, fed up. I rotated the Ganesha on my desk again and wondered if this is what He had in mind for His religion. “How about meditation? It’ll be easier to do and less, uh, culturally specific?”
“Hm, I’ll think about that.”
***
The next DLC meeting began with meditation. We went through ten minutes of breathing exercises, led by a white guy who said he’d discovered Buddhism after a career in finance. It turned out to be Madeline’s father. In the long pause after he finished, I did feel a morsel of peace. It was just what I needed.
The Head of DEI said the mindfulness had been suggested and organized entirely by Madeline, and she nodded with aplomb. “I feel so centered, fam. Join me and Vik for kirtans at the next meeting!”
After the call, a scan of my room confirmed no trace of alcohol remained. I ventured out to the living room and saw Bradley drinking a Coors on the couch. He was writing a LinkedIn status on his laptop: 2020 taught me that resilience isn’t a choice — it’s a daily workflow.
He raised his drink. “Happy Friday, dude,” he said.
“Hey,” I said. I opened the fridge. “We’re all out of beers? And like, food?”
“Yeah,” Bradley said.
By then, I relied on him to order food, fetch groceries, check mail, and any other tasks that required the unpixelated world. I’d stopped bothering with my desk and took calls from bed, propped up on my headboard. “You goin’ out for supplies?”
He turned to me. “Whoa, you should shave, dude.”
“I know. I need a vacation.”
“I’m gonna see some friends later.”
“Is that really a good idea?” I felt the cool air of the fridge wash over me.
“There’s a lot of misinfo out there, bro. And there’s disinfo, too, gotta watch out for that. It’s been so long now, whoever’s gonna get it probably has it. We’re safe. We can party.”
“Where you gonna go?”
I saw the reluctance on his face. “Just out. Waiting on friends to decide.”
“Cool. Mask up, though.”
“If I’m not sipping, I’m masking, bro, no doubt.” He threw up a shaka and went back to LinkedIn.
I closed the fridge and stood there for a second, imagining him and Madeline as CEOs one day, because they’d broken all the rules in only the right ways. The lull of meditation was replaced by a feral anger clawing its way up my chest. I stormed out the door without a mask.
I wandered for a long time, not knowing how far I’d walked. I thought about my dad. Once I was lost, I could breathe easy again.
I looked up at an intersection and saw a yoga studio. It was beside a row of formerly bustling Friday hot spots. Perhaps this was where Madeline sang kirtans and sipped golden milk. The thought of her buying all she needed from my heritage made me want to flip over all the empty patio tables in my sight.
My feet stopped in front of a bar. The bartender had a mask. “What’ll ya have?” he asked.
“Two lagers. One to chug and one to enjoy.” I like to think he smiled.
The hops stung my throat in their flush downward. A smattering of patrons, sitting tables apart, drank in ones or twos. They nodded at me, and I at them, because it was nice to see the world still turning, and ourselves as nothing but small, insignificant gears within it.
I moved across the street to a similar bar and did the same. Night fell. The string lights dotting the patios looked pathetic without people under them. Little purposeless things, like Christmas ornaments in a grieving house.
I kept drinking. The people around me no longer looked hazy and attractive, but more like cutouts, pasted onto a scene of an empty town, and the entire world was a sort of nightmarish scrapbook where the pages flipped too soon.
When I was younger, my parents had sent me to Hindu camp. They’d said the entire world of souls was connected, all part of one grand soul, a Brahman, but we were too ignorant to know it. I decided I needed to defeat that ignorance right then, to transfer little molecules to another person and know that I was no longer just myself.
I stumbled out of my fourth bar of the night. The only other person in sight was a homeless man across the street, looking at his phone. I lurched over to him, hoping he would breathe or cough on me, finally give me COVID so it would be something I could fight, not fret over from a distance. I reached for his fleshy forearm.
He shoved me off of him. “Zombie!” He yelled behind his mask and scampered away.
“So are you!” I said.
I sat in his place on the curb. I raised my palm to my face and stared, but the lines were blurring and shifting, as if life itself were malleable. Then I saw Madeline.
At least, I thought it was her. I may never know for sure. What I saw was a pretty blonde with determined eyes, alongside a friend who looked the same. They wore athleisure and trucker hats and their masks were glamorous, dotted with rhinestones like Dolly Parton had sewed them herself. She glanced at me with a mix of terror and pity. It’s always odd the first time you meet a virtual colleague in person — they never look quite the same.
“Happy Friday!” I yelled, my arms splayed, as I fell back on the grass.
***
Morning dew wet the back of my head and I awoke in a stupor. I expected the ugly popcorn ceiling of my home but saw a purple dawn. My legs were leaden. I rolled onto my side and spied a street even emptier than it had been last night. I considered staying, to keep waking to open skies and watching real people pass by. But my legs eventually stirred, and my phone was still alive, so I stood, vomited, and called an Uber. The driver gave me a mask.
When I was back in my bedroom, I heard Bradley call out. He appeared at my doorway, his dirty blonde hair matted on one side and his eyes crusty. “Bro, I was worried you never came back last night,” he declared.
I blinked at him and looked around my room. It was vacuumed and tidy.
“I cleaned up. Got you some more wine. But you oughta slow down. There were hella bottles there. You okay?”
I nodded, feeling naked. My voice croaked. “I’m fine.”
That was all a person could be back then.
***
The worst part of depression is the loss of gravity. I floated away from my mind like an astronaut watching Earth from far away. I joined meeting after meeting without remembering what I’d said. I went off camera to cry. I didn’t realize what day it was when I joined the next DLC meeting.
Madeline sported a bottu between her eyebrows. She said namaste to welcome everyone.
“Fuck,” I muttered.
“You’re on mute, Vik,” Madeline perked up in her seat. “Wanna introduce yourself and say a bit about keer-tans for the group?”
I only stared out at the expectant faces, so she unmuted me herself. “There you go, looks like you were having technical difficulties!” Fake laughs sprung from the group of dozens.
“My name is Vik,” I mumbled, scratching my beard’s curls. I could barely mumble. I scanned the other videos frantically for any sign that Madeline had gossiped about seeing me.
“Speak up a bit, Vik.” Madeline tilted her head, losing patience.
I seethed, seeing that bottu on her face. “When I was a child growing up in Texas, my parents would make sure my brother and I showered and sat in our prayer room by six pm sharp. We’d gather as a family and sing these bhajans to Ganesha. Our voices would fill the room, and my father — he really loved bhajans — would play little cymbals to keep us on beat, as he always did for our family. If I closed my eyes, it could feel like God was sitting in the corner, clapping along. I don’t remember what that’s like anymore, to feel a room filled with love.”
Tears ran down my face in a hurry. The Head of DEI and Madeline held horror on their faces. I sniffled through more words I shouldn’t have said. “We’re not in a room together. We don’t love each other. You can’t just take what’s mine and make it yours.”
“I don’t think Madeline ever meant to do that, rest assured. We all fully respect your culture, Vik,” the Head of DEI cut me off. “Do you wanna take a few minutes and come back to us? Madeline, why don’t we continue. I know you’ve put a lot of work into this.”
I watched Madeline fold her hands, as if in prayer, and say we should re-center ourselves. I wouldn’t let her ruin a good memory. I wailed “No!” until they kicked me out of the meeting. My lungs strained. Ganesha-on-my-desk looked on.
I could still read the chats, even from other Indians, praising Madeline for keeping her cool, for leading them through such a “rejuvenating” session. Several signed off with the words “Hari Om.” The Nigerian in the group was the only one to message me privately and wish me well, so I told him that Madeline thinks Africa is a country. The Head of DEI sent me an e-mail ordering me to take a week off.
Bradley walked in to find me laid on the strip of carpet between my bed and desk. “Broseph?” He held a glass of water above my snot-stained nose. “I heard you.”
“Thanks.” I sat up and wiped my eyes. We looked at my tears on the carpet.
“My little sister, she’s Gen Z. Calls that a ‘menti b.’”
“Gen Z is messed up.” I took a sip of water.
“I can connect you with a client of mine, bro. He swears by online therapy. Everyone’s doing it now.” Bradley swept his fingers in the air, showing a level playing field.
“Seriously?” I warmed at the thought of Bradley having a stake in me.
“Totally. Hustle and grind, bro, but you need balance, too.”
“You’re right.”
“So, you’re just not working tomorrow?”
I shook my head. Bradley left to retrieve two of his dorm-room-chic beers. “Friday came early, then,” he said. We clinked cans and despite the terrible taste, it washed away the sadness lining my throat.
***
Bradley’s client Hunter pronounced my name properly when we spoke on the phone. “I’ve worked around enough Indians to recognize it,” he said.
“Most people never do.”
“Big companies are landfills. They’re just waiting for you to decompose or float.”
“Yeah,” I nodded. “They make a big deal of titles so your name can disappear.”
“Hm. You’ve got AI chops, you should move around, man. I’m hiring for the product team, actually. Looking for employee number eight.”
“Seems like a risk,” I suggested.
“So is staying.” He adjusted his thick, rectangular frames and gave me the e-mail of his therapist. Within weeks, I would follow up on his offer.
But first, I had therapy. A sympathetic-enough woman nodded and furrowed her brow as I told her I’d been forced into time off. Her eyes widened when I mentioned my drinking, but they were big as spotlights when I told her about my father. How I couldn’t fly to him when he was on the ventilator. How his funeral was livestreamed, like it had never really happened but was just another show in the endless chain of content. An image is a deceitful thing, I said to her, and she continued scribbling.
I reached out to the monitor when the session came to a close and asked if she’d indulge me. Our fingertips touched in some digital ether. That felt better than nothing. I imagined, then, that if I were to look at all the photos and videos I had of my father, and reach out to them, then maybe he, too, could touch me in a space between. I put on his favorite bhajan. I lit the candle before Ganesh and I slid him to the side, to let the picture frame of me and my father be visible.
There was a fear, I’d once read, that a camera could take a part of your soul. I prayed this superstition held true. Over hours, or maybe days, for the first time since he passed, I scoured my father’s digital record for pictures. I touched the screen, even put my cheek to his own, felt the stubble of his youth, the wrinkles of his later days, the warmth of laying my head upon his belly. I watched videos of him dancing in the living room until laughter stifled my breath. I listened to his speech until I could imagine how the words “goodbye, son” would’ve sounded.
Clarity returned one day, like a morning sun lifting fog. I took two more weeks off since I had the PTO. All I wanted was to be outside. I started with walks around the nearby hills. Then I wanted to run daily, to create my own wind against the world. I tossed a frisbee with Bradley. Wine bottles and tissues were tossed in the trash. My resume was dusted off. I FaceTimed my mother more often, and we sang bhajans together with my brother, because it was something to do in the dark.
When I went back to work, I was added to a chat of like-minded folks within the DLC, who also found it useless. We took bets on buzzword bingo during meetings. In one session, the Head of DEI said she’d been promoted to lead a larger Purpose Office, which no one knew existed, and she appointed Madeline the new Head of DEI. My nemesis kept our meetings on the calendar even though we were no longer peers. She wanted to rub it in, I figured.
“Hey dude! How we doin’?” she asked me at our next call.
“Pretty good, actually!” I was better able to don the cape of corporate joy by then.
“Oh, we’re so glad to hear that,” she said. The extent of her “we” was unclear. Perhaps she was speaking royally because of her new title.
“Congrats on the DEI promotion.”
“Oh, any one of us would’ve been great for the role.” Her voice lowered to downplay everything. “Any new updates? What do you think of a DEI book club? We could stick to books that have become movies so people have options.”
For some reason, I found myself wanting to be honest with her. I needed her to know how far I’d come, that I was no longer the person she may have seen stumbling around that Friday night. “My team is killing it on the work front. And uh, I’ve been doing therapy. Running a couple miles each day.”
“Two miles is such a good start, fam.”
That was not the response I’d expected. I hated when she said “fam.”
“It’s not always two. I go as far as my body wants,” I said.
“Yasss.” She snapped her fingers. “I just ran a half-marathon in Zion! Vik, you would love it. It was like this spiritual experience.”
I sighed. “Do you ever think about starting your own thing? Like, leave corporate?”
“I wouldn’t want to jeopardize the great opportunities we have. I’m so grateful to be on a team where we make an impact every day.”
Even for her, this sounded forced. I realized she was wary of our calls being recorded. There had been rumors about the company doing that of late to gauge productivity. I stared at Madeline, wondering why I offered so much of myself to others when they insisted on showing only their buffed fragments.
“You should cancel these useless meetings,” I said. The last image on my screen was her frozen confusion as I closed the laptop.
In my picture frame, my father and I were dressed in our best shalwars, beaming behind Diwali sparklers. “Happy Friday,” I whispered to him as I put my fingertips to his cheek and then brushed the Ganesha beside him.
I laced up my sneakers in the living room and made small talk with Bradley. He crushed an empty Natty Light on his forehead. “That’s how painful this next LinkedIn post is gonna be: What Operation Warp Speed taught me about B2B sales.”
“Good Lord. Talk about scarcity creating demand.”
“Oh, that’s good. Come help me with the rest, bro. I’ll let you beat me at CoD.”
I chuckled. “No, I gotta go. I’ll bring back Thai food and Singhas though.”
My feet were antsy to move. They rushed me out, down the stairs, past the stoplight bordering our apartment, and through the Stanford campus with all its trees, until I found myself in unadulterated sun, without enemies, or cares, or ambitions. There was only the gratitude of breath still moving in and out of my body. Just the beating, panting appreciation that it was a proper sort of day to be alive, if only I would have it.
Image by Ged Carroll on flickr.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
- Happy Friday - September 4, 2026