The Mentor Who Saw Me Before I Did
He kept assigning me things I couldn't do yet, on purpose.
The first thing Prakash sir ever said to me was, "You'll present to the client on Thursday." It was my fourth day at the agency. I did not yet know where the bathroom was.
I was twenty-three, a junior copywriter hired mostly, I suspected, because I was cheap and could stay late without anyone at home noticing. The agency was one of those mid-sized places in an office park where the reception plant was plastic and the ambition was real. Prakash sir ran the creative team. He was in his fifties, wore the same three sweater vests in rotation, and drank his coffee black from a steel tumbler that had outlived, by his own count, two mergers and one marriage.
"Sir, I've never presented to a client," I said.
"I know," he said, not looking up from his screen. "That's why."
I want to be clear about something: I did not experience this as inspiring.
I experienced it as a hostage situation.
I spent three nights rewriting the deck. I threw up a little on Thursday morning, quietly, professionally, into the office park hedge. Then I stood in front of a fertilizer company's marketing head and presented a campaign about soil like my life depended on it, because as far as I knew, it did.
The client said yes. Prakash sir said nothing.
He nodded once, the way you nod at a bus that has arrived on time.
This became the pattern of my two years under him.
Every time I got comfortable, he handed me something I could not do yet.
Not something slightly beyond me. Something absurdly beyond me. Write the radio spots alone. Handle the shoot in Jaipur, the director is difficult, figure it out. Fire the freelancer, kindly. Train the new girl, and no, it does not matter that you joined eight months ago.
I complained about him constantly. My flatmate knew him only as "that man." Once, at the canteen, a senior designer heard me grumbling and laughed into her tea. "You don't get it, do you," she said. "He doesn't do this with everyone."
"Lucky them," I said.
She looked at me the way you look at someone who has not yet understood their own biography. "He did it with me," she said. "Eleven years ago. Ask around who he ignores. That's the group you don't want to be in."
I did ask around. She was right. There were people Prakash sir was perfectly pleasant to and never once stretched. They stayed exactly where they were, comfortable, unbothered, unchanged, like furniture with salaries.
Somewhere in my second year, he found a poem of mine in the printer tray. I had written it at lunch, a small grieving thing about my grandmother's steel almirah, and printed it by mistake along with a client brief. I saw it in his hand and wanted to dissolve into the carpet.
He read it. All of it... Standing by the printer while I died in real time.
"This is better than your ad copy," he said finally. "Which is a problem, because your ad copy is good." Then he handed it back and said, "Enter it somewhere. There are monthly contests. Pick one. That's your deadline for Friday, along with the radio scripts."
He said it exactly like an assignment, because to him it was one. I entered it into a monthly poetry contest that Friday, furious, certain I was being mocked. It did not win... He asked what I learned. "That I hate losing," I said. "Good," he said. "Now you know you care. Caring was the assignment. Enter another."
The second one got shortlisted. I did not tell him. He found out anyway, because of course he did, and left a printout of the shortlist on my desk with one word in the margin in his terrible doctor's handwriting: "Obviously."
I left the agency after two years for a bigger job in a bigger city, the way you do. At my farewell, he shook my hand, said, "Don't get comfortable," and went back to his desk before the cake was cut.
That was the whole goodbye... I remember being hurt by it, a little. I had wanted a speech. I had, if I am honest, wanted to be told what I had been to him... because I could not tell.
Here is the part I did not know.
Four years later, he retired, and the agency threw him the party he would have hated. I flew back for it. Afterward, his longtime account manager, Susheela, waved me over to a corner with the urgency of a woman holding classified information and a third drink.
"You should know about the folder," she said.
"What folder?"
"Every time he gave you something too big," she said, "the Jaipur shoot, the fertilizer pitch, all of it, he prepared a backup. A full one. Complete deck, complete scripts, done on his own time, at home, in case you fell on your face. He did it for every kid he ever pushed. He never told any of you, because if you knew there was a net, you'd perform like there was a net."
I stood there holding a paper plate of party samosas... recalculating my entire twenties.
"How many times did he use one?" I asked. "For me. How many times did he have to send in the backup?"
Susheela smiled. "That's the thing you should ask him."
So I did. I found him near the exit, escaping his own party, tumbler in hand. I asked him straight: how many times, sir, did the net catch me?
He looked genuinely annoyed at Susheela for a second... Then he shrugged.
"Never," he said. "Not once."
"That's the whole trick, girl. You were never as unready as you felt. I just saw it a few years before you did. That's not talent on my part. That's just being old and paying attention."
A good mentor is someone who builds you a safety net in secret, and then makes sure you never find out you didn't need it.
He died two winters ago. Sweater vest, steel tumbler, a crossword half done on his desk at home, his daughter told me. At the prayer meeting, I counted at least eleven of us, his kids from four decades of that agency, all standing around telling the same story with different names in it. The impossible assignment. The single nod. The word "Obviously" in a margin.
I run a small team of my own now. Last month I gave a twenty-four-year-old writer a client presentation she was in no way ready for, and watched her go pale, and hated myself pleasantly for a week while I built, at home, at night, a full backup deck she will never see.
She presented. The client said yes. I nodded once and went back to my desk, and only later, alone in the parking lot, did I let myself grin like an idiot.
I still write poems. Better ones now, I think, partly because I finally stopped writing around memory and started writing straight through it, the almirah first, then everything the almirah held. And when I read profiles of writers nobody has heard yet, I catch myself doing his thing, scanning for the one who is more ready than they feel.
Because somewhere out there is a fifty-something man or woman in a sweater vest looking at some terrified twenty-three-year-old and seeing, clear as a printout in a tray, everything they are about to become.
Some people call that management.
He would have called it paying attention.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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