The lobby at eleven PM was fully staffed. Security, reception, the canteen already running for the night crew — idli and sambhar and the particular chai that BPO canteens made, strong and sweet and tasting of mass production, which Meera had already decided she would not complain about because she liked strong sweet chai and she had been an academic snob about enough things in her life.
Her supervisor was a man named Vikram — compact, thirty-five, with the precise grooming of someone who took the night shift seriously as a professional environment and the slightly too-bright eyes of someone who had been on it for years. He walked her through the floor with the practiced ease of someone who had done orientation many times and had found the efficiency of it.
Floor seven: 120 workstations, the US timezone call centre, handling customer service for three American clients. Insurance claims, software support, banking queries. Standard BPO work. Standard headsets. Standard scripts on the monitors. The calls would come in from 11 PM to about 4 AM India time, corresponding to 12:30 PM to 5:30 AM Eastern — peak business hours and the early evening of the American East Coast. After 4 AM, the call volume dropped and the remaining hours were for documentation, callbacks, quality monitoring.
"Floor eight is client management," Vikram said, as they passed the lift bank. "Executive accounts. You won't be on that floor initially — we move people up after six months based on performance."
"What's on floor nine?" Meera asked.
Vikram smiled. The smile was professional and entirely correct and told her nothing. "Technical operations. Server rooms, QA labs, management offices. You won't need to go there."
Her cubicle was in row seven of floor seven. Her neighbor on the left was a young woman named Divya — twenty-two, Hyderabad, had been at Zenith for four months, had the comfortable familiarity with the space of someone who had stopped noticing it. On the right was an empty station.
"Rajan bhai,"
Divya said, noticing where Meera was looking. "He's always late. He's been here six years so Vikram doesn't say anything. He'll be in by midnight."
