THE SEXTET

Lopa Ghosh

When Jeff Calvino summoned Ananth to his room, office Cassandras of the 9th floor promptly foretold a debacle.

“The axe will fall now; blood will be shed of Ananth, the malcontent with a hole in the middle.” A grim wave of who-next and what-next rose as did a muted cheer and I-told-you-so-s for Ananth was not exactly likeable. It was not so much disgust or embarrassed discomfort due to the hole he had in the middle where the stomach should have been, but his arrogance and sense of superiority for being a holed-out man that put off his colleagues. They used to say on the 9th floor – “What use is he here? Why doesn’t he go back?”

Back in those years people were beginning to feel settled. In that warm wooly daze Ananth was a jagged edge. His disjuncted self, stories of father dying in a bomb, Amina the theatre-widow he was having an affair with, the khadi shirts he wore to board meetings , unsettled everyone.

So when Jeff Calvino, American boss from Sacramento, spent an hour with Ananth, it was perceived as a hatchet job. Jeff had come on a long visit, so long that people were saying he could stay till late July. There was that whisper that Jeff was on run from FBI but who could have ever proved such claims. He seemed calm almost leisurely, passing his time playing golf, making friends with young MPs, playing card games on the computer. Soon after he landed the media had descended on him in mad droves demanding interviews, quotes and panel discussions. He shooed them away pleading to be left alone – “I am thinking. Please leave me in peace.”

Seven years to the day, when just after nine, a million paper-birds with pink, white, blue and yellow wings blocked out the sun and sailed down ninety floors of steel and glass, guilty of adding fuel to the fire, pink coloured slips were flying again. Presidents and premiers declared they could not be like Moses taking the dark plague head on and desperately waving away locusts. The deadly determined pink birds were nasty. They elbowed out poor black crows from cities, sat on windows, car bonnets and sometimes tapped on the mobile phones with their hideous beaks, whispering discreetly a message that caused guns to blow off heads, poison borrowed from farmers to burn up guts, bodies to float up in Yamuna, Krishna, Ganga and the Arabian Sea, or to float down, once again, after seven years, tall buildings.

In these times, when people were doing things they were not in the habit of doing. A Korean man with a Phd applied for the job of a street sweeper and toilet cleaner, only to be rejected; waiters with clean shaven soft chins, upright in raw silk gullabandhs fought bullets with their silver salvers and became martyrs in the Jallianwalah Bagh of coffee tables; fathers killed their children, a dime a dozen; a company ran itself for seven years with phantom workers. Yet, fifty million more pink paper-birds were waiting in the wings, to hand out their message of death.

Beggars begged for less, stood on their heads at crossings and knocked on car windows with live snakes, whores became half men by day and covered their false moustache with cakes of make-up, starch, the milky refuse of cooked rice, a word that had escaped national memory, came back to haunt as the staple food. Like Uma’s dance of death, across the gangetic plains and even as far as the deccan hills, ornaments of pride fell twirling from the sky like headless, spent rockets.

The sounds and fury of debacle are at their loudest, when Jeff presses Ananth’s hand and says, “You have to do it my friend. The company needs you at this hour.”

Ananth wets the tails of his drooping moustache with a discreet tongue flick. After years of moustache chewing, it has become difficult to resist. But in front of Jeff Calvino, you didn’t, even if you are a son of revolution and a theatre-actor once, chew your moustache.

“How many?” – he asked.

“Six senior employees of our company. All of them extremely talented. Our favourites – but alas!”

“Men, women?”

“Men. But it is incidental that only men are in those top positions. As you know, the gender bias or the fabled glass ceiling does not exist in our company.”

“When?”

“The show must go on stage day after tomorrow, once the Quarterly meeting finishes. I have made arrangements at our company auditorium and assuming that you will not let me down, I have made the necessary arrangement. The invites have been printed – lovely designs – you know I met a graphic novelist at the golf club. She is something, yeah. Agreed to do the cards for me. Subtle French cuisine to go along with it. Nimble food so that it doesn’t distract. And I am flying down a few crates from my vineyard in Napa.

“But that’s crazy Mike. You cant plan something like that in one day. And all these men, whose names I hope you will reveal to me soon enough, totally unaware. What about motive? What about sufficient clause? And well, they are not actors. Complete novices – aah!”

“Easily remedied. They won’t have to remember lines. A teleprompter will be used”.

I don’t know – doesn’t sound right to me. You guys are always undermining the effort that goes behind art. Quickfix quickfix!”

Jeff remembers something and snaps a finger.

“By the way – I am trying to get Shah Rukh Khan for the show. He promised me he is going to try his best.”

“So now Shah Rukh Khan gets to act in this play?” – Ananth thumps on the table angrily.

“Hold on man. What’s with the temper? Shah Rukh will be in the audience – just to pep us up.”

“You are toying with history. You are arrogant and unheedful.”

“Who is the boss Ananth?”

“Since we are talking about theatre, I am”.

“I see. No one talks to Jeff Calvino like that. But these are extraordinary times and along with extraordinary measure, I suppose they also call for extraordinary decorum Mr Hole”.

“Mind your tongue. Don’t call my hole names. Or I will reveal your plot”.

“Who will believe you Mr Hole-bodied Nut?”

“All these American slang-isms and Bush-isms are getting on to my nerves. Are you from Texas?”

“I am a landed aristocrat Mr…”

“Yeah right, the kind my father would want to blow off with a bomb”.

“Ha, ha and in the process he got blown off himself. While we are on the topic, what’s with this hole of yours? Couldn’t you get it repaired? Our company has a bloody good medical policy and we are generous enough to let employees who have a handicap – uuh umm, I mean differently behaving or looking body parts, get themselves fixed up all new, on the house. Now with difficult profits and all that we are rolling it up, but I could make an exception for you. Go on man, get yourself fixed.”

“It isn’t one of those surgically correctable holes. The story goes like this, and please don’t laugh or disbelieve: my father’s bombed out ghost came to my mother in her dreams and left behind his seed posthumously. So I was born like that with a burgeoning hole where my stomach should have been. Over the years it has become a gargantuan crater where the steam from people’s sadness and anger are stewing and stewing. I joined a theatre company and travelled all over the country gathering more steam inside me. They used to think of me as a kettle on boil. Every now and then I would give them stories, plots – horror, romance, romance followed by murder, bloody, ghostly. I could make people laugh with stories of their own miseries. They found it funny when I retold them their own personal disasters - wife running away, a mind gone over the edge, a refusing to die father. All I had to do was change names and that was enough to send them rolling over in laughter. I told them take more, take it all. Let me write my bombed-out-father’s gifted torso to you. But slowly the tickets wouldn’t sell and people began drifting away from these stories. The actors wanted real jobs, kids, wives, shopping malls. I walked away from the theatre company with my hole and came and joined your company. Amidst you people, I can’t possibly feel betrayed. There are no surprises”.

“So in a far fetched sense we gave you the hole?”

“Yes and now you must harbour me”.

“No free lunches”.

“You need me more than I need to dispense of my cavernous gut”.

“That is true, much as I would hate to admit it since such lowering off guard don’t make sense in good negotiations. But what the heck! We need your bomb. Blow them up, yes, to smithereens but under the dreamy glaze of your costume, wig, song and dance. Let it seem like fireworks”.

“You know, I have always felt that the top CEO of a company should be a philosopher. Sales people like you are gross individuals who know nothing about moral balance and are reduced to seeking help from poor half gone low level workers like me. No blowing up Jeff. Nah, nah”.

Silence. Ananth has now shaken off his Calvino consciousness and is chewing both ends of the moustache. They have been in the room so long and so still that the sensor lights have gone off. Semi-darkness and a slight whirring of the laptop fan. Jeff’s voice, no longer with a summery, bar-b-q casualness, but more grave, reminding one of his Harvard degree and various authored articles on late stage capitalism, speaks up.

“Ananth, have you heard of Augusto Boal?”

“You bet I have. In fact I am surprised you even know of him”.

The moustache chewing has stopped and only Jeff is talking.

“Boal is your guy. Break the proscenium, bring them in, let it happen in-situ”.

“Wow you are something else. Yes Boal did that. And closer home, our own Utpal Dutt, Safdar Hashmi, Badal Sarkar. Of what use is theatre if it doesn’t change lives?”

“Now you are thinking – impromptu, in-situ, game changing, provoking”.

Ananth feeling a bit out-witted, even in matters of the theatre, sulks and passes a hand over his hole.

Jeff leans forward. In the dim light he makes conjuror eyes at Ananth and repeats slowly –

“Game changing, provoking, instigating, bringing change, also called brain washing, abetting…”

After a point Ananth feels convinced that he would finally be able to extract the flesh that would fill up his hole. He decides to tell Jeff about Amina.

“That theatre-widow you are sleeping with?”

“Ouch, don’t call her that. She lost her lover to the fall of Soviet. People like you… I need her to help me in this. Let me hire her as a consultant. She is a remarkable woman and has distracting qualities. I could wink here if you like, to insinuate, grown man and grand master manipulator that you are, I hope you will not refuse me. Those six stuffy honchos will need some distraction before they go to their unspeakable blah blahs”.

Next day at the meeting, Jeff Calvino is terrible excited. Last night he has managed to seduce the graphic novelist and they have endlessly worn each other out. He is raw from the loving and finds himself developing a curiosity for Amina, the theatre-widow.

All six of them are here, intended protagonists of the grand show. The meeting starts – Pronoy says – “Lets take stock of the last quarter. Bring up the scorecard”.

The scorecard is reflective of difficult times – the failings in oranges and reds is the reason why Jeff has had to plan the show. He sits quietly through the taking-stock, once in a while trying to sound interested.

Nihaal warns – “The competition commission has been set up. They have a full staff on board now and will start their assaults very soon. Some of us are trying to convince them that this is not the best time to question mergers and acquisitions or to bully companies. But they want something to do – they have been inactive for too long. I hear the commissioners have been going to the gym regularly just to fight the boredom”.

Makrand wants to know if they run some sort of risk.

“We will be the first ones to be accused of cartelization”.

As a natural consequence of these discussions and fears, a motion was raised to alter the company policy regarding personal gifts and travel junkets.

“Given the complex challenges we are facing, and I would request Jeff to give his opinion here, perhaps we should leave Clause 591.A open to interpretation” – Pronoy says, hopeful that Jeff will share his views. Earlier the meeting room has been de-bugged. Telephone lines are secure, mobile phones switched off. Walls could grow ears anytime but that’s a risk every highly confidential strategy meeting must take.

Rana, Isaac and the rest agree with Pronoy – “a bureaucrat’s favourite gift as you know is a Louis Vuitton bag for his wife or a holiday at the French Riviera for his son-in-law. A minister is more altruistic – investments to the tune of a power plant or an IT hub in the state from where he is elected.” 

How are we supposed to respond to these demands, they want to know from Jeff.

Jeff chuckles and advises the team that they should go out there and make friends – “champions of our cause, those who are interested in our well being. Befriend Louis Vuitton in such a manner that you get a purse or sleeping bag whatever it is, for free anytime you want it. Find yourself golf mates in Chanel. Let Cox and Kings be your handyman. Snap your fingers for the best goodies – like that, anything I want. Instead of tweaking Clause 591.A, I say, build a modified Club of Rome. By the way, since we are on the subject of friends and well wishers, I have a little quarter ending gift for you guys.”

Jeff Calvino, curiously placid through the meeting, gazing hermit-like at the pillaged state of business, has just announced that they will all be playing theatre-theatre tomorrow.

“It is an unusual arrangement, more challenging than diving into ice cold waters of Uttarkashi from 30 feet. But this is a nation known for renunciation. You all are genetically seers and saints, austerity runs in your blood. Won’t you, at this hour, do your bit to set an example and show the world how we can exhibit restraint? Instead of the usual snorkeling and tanning holiday that I send you on, let us do something differently this time.”

Though a sharp pain, splinters his Davos knee every now and then, Pronoy the CEO, rises to the occasion and pledges himself to wear face paint and brave the spotlight.

“I am amped about it guys, for sure! – he says. But can anyone tell me if the Tathagata walked with a limp?”

His characteristic eye for detail, generates a ripple of reluctant laughter in the motley crowd of business heads gathered in the room, as they sip on their late evening coffee, relieved that the end of quarter meeting was not culminating, as many had predicted, disastrously.

Ananth has been busy making his own arrangements. He visits Amina who lives in a leafy bungalow with a black stone bust of her husband at the entrance, welcoming visitors and lovers. She is sitting on the verandha making arrangements for a show in Uttar Pradesh.

“Ananth jaan, all your bara office baazi has made you such a colourless man. See how beer swollen you have become? How will you be my Jehangir this coming winter? You know na, that we have smart young boys lining up for the role? So you wont fret, if I give your old robes and roles to someone with a younger face?”

Ananth sucks in his belly but the August heat is too much and at any rate the sweat  determined to embarrass him, is acting like an adhesive between the thin cotton kurta and the guilty swell of his girth. Nothing must remain concealed in the high glare of the sun, and Ananth has not been a sun denizen for many years now. He has crossed over to where the sun shines through glazed windows, spilling over like a memory or a fossil of yesteryears on vitrified tiles, sometimes causing a temporary distraction in the busy on-goings.

Amina quarells with the Masterji over Hamlet’s costumes. The to-be or not to be soliloquy will have to spoken by the prince in really tight churidars. She stops her haggling midway and retires into the bedroom with Ananth. He has never visited her on a weekday afternoon before and this arouses her exceedingly. After the sex, Amina lays her head on the hole. Like a swimmers head on water, it remains afloat. Sometimes she holds breath and goes under the surface. Ananth has never been able to get a view of the inside so he relies on her to tell him what goes on underneath.

“It is a green still pond, there are lotus roots, brass vessels broken free from around suicidal necks and whispers growing louder”.

Amina’s periscope eyes are gleaming now. She says the landscape is changing.

It is time now to draw her into the plan. Amina, a magnet perched on the sea side Sun temple, draws men to shipwrecks. She would help numb the pain.

“But such lovely young men with riches, cars and yatch club wining dining. What a waste! I could marry one of them and give up theatre. All this traveling is draining me out”.

 “Amina, this is my last chance to heal the hole. On stage, under the lights, we will lift them up to a nobler plane of existence. Once again the third eye will be opened and people shall perceive the maya jaal and stop grieving. Earth will be restored even amidst poverty and hunger, solace and moral goodness will rule.”

“What a ghastly script!”

“There will be no script. No rehearsal. The actors will go on the stage for an impromptu performance. You will do a quick workshop with them before the performance to correct their gait, free up their vocal chords and get them in the groove of things. When the curtains go up in the auditorium, they will make an entrance. A teleprompter will play the lines they have to speak. Unexpected, Amina jaan, is the quality of Nirvana. Words descend on your tongue, you cannot predict their coming.”

They spend the evening discussing costumes and theatre props. Amina has a brilliant idea about the pink birds. She says she can make them look alive. Masterji starts work on the robes. Wigs with right bending curls are ordered.

Amina gets guilt pangs once in a while – “I had rather not do it. Your hole is the only thing that draws me to you. I like sinking my head”

“Do it for the money Amina. Save your theatre company.”

On the day of performance, the six member cast assembles, not knowing or suspecting that it was the last time they ever would. Ananth is a nuisance to have around – but Jeff has his own fancies, which seem to have become something else now with the FBI after him. They have heard reports that the company auditorium is filling up. Shah Rukh will be leaving Bombay and landing on the helipad soon. They are eager to rehearse their roles and get into the groove.

They wait for Amina, the theatre consultant, to take them through the motions. She is late so they glance at their watches and answer emails on their mobile phones, once in a while looking askance at Ananth. When finally Amina arrives breathless, her silk bosom and orange hair strikingly inconstant, they lose their looks of business. Jeff comes in after a while and welcomes Amina, giving her ownership of the song and dance. Meanwhile, her musky smell has penetrated Jeff’s sinused nose and he sees why she must be here – sweet drug that she is.

Amina arranges the six men in a circle and instructs them to step forward: “In a sing-song voice speak your name with an adjective in front and then follow it up with your designation. That becomes your name badge for the rest of the evening.”

Peppy Pronoy, CEO is complaining about the pain in his Davos knee and excuses himself from the falling act. “I have done this before – he says – in a training workshop for the blue chip CEOs. Amina, trust me I was a great one at falling with my eyes closed. I could do it like butter, gliding from left to right to back and front. But not today please.”

When the rest of them are falling over one another, he takes Amina aside and tells her the story behind his legendary injury. Two years back on the Alps, when the World Economic Forum was in full swing he was eager to show Mike, THE Mike Hogan with a stress and raising of the brow, how fast he could race with the skis. We ski-ed together, together, he repeated. They rushed me out to the hospital on a helicopter after the deadly tumble.

Nothing, not even an operation, which took two hours and during which, reportedly, Mike Hogan called at least twice to find out if I would walk again, could deter me. I hobbled, the leg in a gigantic cast, to the breakout session a day later and with great finesse presented to the Education Secretary of Brazil. That was when he did it, Mike Hogan – plucking a black marker from the writing board, he thumped me heartily on the back and wrote in big bold letters on the white plaster, You are a hero! Signed – Mike Hogan, Davos, January 2006. 

“You see Amina, I have never been on a back foot. On a moonless night, I have climbed the harbour bridge in Sydney with my sales team, to prove that we trust each other, I have sky dived with my BRIC peers. Snorkelling, Himalayan trecking, what not have I pioneered in this company. This theatre business, yes it is new, but I embrace it whole hearterdly and condone it as a fantastic team building exercise in these recessionary times. Bring it on, I say. I shall be your Buddha.”

Anima smiles but inside her heart quivers a little. She wants to pat his hand, this man who looks too young to be CEO.

“It is something of a green field to not have a script” – says Peppy Pronoy CEO -  “but never mind, I am always open to challenges.”

Jeff has now left and there is cheese and wine in a corner. Amina warns everyone good humouredly – don’t drink much. Or you will forget your lines. She pours a glass full for herself and then another when it is drunk quickly.

“Can we at least see our costumes?” Rocking Rana CMO, dashing in his linen pants, wants to know.

Anima likes him already. He is not like the others.

“Yes, but let me ask Ananth. He is in charge of the logistics.”

“Do you.. are you?” Rocking Rana CMO wants to ask her something. From his hesitation it is likely that he wants to know if Amina is really the Trustafarian’s, lover. But he desists.

Amina wishes he would ask, so she could tell him how difficult it is to be lonely.

Ananth looks at the timetable, Jeff has given him. “Yes” – he says – “it will be fun to try out the costumes, now that only an hour was left.”

As they wait for the trunk to arrive, Incredible Isaac CIO and Reserved Rajiv CFO corners Ananth and wants to know what the deal is. At least tell us what the play is about.

When he says the fun is in the surprise, both the CIO and CFO are displeased and tell him – “Spare us the party line mate. Off the record, we all know that Jeff is obviously he is not all there these days. So whatever it is that you are cooking here, well, we hope it will speak to your performance review.”

Now the Natty Nihaal COO joins them and observes – “This jamboree in front of the media, is it compliant with our company image policies? After all we are all C-level people, senior execs wearing wigs in times of such downturns…I don’t know, I don’t know!”

“Exactly our thoughts” - Incredible Isaac CIO and Reserved Rajiv CFO say nodding their heads.

Natty Nihaal COO adds in a sniding aside – “See how comfortable MTV Makrand CMO looks. All this showmanship is up his street.”

The costumes come in a trunk and the actors crowd around it eagerly. Ananth holds out six mendicant robes for everyone to appreciate. There are wooden slippers, begging bowls and Buddha wigs to complete the ensemble.

Rocking Rana CMO sheds his shirt and promptly wears his robe. When Amina remarks how his body has the glow of royalty, he confides to her that in order to step into the role of a Kapilavastu monk, he has waxed his arms and shoulders – an aesthetic touch.

But MTV Makrand COO is sulking and demands to see the script. “I am a practicising Buddhist” – he says. “You should have roped me in. I am surprised that Jeff didn’t pass this through me. There could be branding issues and it must be altered according to the sentiments of our society. We don’t want the entire press launching on us for contempt of religion.”

Ananth assures him that the premise of the play is secular. It is about how Siddhartha, and here is the allegory, renounces wealth, family, power, lust to set out and seek answers. It is merely about that moment of giving-up. One Buddha after the other will step up and read their lines from a tele-prompter. As a symbol of the renounciation, you will pick up the begging bowl and walk away from the stage on your wooden slippers.”

Evidently the six men are not very happy with their roles. It is too thin, few lines, no drama. Where is the acting?

Peppy Pronoy CEO steps in at this point and says he is excited about it – “The script is remarkable. I can read Jeff’s mind. He has designed this as a high level branding exercise – senior execs pledge themselves as Buddhas who will follow a rigorous path and save the world from these difficult times. Austerity, remember? The spirit of renunciation. Let us go do this people. In thirty minutes when rubber meets the road – let us go out and tell the world, here comes the messiah.”

Ananth pours himself a glass of wine and eats a piece of cheese. He can’t hold his excitement anymore. He wants to close the hole and dance out into moon with Amina. But where is Amina?

He sees her in one corner helping Rocking Rana CMO with the gliding monk walk. But what he cannot hear are the whispers. He does not know that Amina has fallen in love with the hairless monk-poser.

But what is Amina thinking, her lotus eyes brimming over with lust and motherly affection for the pale skinned youth? She is scheming how to save Rana from destruction, how to prevent him from walking upto the tele-prompter and speak those ruinous lines. When he suggest that they meet every Sunday morning when is supposed to be out golfing, Amina wants to tells him about the deadly plot. That he will be sacked in full view of the public. She begins to tells him – The play is a ploy. It is codenamed Pink Bird…

But Ananth who cannot afford to lose everything to an insane woman’s sudden love, swoops down on them like a vulture.

“It is time to rehearse your entries together” – he says and sends Rana back to the circling monks. Rana, having elicited a promise of love from Amina, sees no reason to stay.

“What were you talking about?”

“Oh nothing.”

When Ananth is not looking, Amina types out a long SMS on her phone – When you Buddhas go up on the stage, the teleprompter will say “I, (for instance Rana, the CMO, since you will lose the alliterative adjective on stage) resolve to give up all worldly possessions, my company flat, company sedan/sports car (as appropriate), my employee stock and other minor and vulgar forms of luxury such as the golf club membership and without any further delay, to prevent the world from doom, my job in this company, so that I may seek the true path to happiness, peace and equality. In my full senses, as a responsible corporate citizen, I release myself from wealth (now the renunciation metre will do some furious calculations and flash on the huge screen your net worth) and give back to this impoverished world the xx million they would have spent on me annually. To seal my nirvana, I accept this pink bird”.

Rana has written his number on the back of her hand when they were whispering and she hurriedly sends the message to that number. She sees her warning land on the phone as it lights up under the maroon robe Rana is wearing. But he who receives thousands of mails and messages everyday, ignores it and concentrates instead on what his company excepts of him at that hour.

Later at night Ananth sits motionless on the floor and it seems from the heaviness of his posture that he has been like this for hours. Curly Max the cat, who has decided not to plead or wait for dinner, is finishing the last of the fish bones stolen from the neighbour’s garbage. He plans to litter the floor afterwards for revenge. Lying around flightless, spilling out of cardboard boxes, are little pink birds with organza wings. They have thumb sized battery operated LED lights stuck inside. Some are blinking, set off by the cat’s paws or maybe by jostling in the car boot when they were travelling back from the show. In time, they will spend themselves but for now, the dark air if full of pink glimmers. There are pink bird patterns on the ceiling, on Ananth’s right cheek, on his stomach where the hole has just got healed. Curly Max the cat feels betrayed by all these lifeless pink birds. He feels a futile desire to maul each one of them. If only they were alive and he could kill them. Slowly, frustrated by the pent up lust, he wanders out into the night in search of the brown cat.

The fan air swells up the maroon robes hanging from the washing line, stretched across the middle of the room. Ananth looks at them, these cloth Buddhas with a show-over look, as if dawdling their time indifferently between performances. They look confident that they will be summoned again, that here will be many more such grand shows. But Ananth is satiated now, this evening, when the show is over and he sits exhausted, the hole within him closed for the first time, amidst pink birds, monk robes, begging bowls, wooden slippers and the renunciation metre which has and will deliver the world from its sins.

The TV is on and he watches how the news channels can’t stop talking about it. There was a grand show, they are saying, a blockbuster performance. In a rare and bizarre display of talent and corporate responsibility, the CEO and five business heads enacted an original play ‘Boddhisattva,’ based on Siddhartha’s transformation to Gautama Buddha. In this era of self serving charter, such a timely and innovative gesture has restored faith in the moral uprightness of the corporate sector.

No one mentions Ananth so he feels safe. He walks over to the mirror and stand there shirtless. The hole is gone but he doesn’t miss it. Amina has left, having lost Ananth’s undersea world. Jeff has called to tell him that pink birds are still at large – the epidemic far from  over. Ananth packs his bag and thinks he has to buy new shirts in a smaller size.