Struggles and Peace

Pankaj and Murali had taken this same train six days a week everyday for the last eight years to get back home from work. To get back to Human beehives tenanted by worker class bees they would joke.

To progress you need to change the story. Theirs had stayed constant, constant for the last decade only. One lived with a universal sorrow and one lived with an anxiety. Both the sorrow and the anxiety had got buried deep within and become second nature. And yet on their faces you could sense a calm. Always. A calm created by years of subservientness. A calm as felt at a quiet beach or in a garden mostly occupied by old people. A persistent bird crying out monotonously on one of the trees in such a garden can be felt only by its visitors.

Those persistent bird cries were the anxieties of their lives. Already blended into the experience of the garden. Years of anxiety had created the quiet.

Their lives were similar and yet different in many aspects.

Pankaj’s father had passed away when he was a still a teenager in school. His mother did odd jobs, sold home made chapatis to get him and his sister to be raised. Pankaj started working straight out of school at 16. Right from delivering food from local restaurants to cleaning dishes to working at stationery shops, he had learnt things the hard way, worked his way up. For someone who had worked the way he had, to now have a stable job with a provident fund and two children studying in decent schools, he had come a long way. 10 years back he would have taken this life as his aim. For his colleagues the daily travel through the crowded train standing for an hour each way was an arduous journey to be hated. For Pankaj it was an enjoyable time. An hour when he could chit chat, listen to songs, just do whatever he felt. He did not have this luxury 15-20 years back. Indomitability is built over years of anxiety.


Murali had given up on many things in life. If content face had an icon to look for, Muralis face may come up with little competition. Murali used to play for his college cricket team and later University Cricket team. He had had the opportunity to rub shoulders with a couple of those who had now garnered huge IPL contracts.

But his game was good enough for university level and to take it beyond that Murali was always found wanting. Such things come to you in a particularly wounding way. Years of having spent a life on the field had ensured little knowledge of any other field. The Indian family system had eventually pushed him to take up a stable source of income. Murali was forced into decisions which he should have made himself. Whether it was to take up a low paying job finally at age 25 or whether it was about not asking the love of his life to wait for him for marriage during his period of struggle. For him this current life was an adjustment which he would live with and had made peace with. Untill he ever worked to make a change himself.