Short Story #002

After the Sack

Parents

The rumors had been doing the rounds at office for the past two months. I won't divulge the details because it was mostly my fault and I am ashamed to recount it. I got the axe.

I was not entirely shocked. The weeks of anticipation could finally cease and I was glad the uncomfortable tension was over, but a new horror presented itself: what was I going to do now? I was unemployable. I had been fired from my past five jobs.

I didn't actually remember this fact but Radhika was ever so quick to remind me. She laid the blame at my door. The sight of her mongoose-like face eager to pick a fight put me off and I threw one of my finest temper tantrums complete with flinging some glass items and knickknacks around. She packed up, took the kids and left for her mother's house.

I've done nothing all morning except brood. I received a few calls from some of my office pals. The sound of their obsequious sympathies helped reinforce my belief that the whole wide world was seriously screwed up. I lounged around the house and wondered if I was as useless as the bosses in the five M.N.C.s thought I was. Perhaps I was like a cough or a rupee note that exchanged hands a thousand times a day. I was pushed back and forth. They hired me then they fired me. I drew a salary then I lived on it.

I gave myself a week to inevitably succumb to depression. It wasn't a brand new feeling. This time something told me that I was finished for life. I was fifty five. No one is hired at that age. I was forced into an early retirement.

*

I made the choices that were easy to make. I picked the highest paying jobs without knowing they were the most stressful. I married the prettiest woman my parents introduced me to. I had two children because the government said that two was all I was allowed. I bought a flat in a neighborhood which was safe and respectable. I did the usual things that countless middle-aged men do. Where did I go wrong?

I tried not to blame anybody. I am not a very smart person. There are things I know because I’ve been taught to know about them but I’ve got no appreciation for the work I’m trained to do. I was never excited by machines, tools or equipment yet I managed to get an engineering degree. Come to think of it, I rarely played with building blocks as child. Those were not my dreams.

The first time I lost my job the feeling I had was of pure relief. I wouldn’t have to wake up and go to work in the morning, but I was the only one who felt that way. When I woke up with a hangover the next morning and skulked around the kitchen for a mug of tea, I spied my father with his face grim and set. He was scanning the wanted section. I left him to it.

All through college I would think about the kind of job I wanted.

I found jobs frustrating. My deep distaste for them sprang from my hatred of desks and chairs. For the greater part of my childhood I had sat at a desk and studied. I didn’t enjoy studying, I enjoyed learning but the foolish adults around me equated them to be the same thing.

My mother was never fully convinced that I was prepared for a test until she saw me sitting at my desk for two straight hours. While I sat on the hard chair, my mind wandered. It took trips to other countries and worlds. In those worlds I was predictably the Lord and Master of all I surveyed. This is why I find the real world startlingly bleak.

I got a job soon enough after the first sack. My parents wasted no time in getting me married. After twenty seven years of rigorous mollycoddling they were ceremoniously kicking me out of the nest. Why do we do this, why do we grow up, get jobs, get married, have babies and die? It’s not compulsory. It’s not even a prerequisite to dwell in society. There are countless bachelors. Batman is a very cool bachelor who saves Gotham’s innocents by night which is why he is called a super hero. ‘But who will look after Batman when he is old?’ my mother would ask. I don’t know. The Salvation Army, perhaps?  

I had imagined a very different end for me. I had wanted to be a personality. I wanted to be a film maker or an artist or a writer.

My parents were quick to beat the arts out of me. I would never be good enough, they said. They expected brilliance in everything I did. They had wanted a prodigy.

 Children and Wife

Radhika came home on Wednesday. I didn’t ask her to. I called the kids once a day and asked them if they wanted to come back home. “Yes,” said Nikki, “But Mummy won’t let us.”

Radhika has the same hold over them that my mother had over me. For nine months mother and child inhabit the same body which is why they are slow to disobey each other. If Radhika is upset with me, the children are too, and vice-versa. I am the outsider.

My father was the outsider too. My mother couldn’t get along with her in-laws so she went out of her way to avoid their company socially. This meant that we rarely went to their homes and attended their functions.

My father felt alienated, and since he was so shy he never created a fuss. My father was nothing to my mother except a fixed source of income.  He worked in the Indian Railways. He could never be fired.

I was scared to tell the children that I was without a job. I didn’t want to witness the confusion and fear in their eyes firsthand. In a way I was glad Radhika took the trouble of telling them what a wastrel their father was. I was scared that they would say something that would irritate me like – ‘What are you going to do now, Dad?’

But they were very tactful. We follow a strict policy of not talking about the rhinoceros in the room. They made no mention of it when I called and sounded cheerful. How do they cope? Where does this inner mental strength come from when they are faced with challenges? Do they know that their mum and dad won’t always be around to protect them? One day they won’t have a safety net. What will my little girls do then?

Radhika looked repentant and the girls were very happy to see me. My father-in-law drove them home. He said many kind things. I was not to worry about getting another job. I could join his business. I was relieved when he left.

I admire my wife. She usually gets what she wants. “I’m sorry,” she said, her kohl-lined eyes opening to their widest.

The pressure cooker was whistling in the kitchen. I have been making my own meals for the past week. I flicked off the hand that she rested on mine and got up to turn the blasted thing down.

When I swear allegiance to someone, it’s for life. When Radhika swears allegiance, it’s until the cash runs out.

Society and the World

How do you get from point A to point B without living through the interim? How do you go from rags to riches without the hard work? I have lived most of my life believing it is luck that propels the ship of life.

How easy it is to live and yet how difficult. It’s easy to live from day to day without worrying about the ten years from now or the retirement funds but living, actually living from a five year plan to the next is life. Either you wallow in the shadows as the underdog hoping to make it one day or you can bask in the safe glow of an ordinary existence. I regret that I chose the latter.

Soon the word got out. The neighbors, the servants, the geckoes in the corners all got to know that a man stayed at home while his wife went out to work. I couldn’t hide forever. They castrated me with their words and the long unashamed leering. A few retired men sympathized with me in the elevator.

“It’s difficult to hold a job nowadays. The pyramid structure of a company has to be maintained you know. Only the best succeed.”

“Yes,” said another, “Only a government job will see you through. Live quietly, live safely.” I liked his mantra. Live quietly, live safely. Like a mouse or a squirrel.

It’s very necessary for polite society to know that a man can hold a job. A man is a dangerous thing without a job to tie him down. A good job is the hallmark of a man. Everyone let me know indirectly that I was now no longer a man.

My peers looked apologetic, as if I’d suddenly grown an extra ear and it made it difficult not to stare. I usually meet them in the parking lot when I go to drop the girls off at school. They all promised to look out for an opening.

“Are we going to be poor?” Milli asks me in the car. Her sister whacks her on the head.

“Shut up, stupid!”

It’s been a month now. I look straight ahead at the traffic. No, not desperately poor. We have a house without a loan to pay off. We have clothes, food, water which is more than the beggars who knock on our rolled up window to beg for money have. The girls ignore them.

I want to tell them that we may be poor but we still have each other. It’s the lamest excuse. In a couple of months’ time when it finally hits home that I’m going to stay at home and watch TV all day, the girls will want to be rid of me…This reminds me, I can finally watch TV all day…Yay!

Milli looks disappointed at my lukewarm response. They don’t know how to forego pleasures. They don’t know the difference between necessities and luxuries.

“We’re not poor.”

“Everybody says we will be”, she blurts out. A second later she is mortified at her foolishness. Did some kid tell her this at school? Why is the world conspiring to rob my children of their innocence?   

I had never given a crap about the unemployed. It was just a statistic that politicians, economists and social scientists debated over. Is this the universe’s way of getting back at me?

Self

I’ve asked this question almost every single day of my life – why did God put me on this earth? It’s a question that has irritated my parents and my wife but strangely got my two brats debating.

“To tell us stories, Dad.”

“It’s the only thing you’re good at,” says Nikki matronly. They’re right. I was a master story teller at school. I stood second in most of the competitions because the first prize went to the student with the better penmanship.

I wanted to live quietly but in another world. In a world where nobody was forced to sit at a desk and stare at a text book filled with irrelevant things. I closed my eyes. All sound and light seemed to fade away…

“Daddy, start the car!”

I wake up from my reverie. The traffic lights have switched to green. I suddenly remember the venerable Principal of my boys’ school, Father Patrick. He had once said in the morning assembly that we ought to do the things we love the most, only then we would excel in it.

I came home and told my father. He laughed, “Only those Catholic priests have that luxury! Look at the fees they are charging us for such platitudes!”

I know what I’ll do. I’ll go home and write a story. It will be about a man like me who ignored his true calling until he was fifty five years old, but this time he’ll be lucky because I gave him another chance.