Entwined Lives

XVIII

On the morning of 18th December even before the sun shone, Sivi was up already walking out on the streets of a sleeping Bangalore. She left a note back. A critical one. About parenting, about trust, about real life and a notice not to look for her since she was moving out of Bangalore. She was only bluffing for then. She had gathered details about that construction site she had seen a couple of months back. The construction was still on. She figured she had to look needy to land the job and wore the most drab clothes she owned and set out to never return. She wore one bag on her back as her investment in the life she planned for herself. She had the essentials required for her independency. Her matriculate certificate, her passport. She walked on. On for 15-20kms. To where a rich man was building a hotel for his rich peers.
The sun was just coming up. But the lights and machines were on. The laborers were up and working. She entered the dug up, dusty site.She had earlier decided she would only converse in her native language to make believable her desperation for financial support. To her elation, it wasn't the interview and HR questions scene that she had all along imagined. It was a signature and begin working and at the end of the day collect your share of wage kind of setting. She signed in. Explained briefly that she was from a village in Karnataka who had earlier worked as a house maid. They believed her and didn't look twice. She couldn't stop smiling when she turned away from them to begin the first day of her life as her own.
The construction itself was a project ranging over a remaining four months. Four months of hard work and labour.
The first day was exhilarating. Nothing that day could possibly go wrong except for her parents popping up out of nowhere and taking her back home, which she knew was unlikely. Unlikely in Bangalore since she knew they wouldn't even try in Bangalore. And in four months, they were most likely to accept their fate and resign. Everything seemed right, good. She worked hard that day, put in all that she had. Soiled herself like she never had, and ate with the same dirt when a stand next to the site opened. But it was the real world and she didn't mind, she kept saying over and over again. She was finally in the real world outside the bubble, building everything from scratch. At the end of the shift, after 7:00pm after collecting her due wage the kind ladies who labored with her offered her a place to sleep when they learnt she had nowhere else to. She saw the kindness she always knew existed. She saw raw emotions, unkempt, un -groomed. She was enjoying every bit of the bare life. She slept like a baby that night.
*
Ms.Mytla walked around the city. Hoping to find pamphlets stuck on electricity poles, advertisement boards, walls for a roof over her head along with offers or opening for a job in small stores. She made her list of possibilities by late afternoon, beginning to drop in and enquire at the given addresses. She found a PG and a job at the same place. As a cook in the canteen that automatically cut her accommodation charge from her pay. It was ragged place. Tobacco stains over most of the walls, a faint cool smell of urine in the corridors of the PG. It was still more than she could thank for. At the least, she didn't have to spend a night alone stranded on some road vulnerable. She was shown her room that she had to share with 4 other people. The room had no bathroom. All of the 16 rooms of the PG had only 5 common toilet booths with separate 5 booths for taking a bath. She shared a room with girls senior to her by a couple of years. Yuri, Sama, Lola and Padma. All four of them were college going, friends and in pursuit of the same course - biotechnology. It was a sort of stereotype those days - modern educated women were mostly in the medical/ biology related fields. They were looked at differently if they wished to pursue some other course like engineering. Ms.Mytla didn't have time to reassess anything that happened to her that day. Leaving her house forever, a kind of rejection from Gapo, finding her own means of livelihood and a promise to keep going ahead since she didn't have any other choice all in one day. The finality of her situation struck her once she settled in her room. It dawned on her that she had a new home that she would spend at the least some years of her life in. There was nobody to tie her back to her life. No one. Nobody knew anything. Gapo was a stab in the heart but he too was pointless. Not needed. She wanted to get out of the suffocating life that she lived and she was out now. Gapo became a means. She had loved him, but all along it seemed too good to be true. In days when there are more testimonials of deceit in the name of the love reigned, how could she believe everything that was happening to her was genuine. She had her doubts. She was scared then and now thankful that she was.
Ms.Mytla cried herself to sleep. Gapo. She smiled and frowned. She was dealing with everything, wanted to ease any baggage from before and make it big and successful in the city.The city was asleep while she schemed to take over. It was still only her first day and despite she showed great determination and found herself a home and job. She was becoming anew. Ready.