A road to nowhere..

12. The transformation

"He is my younger brother. He was born when I was 2."

Oh. So that explained their similarity.

"We were born in a family where the earning hands were disproportionately lesser than the feeding mouths. Often we would get to eat only once a day. Food would be scarce and hunger superabundant."

He paused for a moment.

"An empty stomach doesn't let one ponder about other necessities of life. Hence there was no concept of educating children."

Agony was twinkling in his eyes as he made his journey through the hard times that had left their marks on the pages of his memory.

"But those were good times. Except for hunger, nothing else bothered us. No other distress.

In our small home, we would find our comfort, contentment and happiness.

But as the years passed by, and we stepped into the age where one starts having an insight, we started noticing the wrinkles and stress lines on the faces of our parents.

The time had, slowly and silently, sucked life out of them.

It was heart-breaking to get to terms with the fact that those who had held our hands and made us learn to walk, now, started needing our support for walking.

We saw the lives of our parents revolving around the concern of feeding their children and themselves.

Their hair were transforming from black to grey to white.

The once robust structures were crumbling into fragile statures.

But they were too busy to notice.

We, 2 brothers and one sister, were their world, the centre around which their thoughts, their energies and they themselves revolved.

Times had changed fast, and so do they, and us.

With this realization came another harsh reality.

When we two decided to relieve our parents of the burden of earning, the jobs that the village offered us were not promising at all.

Life had changed our roles, but the circumstances remained same, hunger and poverty being our constant companions.

It was in those times that we two decided to try our luck in the city, an outer world that we villagers envisioned to be full of wealth and riches.

The decision was hard, and bringing it to action was even more harder.

Stepping out of the comfort zone and separating from our family consumed a lot of our strengths.

Moreover, the bubble popped soon after we started finding a living in the city.

It was tiresome.

Inhumane working hours and unfriendly environments awaited us.

But the payback was better than what we could gain in village, so we decided not to quit.

We got job in a plastic factory.

The factory owner took our signatures on a 3 year contract that bound us to stay in the city for 3 years, and afterwards we would be getting vacation of 5 months, that too without our pay being withheld during our absence.

The job seemed suitable and that idea of payed holidays was attracting us.

But we, the experience-less villagers, couldn't sense the risk in that 3 years of constant work without a leave.