Hello
Readers! How are you all doing? Already relieved tomorrow is Friday? Already on
a long weekend? Or just thinking about how many hours you are going to sleep
during the weekend? All sounds good to me!
Here I am, with a Diary Logs post after a while.
The thing with these kind of posts is that they are mostly real with a bit of
added fiction. And, nothing real usually happens to get me into my
over-thinking zone. But, here I am, finally, so read on!
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Dear Diary,
The other day I woke up as usual & got ready to
go to the office. It was an unusually hot summer day. It felt unbearable to
step out of the house. But, of course, I had to. Work doesn't stop, be it scorching heat or heavy rains. I decided not to take my
two-wheeler to work & instead took a rickshaw. The rickshaw driver took a
different route than my usual one, but I was already too tired from the sun to
tell him otherwise. All the routes were familiar to me, anyway.
He took a left turn from my street & we went to a
lane which is always full of traffic. I was shocked to look at the state of
that road. On both sides of the road, there was destruction. Total chaos. All the little
houses, shops & other establishments were torn down. Some completely. Some
partly. On some houses, there were no walls. On some, there weren’t any windows
or doors. On some, the living room was gone. And then there was one, where
you could see directly inside the house. It was on the first floor. Everything
on the ground floor was torn down badly. And the visuals upstairs were evident.
Green-coloured walls in the living room. A partly broken screen of a 24-inch television.
A single wooden cabinet with a lot of belongings from clothes to utensils to
documents. A broken house.
Of course, all this was for road widening & I’m
pretty sure most of these constructions were illegal. But, they contained real
families. Even if it was an illegal house, it was a real home with real people.
I thought how the scenario at that home might have been just last week?
The husband must probably be a labourer returning
home after a day’s hard work. Or he might have a sales job, selling anything
from toys to socks to mobile back covers outside the railway station or outside
parks. Or he could be working at a decent enough job & could be earning black
money.
Who knows? But, the point is he was in his home
just last week, maybe even happy.
The wife is probably was a stay-at-home mother focusing
on raising & educating her kids so that their children might have a better
livelihood. Or she could be working as a maid; sweeping floors, cleaning
toilets, washing clothes & utensils. Or she might have a job as a low-key chef.
Or she could be working as a teacher in a Municipality school.
Who knows? But, the point is she was in her home
just last week, maybe even happy.
Maybe just last week, they might have had a
pleasant evening. An evening where the husband, his wife & their kids were
all sitting in the now-torn-apart living room with green-coloured walls, having
a discussion over tea & a cricket match playing on the now-partly-broken
screen of the TV in the background. Maybe they were even happy, despite
circumstances. Maybe they knew it will be the last time they will be happy in
that little house which was a home to them. Broken Houses, but not Broken
Homes.
Until next time,
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