A day in the life of a nameless, faceless, jobless individual!

She gets up each morning to her Mum urging her to have a cup of tea before she heads out to work. By 8 in the morning she is alone in that empty house that is filled with remnants of her Father’s bygone existence. Has it really been a month that he left them for his happy hunting grounds? She has her bowl of oats and milk and sits online looking for jobs here, there and everywhere. Its almost a routine now. She cannot get herself to read any books cos her mind isn’t at peace. She so hates not working, she so hates being the one whose isn’t moving on unlike the rest. She feels stuck in the most horrible time bubble and keeps waiting for it to burst. But it doesn’t, just doesn’t and by 11 she is in tears again, cursing her luck for having wrecked havoc in her life.
Na she cannot keep up with this so she gets out in the afternoon like she does almost each afternoon when she lands up in Park Street waiting for her girl friend to come meet her so that she could listen to her crib about the lack of eligible bachelors in the city or pre-empting the consequences of possible spinsterhood. For those couple of hours she tries to forget her jobless state and how much she misses how it use to be living before. Now it just seems like a bottomless pit of darkness that enshrouds everything. Happy thoughts have become alien cos sometimes she feels happiness has given up on her. She just wanted live the normal life, do the normal things the normal way. Life wasn’t supposed to be a movie all melodramatic where one looses everything but then it assumed this movie like quality that too a tearjerker. The hardest part was gonna be the comeback though.
She sits in the Oxford Bookstore everyday with a book in her hand listening to old Bengali songs being played in the background and realizes this city revels in nostalgia and times gone by and she had to be here of all the places now. She doesn’t like being home alone in the afternoon hence the trips to Park Street and the endless Metro rides to reach there. She likes travelling by the Metro in the afternoons because its quiet and somehow empty Metro stations always fascinated her, something about being alone in the heart of the earth and the tricks played by the sound of the wind . As a child she’d be enthralled by the colourful graffiti on the walls in the station done by unknown artists who had been commissioned to make the grey and sterile stations look alive.
She is on her way home in the crowded bus when she gets that call. Yeah well maybe there could be that one chance of the bubble bursting. The next day there is a sense of purpose in her. She has to go to the High Court to pick up a book This place hadn’t changed a bit in 6 years. Old Post Office Street is as old and grimy as ever and Emerald House is as green and ugly. Even the lawyers with their black cloaks and blazers look as excited as they use to. Back then when she was interning in one of the law firms even the sight of the sea of black and white irritated her cos she thought she’d never fit in and hell she always wondered where was all that enthusiasm coming from even in that horrible, rainy and moist weather.
Today it was different. She looked around with wonder in her eyes as she saw many running around from the High Court to the District Court or vice versa. Some Court Clerks were getting judgements and documents photo copied while most lawyers were heatedly arguing on some point of law or happily agreeing to each others points of view. Waaahh the Bengalis will never change she thought and smiled to herself. She found the bookshop and asked for Taxmann’s Corporate Laws Manual. She paid the bill and as she took it in her hand she got that thrill that was missing in her life for the last month and a half. She remembered the interviews that were disastrous, the house she left in a hurry, the packing done in 2 hours, coming home and that fateful day at the crematorium when everything changed. She saw her Mum’s smiling face and her sister’s tears when she was saying goodbye. Everything flashed past by and then she remembered how her Dad would call her up when he had a legal query and how she had finally begun to answer some of them before he fell sick. She felt this strange feeling of peace and strength as she opened the book. Oh how she missed it, all of it. She turned around and picked up that form for finally getting enrolled into the Bar. Ah well yeah she was finally one in that sea of black and white.