Raghav works hard and deep into the night, for he has 3 children to feed. His wife is no more, cancer took her away last year. Raghav is 36. All he has is a single job to support himself and his 3 children. So he has to work overtime, he often also works as a call-center employee once he gets done with his day job. But the income still doesn’t cut it. Things were better when his wife was around, she had a well-paying job at a bank that made things easier for Raghav and the family. When she was in the throes of cancer last year and Raghav had ended up becoming a medical tourist, she asked him just one thing “don’t let the kids down, you’re their papa”. He reminds himself of this every single day. He can’t let the kids down, he simply cannot.
So he works 2 jobs. He does everything he possibly can. He loved coffee, he doesn’t anymore, it’s too expensive. He had a car once, sold it. He travels in buses now. He has reduced himself to the most penny-pinching miser you might ever come across, and it’s still not enough. Schools today charge exorbitant amounts of money in the name of fees. He feels like a criminal. He feels those 3 children have been wronged. He contemplates what life could have been if he had more sense when he was younger.
Payday arrives, and 35% of his salary was gone! Whoosh! Just like that. He grows cold inside. Shivers all over his body. Turns out his salary is a bit too much for the government’s taste, and so the government has helped itself to 35 percent of Raghav’s salary willy-nilly. CAUSE I AM THE TAXMAN. It’s taken out of every employee’s salary for ‘building the country’. Raghav eventually calms down by reminding himself that one-third of his salary has not gone is vain, it’ll be used to build underpasses and overflies. To repair potholes and help those poor people queuing up at hospitals in the morning. The next day, i.e., the day after his salary arrived (or rather the 35% percent of it that did not arrive), he woke up late and missed the bus, and had to catch a bike taxi. That very pothole which was supposed to be repaired from the money that was siphoned off from his bank account by the government, caused his demise. Rain had weakened the pothole tremendously and so it caved in as it couldn't tolerate the bike's weight.
Alas, his money could never repair that pothole, the only hole it would repair is inside the pocket of a Zilla Adhikari, who had spent 6 years of his life inside a dingy 12 by 6 room in Mukherjee Nagar, and so now it's payday for him, man.
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