Imagine how hard
it is to break up the asphalt with a small pickaxe. It is not even a good one
as it has seen so many asphalts and tortured itself to make the way better. Now
imagine you’ve been doing it for several days. The sun gets hotter day by day.
There is a heaviness on the body, aches you to rest for a while, makes you
sweat like a boiling pot, itchy like a bug landing on you.
The dust makes you feel more and more uncomfortable. Sometimes tiny sprinkles of water that wheeling down the black dust on your face. Irretrievable. The job is so unpleasant to imagine. This has been Madhav’s existence for almost a year. Madhav, his pickaxe and the pavement. I have seen him worried that his arms won’t know how to do anything else by the time he gets to stop. Will they remember to buy him colouring notebooks just to see his golden smile. But he never forgets to wear his bright smile in front of his child. Sometimes, he gets to use a shovel to heave the concrete into the circulating wheelbarrow.
They say change
is as good as a break. Engineers only plan about how to lay it down, not about
who is going to pick it back up. Eventually, that part became his job. He
cannot stop at any time. It is like a prison sentence. More like a damage
deposit for his existence. For everything that he will take, he must first give
something. Once, he said that “I see my fellow friends scattered across this
hot mirage, multi-coloured uniform designating each person’s plot. Some were
doing their jobs and some are sitting in the shade of the trees by the
roadside. Meanwhile, I turn to my pickaxe. It sends me a fascination that the
sweat on my back as if it was a cool grass in the summer”. In the meantime, I
started living his life. As he narrated his work life, the pain and power have
strongly hit to my brain.
He continued his
narration, “I don’t join them. I don’t rest. I am on a time limit. I have only
two nights and there are no clouds. Enough light to work in the blessedly cool
weather. The darkness teaches me more about life. I realized that I have seen
much invisible darkness that tortured me for a long time. But the power of
perseverance keep me alive and set my shoulders to the wheel. I haven’t slept
in two days. But I can’t take advantage of this pleasant darkness. Every time I
put down my axe, I feel the pressure. The fear that I won’t finish in time. I
imagine being in the finish line and getting the word it’s too late in my ear
will be unfair. Because I unpaved for two. It may not be fair for that little
boy who waits for me to buy him notebooks so that he can colour his dreams. The
money that I get may be very little, but it is the gold I treasure”.
We may imagine
the people in the before and how they would make it happen. We probably didn’t
even think about it. God only knows where the path finds its endpoint and what
exactly it holds.
As he adds his
experience as just a mere word, it sounded so intense to me. “As I thought I
have unstacked the chunks into the wheelbarrow. The young girl who is pushing
the cart smiles at me and said Thank God, as she moves away. I thought, she
must be new. People say this to each other here to be encouraging. But it just
sounds like words to me now. I often imagine it as a Paradise. The island where
people can heat themselves. One day, I collapsed from dehydration. I reiterate
myself I can’t be sent back when I’m this close to finishing my plot. I can
taste just the dust of asphalt now. I stare at the pavement around me,
unbelieving and I pick up my axe”.
We never imagine
the struggles as the other person’s point of view. Our life is so precious in
this Earth. We look after the Earth as it filled with greenery, where the grass
beds filled with roses and lilies, we are very much hydrated but often complain
about our lives. We haven’t even think about the other side of any work people
who spare their lives. This story just made my life upside down. As Madhav
describes the scenes of his work life, every time he had pain, I felt the
heaviness in my chest. Every time he felt happy, I just elated. I can feel the
oppression still exist in tiny parts scattered everywhere. I can feel the
patriarchy has taken a new version where people couldn’t mind but live with its
flow.
The change is
the only that never change. This may be sound so familiar but the hardest truth is we never
understand the intense meaning of it. Every time we commit mistakes in life, it
adds a point to our experience. Madhav finishes it with “More practical minds
will only let their unpaved crusade go so far”.
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