Nayantara’s mother Shanti
worked as cook in our home for 10 years. A quiet diminutive woman in her
forties then, she would come for two hours every weekday. And during the long
period, she was absent for a total number of zero days (I mean AWOL). Neither was
she late once. Once, a cyclone-hit Kolkata was under knee-deep water and it was
still pouring. Shops hadn’t opened; buses weren’t plying. But Shanti arrived at
the precise time. Besides her discipline, honesty, and decent culinary skills,
Shanti is an unexceptional person.
Her husband Sudhir was an
expert machinist who ran a cottage industry, using his own lathe. He fabricated
small industrial components for the dying engineering units located around the
city. (Shanti, who helped her husband at work, couldn’t describe the product,
and I left it there.) Sadly, given the state of the economy in West Bengal,
Sudhir’s clients’ factories would be closed more often than not, and
consequently, Sudhir was unemployed for most of the year. In fact, that is the
reason Shanti took up a cook’s job. Ours happened to be the first house she
worked in.
Last evening, we reached
Shanti’s house after taking several turns in narrow lanes that weren’t Wider
than five feet at any point. But thanks to Kolkata Corporation’s people-friendly
work, the alleys, all cemented, were scrupulously clean; there were gutters
leading to an underground drain every 100 feet or so. Halogen light bulbs
flooded the lanes in bright white.
As four of us sat on the
only armless three-sitter sofa in the room, Shanti stood before us and talked.
We couldn’t ask her to sit down because there was no other place to sit in the
tiny room cluttered with old calendars hanging on unpainted walls. Shanti’s
house has two small rooms and a smaller one for visitors, which I’ve just
mentioned. However, the walled compound is spacious, with several fruit trees.
The mango and jackfruit trees reminded me of the delectable fruits Shanti used
to bring for us every summer.
Usually in these
circumstances in our part of the world, the house of bereavement is flooded
with relatives and friends. But when we were there, there was none beside
mother and daughter. Both of them seemed to have taken the sudden, completely
unforeseen shock with remarkable calm. Or maybe, the enormity of the loss was
yet to sink in. Nayantara, wearing pink trousers and a poncho over her shirt,
came and stood beside her mother.
A good student, Nayantara
had graduated with Honours in English. Then she found a job at a call centre on
the other side of the city. It ended her dream of higher studies, but saved the
family. She commuted 30 kilometres by bus every morning, and her company
provided transport at night. She would reach home at 12:30 AM with mother
waiting to serve her food. I knew all that, but as I was away from Kolkata for
three years, I didn’t know she had lost her job during the pandemic. I asked
her what she is doing now.
‘I’ve been working for an
Australian company for the last six months.’
‘Great, where is your
office?’
‘We don’t have an office
in India yet. We are a small team of just 21 people. But we meet from time to
time at a conference hall. I work from home … from 4 in the morning to 11, with
a recess for an hour.’
‘What kind of work do you
do?’
‘I work for a telecom
company. In Australia, every telecom company has to provide a combined package
of telephone and internet services. Our company doesn’t have individual
clients, it’s all B-to-B. My job is to call up corporate clients and convince
them to shift to our network.’
‘Including cold calls?’
‘Yes, some of them.’
‘What is the talk-time
for you in a day?’
‘At least two hours.’
Wow! Sitting in a corner
of Kolkata, Nayantara convinces Australian companies to buy her network! Does
she find the Australian accent difficult?
‘No, not really. I worked
for a British firm for five years. So, I was quite okay with the British
accent. Initially, I found the Australian accent difficult. But they trained us
for a month. It’s okay now. A bigger problem was that I knew nothing about the
telecom sector. I had to work hard to understand the industry.’
‘What kind of work did
you do in your previous company?’
‘I sold nuisance-call
blocking devices to elderly people in the UK.’
‘Wow! How do you find
your present company?’
‘Very good. There are no
hassles, my salary comes into the bank on the first of every month. The recess
hour is flexible. I can even take off four fifteen-minute chunks any time I
like.’
‘You found your earlier
job through campus placement. How did you find this one?’
‘Through LinkedIn. I had
to go through three rounds of interviews.’
West Bengal is known to the rest of India for its moribund economy, lazy people, and a government seeped in corruption. From outside, it looks like a perfect cesspool. As we walked back, I thought when the Gods are against you, only education can help. I also thought however much the scoundrels who run our country might try, it’s difficult to put down young people. They rise above the ruins around them and chart their own course. Nayantara and her 20 colleagues are an irrefutable proof of that fact.
Live long Nayantara, live
well, live independent. Be a beacon to the hundreds of similarly disadvantaged
young boys and girls around you.
15 Jan 23 / ©Santanu Sinha Chaudhuri
