In this short story, Chitra Gopalakrishnan captures the daily struggles of an underprivileged life and how it changes the way one looks at the necessities of existence.
Komala wakes up to the sounds of swishing, its incessant murmur. Her makeshift home in Ghata Goan, near the upscale Gurugram area in Haryana, is built with corrugated metal sheets. It is one among many in the line of dense, transit houses, raised as easily as they are pulled down.
In the dim light of her one-room shanty, she navigates her way cautiously. Short, fair-skinned, with light eyes and a plump face, she has a button nose adorned with a shiny gold nose pin. As she brushes past the clothes hanging from a suspended plastic rope and the big black umbrella hanging diagonally overhead, she makes her way past the shelf that holds a round, mottled mirror, an oil bottle, a comb, talcum powder, kohl, glass bangles, bindis, medicines, and her identity papers. She then searches for the switch of the single bare bulb in her room, but it won’t turn on. There is no electricity, and the sound she hears, she realises, is not that of brooms but of rain falling. Fortunately, the rainfall is light; the roof has not begun to leak through the thick blue plastic covering the tin sheet, and the earthen floor, made from compacted clay, sand, and straw, remains dry.