Akansha was feeling drowsy. It was not that she had been deprived of sleep for days. On the contrary, she spent much of her time back home on the bed with her eyes shut tight. As soon as she got back from office, she would throw her bags in a corner of the room and crash on the bed. There were days when she did not even bother to change, and most of the time she was not hungry as she used to be before.
She had been living in Delhi for quite a while, far away from her parents staying in Dehradun. Her job had beckoned her to live in the metropolis. She had a thousand dreams before coming to this city, but strangely the more she got acquainted with modern life, the more she felt lost!
Whenever life gets hard, it blows a gentle breeze in your direction to soothe the pain. The breeze in Akansha’s life came in the form of her boyfriend. She met him in the office where she had been working as a content specialist. His name was Arun, and he was a part of her team. They were working on an advertisement project for a mega corporation. There were times when the workload was so excruciating that the two of them slipped into the cafeteria and bitched about their boss over a cup of Americano.
Photo by Mohit GuptaWith time, as the conversations became longer and the coffee in the cups turned cold, they warmed up to each other. Before long, Arun had moved in with Akansha and both of them decided to brave the odds at their workplace together. After about a year, things started to turn sour. As soon as the primary infatuation faded away, there came a moment when they simply could not stand each other’s presence. A break was inevitable and soon enough Akansha found herself back to square one. There was no one to talk to except for those brief Skype calls back home.
Moreover, she had always been an introvert. There were no friends to support her when she needed it the most. Slowly and steadily, Akansha started walling herself in from the rest of the world. The pandemic worsened conditions further. She could not get out of her home for months and when the lockdown finally ended, the world felt like a completely different place!
Unable to bear with the expenses of a post-pandemic world, her office slashed down wages and increased working hours. This move proved to be the icing on the cake. She woke up early and prepared to go to her office while barely expecting herself to make it through the day alive. It was on one such day, after signing off from work that she hobbled back to her apartment like a zombie.
“There is no point in keeping up with this farce…,” she thought.
It took her every bit of the strength left in her body to push open the door to her room. The door had been left ajar. She plopped down on the edge of the bed and looked long and hard at the ceiling. There was no noise in the room except for the creaking of the fan that circled above her head.
“Was I born just for this? Do I need to play this role, have this life till the time I die…?” she muttered to herself. “But what else can I do?” she said and lay flat out on the bed. A moment later she grabbed a pen and a piece of paper and scribbled something hurriedly. She had lost it. She searched frantically for a razor. There was one lying inside the cupboard in her bathroom. She took it and sat just beside the window – two quivering fingers holding the sharp edge of a shaking blade just above her right wrist.
It was just about to come down on her skin when all of a sudden the glass panes of the window beside her broke and she was knocked down on the floor with a blow. The blade went flying from her hand and out of the window. “What the bloody…!” she shouted and noticed that a ball was bouncing on the floor.
Her sadness gave way to a massive outburst of rage. She looked out of the window and saw that the kids in the building compound stood flabbergasted and shaking in fear downstairs. Evidently, some enthusiastic bloke had driven the ball straight into her living room while playing cricket. She bared her teeth and waved her fist at them menacingly. It was more than enough to scare them away.
There was no blade in her hand and the room was filled with shards of glass. All of a sudden, she felt as if she had a lot many things to do – clean the room, take out the trash and attend to the bruise on her cheek…. She swore she would get even with the boys by telling their parents all about the incident. But then she decided she wouldn’t. After all, the boys had helped knock some sense into her. She busied herself immediately with what was more important – writing a resignation email to her manager. The paper she had scribbled in a few moments earlier fell from her hand; she no longer paid any attention to it. The first two words alone were visible on that crumpled sheet. It read: I Quit…. It had to be had to thrown away along with the trash.
The thought was already replaced by – I am not a quitter.
Written By Poonam Chatterjee
Week 9, March 2021
