All pain, no gain
It was 5:30 a.m., and Arumugam felt a sudden shiver as the winter wind intensified in the suburban train he was on. That week, he had to travel all the way from his home to the main bus depot to drive the point-to-point bus from Chennai to Pondicherry. He glanced at a young teenager sitting next to him, glued to his fancy smartphone with earphones plugged in. Arumugam wished he too had a smartphone so he could stream songs to drown out the noise of the crowd and, more importantly, silence the thoughts running through his head. He held his old button phone in his hand and noticed that the ‘0’ button was nearly worn off. He thought about how faithful that phone had been to him over the past five years. After getting off the train, Arumugam walked to the depot, boarded his bus, and applied pain balm to his head and a copious amount to his back, which was practically numb and on the verge of giving up. He took a deep breath and started his shift. He was exhausted but he reminded himself th...
