Building a nation

The screams of the street vendors selling greens heralded the morning for Kumar, a budding software professional. Most of them sold spinach but other healthy leafy vegetables were also available on prior-order. It was 6 AM and soon it would be time to get up. He hated sleeping without sheets. He slept with a thin bed sheet even in the hottest weather. He always struggled to get up.
It was a device that he had invented himself or that's how he liked to lay claim to it. The alarm clock he had was creepy, corroded and steel plated, a "grandfather" alarm clock. He had placed it in a precarious position on the lone dusty table. The clock rose hell. He moaned, and so did some of the still asleep neighbours. The poor time piece vibrated viciously like a sick man puking his guts out and unable to control his collapsing knees. The clock fell to its daily silence onto the chair, landing on the stopper. It dragged a weak rope tied from the ceiling along with it. The suicidal clock rarely had the ambition to go all the way, may be hit the floor and shatter into intricate mechanical splinters, but it did enough to bring the rope in to crucial contact with the blades of the blackened ceiling fan. The fan quickly whipped up the rope like a hungry Italian attacking a bowl of spaghetti. The loose end of the rope was tied to Kumar's sheet of serenity.
The baroque contraption was designed to piss him off and wake him up. It did the first part well with the reliability of a German automobile. His bizarre plans never helped him wake up. His mother's nasal high pitched screams always succeeded. He was more pissed now. He had seconds before the fan, that was now spinning the sheet like a male actor spinning a bra in most "respectable" porn movies, stopped rotating amidst a tangle of ropes. He always got to the switch on time to prevent any nasty fumes. Grumpy and even more pissed, he headed off to the bathroom.
It never took a monumental event to piss Kumar off these days. He realised that he was now a man who led a life in a sea of irritation with occasional breaths of peace rather than merely succumbing to minor irritation a few hours a day; just as it all had begun.
Dressed in regulation formals, he waited for the bus. The bus arrived on time. Sri Lakshmi Transport was contracted for punctuality rather than comfort. Head rests did not exist. The bus began its journey under the slowly forming haze. As a dutiful vehicle of India, the bus threw up an exhaust formulated by relic engines and the best adulterated diesel the government could allow without loosing the next election.

The region competed with Cherrapunji and regions of Colombia for the highest rainfall in the world. It was virgin territory before the rape. Kumara hung on to the rattling rails running along the ceiling of the bus. His clothing looked sooty. The bus arrived at the end of the infamous line. The company that ran the buses had paid the seller a paltry sum and the RTO officer a slightly greater sum. Kumara proceeded to the winch. He was awake now but could not see clearly. He convinced himself it was a mix of the air and trailing drowsiness. The descent began. The winch with its pulleys, weights and locks amazed him. With a blank stare he saw the the greasy ropes slide through a perpetually black pulley.
At the bottom, the light was steady, expressionless and artificial. Kumara had trained to make mechanical toys. He made excellent copies of the mysterious toys that his uncle procured from far out places but somehow he was never encouraged to create anything new. Misfortunes and governments were common place and he had been forced to work where his talents were useless. He needed no great skills. In fact he needed none. Just good health.

Kumar began the day with a sneeze. Not a good sign. His thoughts spiraled into panic: his throat would itch, he would begin to cough, he would need to see a doctor, pay him, this could slow down his work, he would have to work longer to compensate ... double whammy. He was thrown back into reality when his screen saver popped up. On it posed Just Right Soft's latest CEO. The screen saver was designed by a prestigious consultant company that had beaten Just Right Soft in its own business model of offering value added services. It was designed to bring a sense of camaraderie. Kumar shook the mouse violently and Mr CEO Santa left Kumar's screen to gift another less fortunate soul his potential job threatening moment.
The job was routine. He received a set of tasks from his line manager and then proceeded to make appropriate changes to a huge mass of software. He sometimes wondered how much disk space all this software would take. This ethereal software he was melding with could be occupying enough disks in the server room to have a strong enough gravitational force of its own. That could explain why he felt gentle tugging on the little finger of his right hand. He filled enough "change request complete" forms to finalize his minimalistic change. He proceeded to the next one. He had 10 more hours to go.

Kumara's robotic movements was now entirely coordinated by his spinal cord. The connections between his few remaining grey cells and the rest of his body would soon go into atrophy. The repetitive movement of this arms and the 12 hour work day left him little time to think, for himself or for those who were less fortunate than him: those that could not afford the rice that would be eaten with sooty hands. With tensionless fear, he gazed at the distant lamp.