One coffee please, I ordered. After work when I wasn’t feeling okay, I went to the nearest Tea Post. That was the first time, I wanted her so badly beside me. I remembered how we had met the first time after a trip at one café in Bangalore. She had opened up the heart to me.
After leaving her village, her home, to never go back, she came to Ahmedabad. That was the first time she was in a big city. She didn’t know where to go, from where to start. She spent the first night at the bus stand. Next day morning, she talked with few people over there and came to know about Samaj Seva Trust. The organization helped her in college enrolment. Soon she was enrolled in best Engineering college in Ahmedabad. The enrolling process was still offline back then. It was a government college and she was staying in a government hostel with minimal expenses. She has to earn to pay that little hostel fees and for her other expenses like books, etc.
Initial few months, she struggled hard to find part-time jobs. She would do anything but there was hardly anything for her to do in very little time she had after college. She found work of maid in a nearby house. She would run there in break time in the afternoon. She had no time for lunch. She would run back completing work as soon as possible. She had to attend those lectures. She couldn’t afford to miss it like others. She would take dinner at the hostel mess and go again to complete her night job. She wasn’t eating properly and working overtime. Soon health problems started, stress, tiredness, depression and above all, migraine. She would go to the government hospital once in a while but never took proper treatment. She neither had money nor time for such things.
It was not like she hadn’t work hard before. In fact, she had worked even more in her farm, back in the village. She would go to a farm early in the morning, go to school directly from there. In return from school, she wasn’t allowed to go home. After seven kilometres of bicycle ride from school to her village, she would stop her bicycle at her farm. She would work till evening and leave for home when the sun was done for the day. That was her schedule for weekdays. You cannot expect anything better for the weekend either. It was same during board exams as well. After the exam, she would stop the bicycle at the farm. She would take agriculture sprayer pump of sixteen litres on her shoulder and start spraying slowly on crops. She would find time to study at night only and yet, she would top in the school.
She thought of working at two houses. She tried for a week but it was next to impossible for her to keep up with everything. The job wasn’t paying much and there came a time when she had no money to pay hostel fees. She was almost kicked out of hostel but her friends helped her. She denied to take offered money, her pride wouldn’t allow that. She would go to the washroom, pull her knees to face, hide face between knees and cry, like a baby. There was no one to console her. She missed her mother. There was no option left, she accepted help from friends.
One semester passed and results were out. Looking at her score, one professor accepted her proposal for his assistant in the Research Department. She also got a job as a teacher in nearby primary school. She had to go early in the morning for two hours. It made her miss one lecture every day but she had to do it. These two part-time jobs affected her study. She ended up scoring average.
In the rush of life, three and half years passed and it was placement time. She expected to clear interview easily. Little did she know that interview is not about technical skills but how good you are in English. Studying in Gujarati medium till high school, that too in a small village, she wasn’t good with English. She failed in the English test in all placement exams. She couldn’t secure a job. She was on her own, again on the road, from where she had started when she first came to Ahmedabad.
