The Indian Middle Class's Melancholy

Two traffic rules broken: triple riding on a motorbike and no helmet. But he does it with an air of sympathy he wish to evoke in a traffic cop who might stop him for his rule-breaking ride. He could use the 'family man' card that may strike a chord with the cop - who too would ride on his own bike with his wife and child(ren) on a Sunday evening. And that card may as well turn out to be a trump card that walks the man out of the intervention with the cop, lossless.

What is striking in that frame - the man with his middle-aged wife and his prepubescent daughter on his 100 cc motorbike - is an ethereal melancholy. A melancholy that's an underlying part of the Indian Middle Class.

What follows is a starkly fictional painting of the man-on-his-bike's life. It could be total farce in its authenticity but it stands for a sect (a humongous one) of people I've grown to know in my life.

That man might be an ordinary graduate with a nondescript job that makes him a tuppence above 30 grand a month. Staying in a single bedroom rented flat in an apartment complex in one of the ignorably sidelined neighborhoods of a metro's downtown, he leaves to work every day by leaving his wife behind at his house. His wife while earning her spot in the family by conscientiously catering to the daily needs of husband and daughter, looks forward to a Sunday of no household chores and one that ends on a high in a cinema theatre. She feels anxious every time a jewelry store's ad shows up on TV, in the short recesses of the daily soaps she religiously follows - soaps that are overdosed with melodrama (an antithesis of this woman's life). When the power goes off  suddenly but unsurprisingly, she takes a deep breath, straightens up her posture and leaves a sigh - reminiscing her teenage fantasies and their permanent inertness.

Reminded by 'teenage', it brings us to their daughter. Her hormones already might have begun getting the better of her but her family can't afford to buy her wings; and she's aware of that in some way. She suffices herself with inexpensive yet almost-unrecognizable frills to keep up with her peers. She's not yet to an age that is brand-conscious but wings, wings of freedom she knows about - about their existence and her family's unaffordability.

Talking of unaffordability, it brings me back to the man. I don't think he remembers the daydreaming from his youth about a plush life. Every day, life forges a slab of mediocrity on his brain that its memory sheets full of once-grand fantasies have evaporated long ago. His bike's servicing prods him for an extra expenditure next month, his daughter's approaching finish line of schooling in the near future and his wife's long due wish of a pair of modest earrings before it's already his daughter's wedding (this, the distant future) occupy his mind.

So there they stop, amid cars, the daughter safely tugged between the man and his wife. The man impatiently stares at the red light, the daughter peers into her father's thinning hairline and the woman looks away into nothingness.