Fiction: A man’s descent from respectability to despair after he resigns from his job in humiliation

Shyam chucked the job at M/S Saint and Miller last June.

The reason why he did this was not a serious one. His boss, Hari Majumder, after stumbling upon a blooper in one of his drawings, had spat out an expletive about him in private: bastard. Majumder was known for using obscenities in every breath. Up till then, Shyam had been mimicking many of his turns of phrase and gestures, and on a few occasions, he had even “gifted” Majumder’s pet swear words to some of his subordinate staff and trainee draftsmen in the same style and tone. Shyam had even come to believe that these expletives had lost their sting through overuse and needed to be replaced with new ones.

Even then, since the day he got to know about Majumder’s snide remark about him, Shyam kept brooding over it for a couple of days. Sometimes, he fiddled absent-mindedly with the knot of his tie; at times, he kept looking at his own face blankly in the bathroom mirror and stayed away from the evening adda with his friends and dawdled in his bed for hours. He continued to be depressed and crestfallen. He tried to reason with himself that the...

Read more