Morning in the city did not bring relief—it brought noise. The station came alive before the sun, vendors clanging their kettles, chai wallahs screaming for customers, children chasing trains for scraps of food. Ravi sat up on the cold slab where he'd slept, his back stiff, his mouth dry. Hunger pressed on him like a stone in his belly.
He had no choice. He needed work, any work.
He wandered through the streets, asking at tea stalls, at cart vendors, at tiny shops stacked to the ceiling with goods. Most waved him away. Some laughed. One shopkeeper even said, "Go back to your village, boy. This city doesn't need another beggar."
By noon, Ravi's head was pounding. Then, at the corner of a massive construction site, he saw a group of laborers being handed small coins after carrying bricks. He rushed to the foreman.
"Work? Please," Ravi asked, his voice hoarse.
The foreman eyed him up and down. "Skinny fellow. You'll break in half."
"I can work," Ravi insisted.
The man shrugged. "Your funeral." He tossed a ragged cloth cap at Ravi and barked, "Start with the bricks."
---
Ravi's first load felt like fire across his shoulders. The bricks were heavier than anything he had carried in Dharampur, the sun above unrelenting. His palms blistered within hours, his back screamed, but he refused to stop. All day he staggered between piles of bricks, sweat soaking his shirt, dust clinging to his skin until he looked like a ghost.
At dusk, his hands shook so badly he could barely lift his pay—a few crumpled rupees pressed into his palm. Not enough for a proper meal, but enough for a plate of watery dal and two rotis at a roadside dhaba.
He devoured it, the taste of salt and heat filling the hollow inside him. For a moment, it felt like life itself.
But the relief was short-lived. That night, his body burned with pain. His shoulders throbbed, his feet raw with cuts. He lay again on the station floor, clutching his bag, forcing himself not to cry.
---
The next days blurred together. Ravi hauled bricks until his back nearly gave out. On other mornings, he scrubbed greasy dishes at a dhaba for a bowl of leftovers. Once, he carried sacks of grain at the wholesale market, the burlap tearing into his skin.
Every night, he collapsed on the station floor, coins hidden inside his shoe so they wouldn't be stolen in his sleep. Hunger never truly left him, but he was learning—learning how the city breathed, how people fought for every scrap.
He also learned something else: in the city, no one cared who you were yesterday. You could be nothing in the morning, and if you found a way, someone in the evening. Dharampur had trapped him in his past, but here—even among strangers who cursed and shoved—he felt a strange flicker of possibility.
One evening, as he carried his last sack of the day, Ravi looked up at the glowing windows of a tall office tower nearby. Men in suits laughed as they walked out, stepping into sleek cars. Ravi's shirt was torn, his feet caked in mud, but in that moment he made himself a promise:
"One day, I won't just look up at those lights. I'll own them."
The city had broken his body, but in that breaking, it had sparked something new—an ambition harder than brick, hungrier than his stomach.