After thirty years of Bablu’s bill book and my own printed pay slips, I know the arithmetic well: the basic pay looked respectable on paper, but after the CPF deduction, the GIS, the small cut for the cooperative canteen, and the bus pass that the municipality forced on us, the hand-to-hand money always felt like a chipped chamki. My daughter in Bhubaneswar sends me the PDF of her startup salary — reading it, I think of my own first posting, how bapa used to say a clerk's real wage is the empty space between the printed figure and the next month's ration list. I have seen too many bright numbers vanish into the bank's interest line; I trust only what I can count on my fingers after the chaiwala has been paid.
#work#money
Jump in to reply — no account needed.
