A story about people working night shifts took me all the way
back to the time when I used to work on graveyard shifts to serve clients
living on the other side of the globe. Like many others, I had an ambivalent
opinion about night shifts. True, that I didn’t like to sleep through the day,
wake up late in the evening with a heart heavy with all the depression in the
world, and walk sheepishly onto the floor to start another busy night with
hardly any opportunity to indulge myself with even five minutes to take a walk
around the floor. But on the other hand, night shifts were much peaceful, for
there were absolutely no distractions or disturbance, especially in the form of
some pesky souls. On some rare occasions, when I had the time to take a look
through the glass wall behind our workstations at my city, adorned with
countless twinkling jewels of lights, at the billboards faraway—probably the
only things bustling with life that late at night— or the cars swooshing up and
down serpentine flyovers like fireflies, life felt wonderful every time, despite
the hundred reasons I had (or so I thought) to justify the constant lion
wrinkle between my eyebrows.
I liked
night shifts for one, actually two, more reasons—food, whatever you liked and
as much as you liked, and good music. We used to be entitled to an incredibly generous
allowance for dinner per night. So every night, after we logged into our
systems and browsed through some hundred emails received through the course of
the day, there would always be someone volunteering to ask everyone what they’d
like to eat, make a list, and make calls to the nearby takeaways that remained
open through the night. I was known for my special liking for the so-called
boring old Bollywood songs from the black and white era which I played on my
system despite pretty much everyone complaining that they worsened the already
depressed mood all the more. Sometimes some would protest by playing one of
those typical auto-rickshaw numbers, proven to be greatly effective to bring
those back to consciousness that fell asleep in the middle of the shift. One more thing energized us like nothing else--calls from delivery guys,
who arrived with the food we ordered and waited outside the restricted area of
the floor to receive payments. Once the food would be in, the team would wake
up as if after a long hibernation, looking perfectly fresh and happy. Even the
one, who had been sleeping with the head tilted back and the mouth slightly
open, woke up mopping the thin stream of dropping saliva off the side of the
mouth, without anyone having to shake them awake. We had a wonderful and kind lady
in the team who bought a complete set of plastic cutlery with plates and spoons
enough for eight to ten people to use at the same time. Sometimes we didn’t
even bother to serve ourselves food on separate plates. Instead, we ate it
straight from the aluminum trays in which it would be delivered, like siblings
or close friends. The food would inevitably be spicy and oily to the point of
being unhealthy. You can’t expect fresh or healthy food in the middle of the
night. We knew it well that in most cases what we ate was at least a day old.
But the lure of chicken Schezwan rolls, bacon-wrapped-chicken, or Mongolian fried
rice was too hard to resist.
You can’t
work night shifts without trading ghost stories. When that wasn’t enough to
induce goose bumps or send chilling sensations through the spine, we watched
horror short films, sometimes when the workload would be moderate especially
post 2 in the morning. I was one of those fearless souls who could never gather
the courage to visit the restroom alone. Our washroom was pretty far from where
our workstations were, near an enclosed area for the department of ethics and
compliance. I was particularly afraid of the desktop screens there that
appeared to come alive every now and then on their own. While passing the area,
I tried not to look at them, sometimes shielding my eyes to avoid accidental
glances.
I worked
night shifts for two weeks a month, for two years. I loved it as much as I
hated it. I hated it mainly because it gave me pimples and I didn’t like to
wake up near dinner time, while my parents would be having their late evening
tea in the living room. A few weeks after leaving my job I was riding in a car
to the airport with my newly married husband and three large suitcases. I was
going to leave my parents, my friends, my realm of comfort to live in a place
that was unknown, unseen to me, much like a distant planet. I promised myself not to cry, for I didn’t want to see my parents in tears. And then I realized
that I was riding down the ever-familiar EM Bypass, leading to Salt Lake,
Sector V, where I worked for two years. I suddenly had a strange feeling as the
car drove past the ‘T junction’ commonly known as Airport-Gate 1, as if I was
not going anywhere, I was not going to leave. Instead, I was going to work at
night as I usually did, to serve clients living on the other side of the globe,
eat unhealthy food, listen to old Bollywood classics, return home the next morning
to Ma and Baba, and fall fast asleep without bothering to wake up for lunch. And
then I found myself giving in and breaking the promise I made to
myself. Tears welled up in my eyes and the car took a left turn to the airport.
