Someone to Pick Up the Phone

 

The phone rang just as they reached St. John’s Hospital.
Akshita.
Sumit knew why before he picked up. She was on general shift today, which meant she wanted to share the cab. She wasn’t shy about asking for what she wanted, something Sumit liked about her.

“Yeah, we’ll come,” he said. “Same spot.” No pleasantries. None needed.
To the driver, “Take the left over the flyover, we need to go to Phase 1 first. One pickup, then u-turn back.”

“Sir, I don’t have any other pickup in my schedule.”

That was the system talking. Operations. Procedure. A senior manager shown his place by a cab driver. Sumit wasn’t offended, just mildly irritated. The blood-boiling days were long behind him. He knew why SOPs existed. Most people weren’t quick enough, or compassionate enough, to make the right call under pressure. When something went wrong, the decision-maker was the first to be blamed. A documented procedure was the perfect shield. Of course, the same shield could be a brick wall when you were on the wrong side of it.

Still, Sumit liked to think his job existed because he could solve problems, not just follow checklists. Without thinking, he called the gate. They handled cab routes. “Hi, Sumit here. Akshita from Electronics City called, she wanted to ride with us, but the driver hasn’t been informed…”

“No, sir. She’s in another cab. You don’t need to pick her.”

“Ok.” He hung up. Maybe she just wanted his company. He had that effect on some juniors. They liked his jokes, his anecdotes. Especially outside of work. At work he was different. Strict. Occasionally called 'difficult' behind his back. He didn’t mind. He liked that split. Approachable off-duty, exacting on the job. The strict senior stance came naturally; the likeability factor, though, he’d cultivated carefully over the years. It gave him a sense of depth, like a movie character who wasn’t the hero but still owned an important role. Over time, the effort to keep up this image became second nature.

He called Akshita again. “They’ve put you in another cab. It’ll come.”

“No, I wasn’t told about another cab.”

Now he was hooked. This is how his 'likeability' backfired. You can’t shrug and walk away once you’ve made yourself the approachable senior.

“Okay, I’ll check and get back,” he said, keeping the irritation out of his voice. Being liked was exhausting. Back to the gate. “Hi, it’s Sumit again. She says no one’s told her about this cab.”

“Sir, who gave her your number? She’s supposed to be in second shift.”

“Oh. Right. Never mind.”

Call to Akshita, round three. “You’re in second shift.”

“No,” she said, stubborn as ever. “Vinay called me early this morning and told me to come now.”

Vinay did that often, move fast, trusting the rest of the system to catch up. Most days it worked. Today, it hadn’t. So it wasn’t mischief on her part. It was Vinay, doing his last-minute juggling act. Production schedules sometimes got twisted for sales priorities, or because some VIP wanted a line cleared. Sumit normally liked that, the whole chain flexing on the fly. Kept things alive. But this morning Vinay had dropped the ball. If you wanted Akshita in early, you ought have arranged the cab. Simple.

Maybe Vinay forgot she’s still far down the ladder, too far to object. On contract. No company cab unless someone raises an explicit request. Maybe, Sumit thought charitably, Vinay just didn’t see Akshita as helpless. And that was a trait Sumit liked to nourish in himself, finding virtue before fault.

But none of that changed the fact, right now, Akshita had no ride. If Vinay called the gate fast enough, maybe she could still catch them. Sumit kept an eye on the turn-off to Phase 1, where she’d be waiting under the lamp post by the culvert.

No call came. Too many systems, too many gates for too little freedom. Even empathy had to queue up behind process.

They passed the turn. No return. Sumit leaned back, resigned. When they finally cleared the toll gates, he called her again.

“Vinay said he couldn’t arrange me a cab. I’m coming by bus.”

She hung up, just like that. No waiting for his reply. She must have felt let down. Trusted a senior manager to fix it, and he hadn’t done a damn thing. Unhelpful. Unsympathetic.

Vinay shouldn’t have left her hanging like that. And she shouldn’t have just accepted it. Sumit almost called her back, but stopped himself. He wasn’t going to play union leader. Besides, if she didn’t come now, she’d have to work the second shift anyway.

But it was Saturday. Only Sumit and his unlucky fellow members of the blue-collared tribe were stuck working today. The rest of the city had begun their weekend last night. Akshita might have been trying to save what she could, do the general shift, grab the last few hours of Saturday evening for herself. The second shift would chew into Sunday as well. Let her have her time. Let her take the bus.

Capitalism wins, yet again.

Sumit felt wrung out. Failed. Miserable. He thought of Akshita, and how she didn’t belong in this mess in the first place.

Lovely Technical Training Facility. LTTF. Cheeky name, long history. They’d been training young men and women from the less-developed districts of Kerala, Karnataka, even Odisha, for decades. Ask around and you’d think they were a government body, some noble service outfit. They weren’t. They were private. For-profit. Very profitable.

In the early days, maybe they had a heart. Now, they were a recruitment arm for Bangalore’s big factories. A middleman with a diploma machine. They scouted remote towns for boys and girls who didn’t know the world had more to offer. Bright kids, but green. Mouldable. That was their strength and their curse.

The pitch was irresistible: live in the city, learn a trade, get a diploma. Earn while you learn. Work inside a real MNC factory. Hands-on experience, minimal classrooms, uniform provided. Tuition? Free. Just pay for the hostel. And if you can find cheaper lodging, even better. Food? The company canteen had that too covered, at least during work hours.

Sumit could almost admire the con. The MNC got to feel charitable and secure cheap labour. No permanent rolls, no benefits. The trainees stayed three years, then rotated out. LTTF kept the cash flowing without even doing the training themselves. They left that to the companies, and then stamped a certificate at the end. In reality, the 'learning' part was a joke. Maybe 120 classroom days in three years. The rest was shopfloor slog. Low-end, repetitive work that barely matched the degree title. If the company absorbed you at the end, you were lucky. If not, you left with no savings, no broad skills, and just enough awareness to know you’d been used.

Akshita was smart. Almost finished her BBA. Yes, she still had an arrear in one paper, the dull business law, but that wasn’t damning. She could wrap it up next semester. And yet, here she was, trapped on the lowest rung of the ladder, because someone gave her the wrong advice at the wrong time. It was the same old story, one part bad luck, one part bad advice, the rest pure economics.

Sumit had tried to help. He’d reached out to Divya, an old childhood friend who had built two factories from scratch. He admired her, almost worshipped her for what she’d achieved. She lived in a different altitude now, the kind of air Sumit could only visit, never breathe. If she could take Akshita in, the girl might get a break.

The first attempt had failed. Divya wasn’t hiring then. It had been months since. Maybe things had changed.

It felt dicey to ask again, close to pestering, but the morning’s events had got under his skin. Sumit was more sensitive than he cared to admit. He would risk the shame. Childhood friends were supposed to have that licence. No ego, no formalities. The truth was, Divya never needed anything from him. He couldn’t offer her a damn thing. She was too far ahead, too far above. That didn’t hurt, he was proud of her, but it did put a wall between them.
Still, he texted:
Hey, remember that resume I sent you a few months back? Just knocking again. Any luck this time?

Ten minutes later, at his desk, Sumit saw Divya's reply:
Hi Sumit, good morning. Send me that resume once again, will you?

Maybe there was still hope. He opened his mail. The day’s grind could wait a few more minutes. Outside, the factory yard was already clattering into motion. Inside, Sumit let the hum carry him. Just long enough to believe the morning hadn’t gone to waste. Hope, after all, didn’t need an SOP. It just needed someone to pick up the phone. Somewhere, Akshita was on a bus, inching her way toward the same factory gates. One morning, two rides and two very different chances at arriving where you wanted to be.