The ordinary life

So you go home by bus, often hanging from it like a brooding bat but mostly crammed in the crowd that moves like rollers, threatening to crush you like sugarcane. People don't recognise you on the street, the magic of your phone calls defused like dispelled charm. You have little or no savings in the bank and your income can hardly make both ends meet. You have mouths to feed, rents to pay, bills to settle, and future to face. Tomorrow is a new day with old anxieties. You live from hand to mouth, from paycheck to paycheck, from day to day.

You plan your life only to find it in chaos. Your son's tuition for the next month is eaten up by your wife's unwarranted illness. Your daughter comes home any day with tears in her eyes: she couldn't go back to her husband who treats her like a ruthless loan shark. Your visit to a doctor for check up on the mysterious pain in your lower abdomen gets delayed, because you have more urgent needs to address every time.

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You borrow money from others every other month, chasing financial solvency like a mirage in the sand. You owe money to friends, colleagues, relatives, neighbours, grocer and barber. Your bills are still unpaid despite permutation and combination of many adjustments. Your life is like an airbag, which eternally swells in one end if squeezed in another.

There is no dearth of worries in ordinary life. You work day and night to earn in a month what rich folks squander in an hour. You are overwhelmed by the calculus of fate, and your only consolation is that God knows best what you cannot explain. Your life is a book that doesn't balance as income forever chases expenditure and the shortfall feeds on itself. A good meal or a new dress requires planning, hardship and sacrifice. You keep yourself confined to the house on weekends lest going out would be expensive. You are reluctant to accept invitations because gifts, transportation and incidental expenses together fritter away a good chunk of what you earn.

Come to think of it, ordinary life is a wonder of God. It's a highwire act between means and dreams, between temptations of life and its myriad restrictions. It's a life in dire straits, life that is trapped in the straightjacket of subsistence living. While more daring ones believe that one needs to break a few eggs to make an omelet, you are worried and desperate how to nest the few eggs in your hand.

An ordinary life is regimented living, your mind and body disciplined to suffer and endure the ever-narrowing lanes of options. You can have meat so many days in a month, soft drinks so many times in a year, buy a new pair of shoes once in a decade, and count on your fingers the number of movies you can watch in your lifetime. You preach and promote simplicity in your family. Your children wear used clothes, read used books, and get used to using everything used.

It's amazing how one tackles an ordinary life. He is frozen in time, although the glitter of life with all its glamour-shopping centres, scientific inventions, new holiday packages, latest model cars, this launch, that opening, happen around him all the time. The ordinary man works for everything. He is the lifter, loader, deliverer, server, bearer, carrier, bricklayer, sweeper, chauffeur, supervisor, foreman, conductor and helper. He is the midwife, who constantly labours to deliver projects for others.

An ordinary life is a contradiction under itself. It's the centre of action, yet peripheral in recognition. It takes high risk for low return. The ordinary folks die in wars, inhale poisonous fumes, fall from heights, burn in fire, and sink in water. They go to jail, get run over by cars, shiver in cold, and sweat under sun. They work hard to create greatest pleasures of life, yet bear the burden of its worst sorrows.

Feodor Dostoevsky, the Russian writer, resents in Crime and Punishment that the ordinary people must lead a life of strict obedience and have no right to transgress the law because they are ordinary. They are born unsung and they die unsung, neither remembered nor forgotten, passing through life as nonentities, never recognised but always neglected, seldom rewarded but forever deprived. The ordinary people live a thankless life, ignored by a world they build with their own sweat and blood. Yet they cannot escape it, because it is their fate to stew in their own juice.

But then ordinary life forms the critical mass of life on earth. It also forms the critical mass of the futility of life, its dailiness and its absurdities. The ordinary people wake up in the morning and go to bed at night, enacting the colossal drudgery in between, enmeshed in the fine distinction of living everyday and dying every day.

Friedrich Nietzche defines that life is continually shedding something that wants to die. Life, according to him, is murder everyday. Ordinary life makes that daily killing ruthless, the anxieties, the uncertainties, the insolvency, the fear of having to face today's nightmare repeated tomorrow, the failure, the sense of incompetence flaying a layer of life each passing day. Thus the ordinary life is deathwatch when a cold-blooded killer has chosen a painful and slow death for its victim.

If you can recede into that dreadful life, try to understand those who live there. Broken hearts and weakened bodies, what you find is a clamorous boot hill of defeated men and women, who are buried there long before they were dead. The ordinary life is a catacomb, where dreams of men and women are sealed in their minds and their souls are suffocated inside their bodies. These are people who have been buried alive, the living deads who are shedding life everyday in the inertia of death.

Before you switch on the television next time or play your DVD, before you dance in a party again or guzzle the next drink, remember those who live without any of these amenities. Remember those who live without a choice, those who wage daily struggle to keep their body and soul together, and those for whom the bare necessities are a luxury. Next time you worry about a club membership or the guest list of your friend's party, remember the ordinary lifers. They are sentenced to death in everything that is a temptation to live.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.