I kicked up the dirt with my safety boots, walking through the puffs of sand and dust. It was overcast and the air smelled of rain, and the day was still young. I shuffled through a stack of papers on my clipboard, thinking about the sheer drama some people are willing to put up with - most of all in themselves. Hyperbole I can take: I’m prone to impressing little cousins and grand cousins that way. Melodramatizing the issue I cannot take.

Enter offending article A: Mrs B, let’s call her. Cute in that 40-plus, worn out way with highlighted hair and the usual layer of gunk on her face. She looked like she still had a body to impress, but knowing how elegantly-cut clothes and push-up bras do wonders, I remained skeptical. That doesn’t mean I didn’t pay close attention to her, of course. She had her hair tied up and wisps fell across her eyes as she frowned in the effort to speak BBC english: mangled, accented and completely ah lian. Endearing, ya?

Match that image of middle-age nouveau riche with tight jeans, a polo t-shirt, a stack of documents and sunglasses, and you have an image of one of God’s most annoying creatures. Let’s not forget how she was dripping with gold, shall we?

“My husband and I since we were 14 you know, we work carry all the bundles ourself, until today want to expand our business,” she said, her tortured English delivered with pride, or so it sounded.

“We can get contractors to restore it all, don’t worry,” I said. I patted a particularly ruined column and smiled up at her. She wasn’t looking, flipping site plans back and forth, her little Italian handbag tossing to and fro like a harried Pekinese.

“Haiyer, now we in so much trouble, I want to cry you know, I feel so sad, past few nights cannot sleep, you know,” she said absently, as I wondered what made her think I gave a damn. I hated her kind - her kind, the ones with wistful expressions and too much money, name-dropping European cities, wearing faux-crocodile leather boots and touristy cowboy hats picked up from some American airport. “Losing so much money,” she crooned.

My lips curled involuntarily and I quickly looked away. I remembered last night and my short conversation with Krishnan, a security guard penshioner a decade or more past retirement.

I was sitting in his world: an 8′ high wooden pondok no bigger than a 6′ x 6′ with one door and one desk, yesterday’s NST, an ashtray with a cheap, well-chewed cheroot and an old transistor radio circa 1982. His day clothes were hung behind his desk, and he was wearing his security guard uniform for the night. He was old, his hair was white and he looked like my father; bulbous nose, yellowed teeth where there were any, a clean-shaven face, but without the prickly life in my father’s eyes.

He invited me in like a long-lost friend and I sat in a rickety easy-chair. The wooden chair on which he eased himself down had long lost its padding, which Krishnan had replaced with a stack of newspapers tied together with rafia string. I realized at once that I was sitting on his preferred chair when he eased a dirty pile of papers similarly bundled off the back of my chair, making apologetic sounds for the untidiness.

“Please, I have some tea, do you want some tea?” he said, motioning to a packet of iced tea hung at the door, little melted ice floating about. It was cold just after the rain and so close to the less developed parts of that particular town. It matched the stark, ghastly orange glow of the streetlamps, and the intermittent traffic made it all feel too quiet.

We chatted for a while, though words were sparse and he couldn’t tell me much of what I wanted to know. It didn’t matter, and the soft drizzle that had started up while we were talking made me grateful for the pondok. It was a long day, and I didn’t have the energy to drive home; Krishnan looked like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders.

“I’m sorry, I’m just pleasantly surprised that you can speak English so well,” I said, putting aside my papers.

“I am a penshioner, I was working for Pos Malaysia so long ago,” he said, smiling, “and you know how the British bosses were long time ago ah?” I offered him a cigarette which he accepted. We lit up and I sat back listening to some Tamil radio station with the volume down low. “I joined when I was 19, left my estate and worked for Pos Malaysia,” he said.

“What about your family?” I asked, and the question was like a spasm, without much thought.

“My son passed away some time back and my grandchildren are staying with me. My wife is a bit sick lah, so she’s staying at home, and my other children are married and living elsewhere,” he said, smiling yet again. His voice had an old, deep tone, like the voice of old tree roots. I didn’t want to ask him about his son, as curious as I was, but when he said his son had passed on the second time, I realized it must’ve been from causes no father would like to witness. Then again, no father wants to see his son die.

“I’m a Christian, and God gave me this life, and I must accept it,” he said. I vacillated between disdain, pity and anger. It seemed that everywhere I went, I saw sons and fathers of Indians working the dead ends in life. And God, what did God have to do with this misery? Nothing as far as I could tell, since God doesn’t answer prayers in this country. The idea that He might is beguiling for those who believe in an afterlife away from their own private miseries, maybe.

I remembered what Krishnan said that night and I grew angry all over again. Mrs B was going on and on about the miseries of her situation, ending each sentence with calculated sighs, and I didn’t care. She talked about her dog, her car and her investments, and I didn’t care.

In comparison to chipped nails and pedicures, the simple torture of waiting for your time to die in a 6′ by 6′ prison of your own choosing was just too much perspective to bear. I remembered sitting in silence watching the intensifying drizzle outside Krishnan’s small space, and thinking, ‘There’s not even enough space to lay down and die, here’. After a while, it didn’t matter.

I wanted to be back in that small pondok again.