The Divine Relief: A Story of Pressure and Release.
It began, as all
great crises do, with a moment of peace. Arvind was finalizing a module, the
code clean and elegant on his screen. He took a celebratory sip of sweet, milky
office chai. It was warm, comforting, and utterly treacherous.
The first signal was a gentle, internal ping, a system notification from his lower abdomen. “Chai processed. Storage at 15%. Schedule maintenance at next available break.” Arvind mentally acknowledged. 11:00 AM. A perfect slot.
By 10:40 AM, the
notification was a persistent, blinking alert. The gentle pressure had become a
distinct, weighty presence. He shifted in his chair, a subtle
recalibration. Just finish this function, he told himself, his
typing becoming more urgent, as if speed could outpace biology.
At 10:48 AM, the
world ended.
“Arvind? Beta, a
minute?” The voice was a familiar, booming baritone that didn’t ask, but
commanded. It was Mr. Gupta, the Delivery Head, a man whose belly preceded him
like a ship’s prow and whose minutes were a currency of their own, inflating in
value without warning.
The blinking alert
in Arvind’s gut turned into a claxon horn. A full-scale, DEFCON 1
emergency. Abort. Mission abort.
“Of course, sir!
Please, please sit,” Arvind said, his voice tight. He subtly leaned forward,
planting his elbows on his desk to apply counter-pressure to his screaming
bladder.
Mr. Gupta sank into
the chair with a sigh that spoke of the weight of a thousand projects. He
launched into an epic soliloquy on client satisfaction, agile methodologies,
and the upcoming performance review cycle. Arvind nodded, his smile a rigid,
porcelain facade.
Inside, a revolution was brewing. The gentle pressure was now a throbbing, insistent drumbeat. It was a water balloon filled to the point of translucence, being gently and persistently squeezed by an invisible hand. Arvind’s world began to telescope. Mr. Gupta’s face blurred at the edges. The man’s words—“synergy,” “bandwidth,” “deliverables”—morphed into a meaningless drone, drowned out by the primal scream of his own physiology.
His face began its
silent, desperate communication. The healthy brown of his skin took on a pale,
sallow hue, a shade colleagues might later describe as “jaundiced urgency.” A
fine film of sweat glossed his upper lip and brow. His eyes, once focused on his
boss, now darted towards the door with the frantic energy of a trapped animal.
They were wide, pleading, shining with a desperate light that screamed, “I
am drowning in my own chai!”
But his mouth said,
“Absolutely, sir. Very insightful.”
He was crafting the
sentence in his mind: Mr. Gupta, with all due respect, a primal force
is threatening to breach the levee. I must go. But the words were
trapped, imprisoned by a lifetime of conditioning to respect hierarchy, to
never be impolite, to never acknowledge the messy, human animal beneath the
corporate facade.
Just as Mr. Gupta
leaned forward to emphasize a point about “value addition,” a shadow fell in
the doorway. It was Priya, from the QA team.
“Sorry to
interrupt, sir. Arvind, a quick doubt on the UAT environment?”
Mr. Gupta, a man
who believed collaboration was the key to everything, waved her in. “No
problem, Priya! We are almost done. Think value, Arvind! Think value!”
Mr. Gupta heaved
himself up and delivered a final, fateful pat on Arvind’s shoulder. The jolt
was seismic. It sent a tsunami of agony crashing through Arvind’s system. He
saw stars. He clenched every muscle from his toes to his jaw, holding the line
through sheer force of will.
And then he was
gone, leaving Arvind alone with Priya, a wonderfully thorough and
detail-oriented person who had, at this moment, the situational awareness of a
brick.
“So, the staging
server credentials,” she began, opening her laptop. “The path variable is
pointing to the old directory. Should we change it or mirror the new build
there?”
The pain was no
longer a request; it was a threat. A deep, aching, urgent fullness that
dominated his entire universe. He had to move. He shifted his weight from one
buttock to the other, a frantic, subtle dance of desperation.
“You okay, Arvind?
You look… tense,” Priya remarked, not looking up from her screen.
Tense! She had noticed the rigid, statue-like posture of a man
physically containing an ocean, and her only takeaway was ‘tense’. He was a
hostage to courtesy, bound to his chair by invisible chains. He tried to beam
the image directly into her brain: a bursting dam, a overflowing cup, a man
sprinting for the loo.
“I just need to
quickly…” he gasped, beginning to push his chair back.
The door flew open
a second time. It was Meera, the vibrant new intern from HR, her arms full of
colourful folders. “Arvind Sir! Perfect! I need five minutes about the Diwali
team lunch event next week! I’ve shortlisted three venues and need your budget approval!”
She didn’t wait for
a response, depositing the folders on his desk and claiming Mr. Gupta’s
recently vacated chair. Priya, seeing her window closing, doubled down on the
server path conundrum.
Arvind Sharma was
now the nucleus of a perfect storm of polite persecution. Mr. Gupta’s value,
Priya’s servers, Meera’s canapés. The three of them formed a triangle of
torture around him. The pressure in his bladder was catastrophic, a feeling so
all-consuming it was metaphysical. He could feel the ghost of every sip of
chai, every drop of water from his morning bottle, staging a violent, mutinous
uprising.
His smile was a
death rictus. His “hmmms” and “okays” were strangled Morse code for SOS. He was
no longer a senior developer. He was a vessel. A fragile, over-pressurized
container in a Bengaluru Cotton shirt, one polite question away from a biblical
flood.
He didn’t know how
it ended. One moment he was nodding at Meera’s description of a pani
puri counter, the next his body had taken over. He stood up. He did
not speak. Words were a luxury he could no longer afford. He moved with a
stiff, robotic gait, his legs pressed together in a desperate, penguin-like
waddle that screamed of a man walking on a tightrope over a canyon.
“Arvind?” Priya
called after him.
“I’ll email you the
brochures!” Meera chirped.
He heard nothing.
The hallway was an endless, bright white tunnel. Each step was a calculated act
of defiance against gravity and pressure. He passed colleagues, offering tight,
breathless grimaces that he hoped passed for smiles, not daring to open his mouth.
The men’s room door
appeared like the gates of heaven. He pushed through, the whoosh of the door a
choir of angels.
The blessed, tiled
sanctum. The cool air. The silent, solemn hum of the exhaust fan. It was the
most beautiful, sacred space he had ever entered.
He fumbled with his
belt, his fingers suddenly thick and stupid. Come on, you fools! The
buckle. The button. The zip. Finally, salvation was at hand.
He stood before the
porcelain altar, took a deep, shuddering breath that contained the agony of
ages, and let go.
The first drop was
not a drop. It was a revelation. It was the breaking of a thousand chains. It
was the end of a war and the beginning of a profound, all-encompassing peace.
It was a feeling of such immense, total, and absolute relief that a long, guttural,
involuntary sigh of pure ecstasy escaped his lips. It was a sound that held the
suppressed torment of the last hour.
The violent urgency
melted away, replaced by a warm, cascading, serene euphoria. The throbbing,
painful pressure evaporated, leaving behind a lightness of being he never knew
was possible. He leaned his forehead against the cool partition, a slow, blissful,
effortless smile spreading across his face.
It was a smile of
pure, unadulterated joy. It was more genuine than the smile on his wedding
photo, more profound than the smile after his first promotion. This was primal.
This was real. This was nirvana, achieved not through meditation,
but through release.
In that moment,
Arvind Sharma understood the universe. You could have all the agile projects,
all the clean code, and all the Diwali bonuses in the world. But true,
soul-deep happiness, the kind that makes you want to weep with gratitude, is
simply the unimpeded right to answer a fundamental call of nature at the exact
moment it is called.
He zipped up, a man
reborn. He washed his hands, catching his own eye in the mirror. The pale,
wild-eyed man was gone. He walked back to his desk, his gait easy, his soul
washed clean. Priya and Meera were gone. The folders remained.
He sat down,
cracked his knuckles, and looked at his code. It was just code. Life was more.
He had faced the abyss and returned, wiser. And he made a new vow, a
personal dharma for Arvind Sharma, effective immediately: no
amount of hierarchy, no project deadline, and certainly no second cup of chai,
would ever come between him and the call of the divine relief again. Some
values, he now knew, were truly non-negotiable.