Chapter 7: Sant Ananya Aur Rozgar Sahkaari (Saint Ananya and the Job Club)

The job club was Ananya's idea, and the idea came from the particular place where most good ideas originate: desperation dressed as competence.

It happened like this: on a Thursday, between the dal service and the cleanup, a man named Govind asked Ananya if she knew how to write a resume. Govind was forty-one. He'd been a machine operator at a packaging factory in Bhosari for fourteen years until the factory automated and the automating was the blue-collar version of Ananya's restructuring — the same surgery, different ward, the anaesthetic being not good chai but a photocopied notice taped to the factory gate. Govind had a phone with a cracked screen, a Gmail account he'd made but never used, and a conviction that his fourteen years of experience should count for something and the conviction was correct and the correctness was useless without someone to translate it into the language that hiring managers spoke.

"Didi, resume banana hai. Par kaise banate hain?" Sister, I need to make a resume. But how do you make one?

Ananya knew how to make a resume. Ananya had reviewed thousands of resumes. Ananya had, in her corporate life, been the person who decided which resumes made it to the interview pile and which went to the rejection pile, the piles being the particular sorting mechanism of corporate hiring: your life reduced to two pages, the two pages being auditioned by someone who spent an average of seven seconds per page, the seven seconds being the research-backed duration that HR professionals devoted to each applicant's summary of their entire professional existence.

She helped Govind. On her phone, on the steps of St. Thomas's Church, with Kiara sitting three steps above them eating a banana (the banana being Thursday's fruit — Nikhil added fruit when donations permitted, the fruit being the luxury, the dal-rice being the necessity and the fruit being the thing that made the Thursday meal feel like a meal rather than a ration). Ananya typed Govind's experience into a Google Doc, formatted it, added the particular vocabulary that hiring managers required: "operated and maintained industrial packaging equipment" instead of "ran the machine," "supervised quality control processes" instead of "checked the boxes weren't broken," the translation being the particular skill that corporate people possessed and that non-corporate people needed — the skill of making real work sound like corporate work, the sounding being the entry fee that the job market charged.

The next Thursday, Govind brought his friend Sunita. Sunita who was a former data entry operator. The Thursday after that, Sunita brought her neighbour Manoj. Manoj brought his wife Deepa. Deepa brought her sister's cousin's colleague's friend — the Indian network effect, the effect that was not six degrees of separation but one-and-a-half degrees of connection, the connection being: in India, everyone knew someone who knew someone who needed help, and the needing-help produced the chain and the chain was how Ananya's informal resume-writing on the church steps became, within four Thursdays, a thing.

Nikhil noticed. "Tu toh recruitment agency chala rahi hai church ke bahar." You're running a recruitment agency outside the church.

"Bas resume help hai," Ananya said. But it wasn't just resume help. It was — it had expanded. The expansion being organic, the organic being: the people who came for resume help also needed interview practice. The people who needed interview practice also needed to know where the jobs were. The people who needed to know where the jobs were also needed to know how to apply online (the applying-online being the particular barrier that the digital divide imposed: you could not apply for a job at an Amazon warehouse without internet access and an email address and the ability to navigate a website that had been designed by someone who assumed everyone had a laptop and WiFi and the assuming was the privilege embedded in the interface).

So Ananya started — she would not have called it a job club. She would have called it "helping some people on Thursdays." But Nikhil called it a job club and Nikhil had the naming authority because Nikhil owned the church's back room and the back room was where the job club met, on Thursdays, after the community kitchen closed, in the room that still smelled of dal and where the folding chairs were still warm from the people who had sat on them to eat and who were now sitting on them to learn.

The job club had no funding, no registration, no letterhead. It had: Ananya's twenty-two years of corporate knowledge (the knowledge that had been the career and that the career's death had freed — freed like an organ donor's organs, the organs being useful to others precisely because the original body no longer needed them). It had Nikhil's kitchen (which served as the meeting space — the gas burners turned off, the vessels stacked, the room's purpose shifting from feeding to enabling, the feeding being the body's need and the enabling being the soul's). And it had Kiara.

Kiara who was, it turned out, extraordinary with computers. Kiara who could navigate a government job portal in four minutes when Govind had spent three days trying and failing. Kiara who had taught herself everything on borrowed phones and library computers and the particular self-education that poverty demanded: you learned what you needed, when you needed it, the learning being survival rather than enrichment. Kiara typed at the speed of someone whose entire social life occurred on a phone screen. She could format a document, find a government scheme, fill in an online application — the skills that middle-class India took for granted and that the taking-for-granted was the blindness and the blindness was what the job club illuminated: the gap between having skills and having access, the gap being the particular cruelty of a digital economy that required digital citizenship and that the citizenship had a price and the price was invisible to those who could afford it.

Ananya gave Kiara a role. "Tu meri tech team hai." You're my tech team. The sentence delivered with the mock-corporate formality that had become their shared language — the language that was half joke (the joke being: a community kitchen volunteer calling a homeless teenager her tech team) and half truth (the truth being: Kiara was better with technology than any of the thirty-four people who had been on Ananya's corporate team, the being-better being the particular irony of a system that credentialed the educated and overlooked the skilled).

Kiara accepted the role with the studied indifference of a teenager who was secretly pleased. "Theek hai, didi. Meri fees kya hai?" Fine, sister. What's my fee?

"Extra dal."

"Done."

The job club grew. Week by week. Eight people, then fourteen, then twenty-two. Ananya kept a register — the register being the corporate habit that survived the corporate death, the habit of documentation, of tracking, of knowing who came and when and what they needed. The register was a school notebook that she'd bought at the stationery shop on Karve Road (the stationery shop that had been there since the 1980s and that sold notebooks and pens and erasers and the particular rubber bands that Indian shopkeepers used to bundle everything and that the rubber-banding was the Indian retail's gift-wrapping: functional, unaesthetic, indestructible).

Farhan heard about it. Farhan who heard about everything in Kothrud because Kothrud's information network was the park bench and the park bench was Farhan's office. He asked, on a November morning that had turned properly cold (the Pune cold that was not Mumbai cold and not Delhi cold but the particular Pune cold that arrived through the ground rather than the air, the cold that crept up through the feet and that required socks, the socks being the Pune winter's only concession from the city's otherwise sandal-wearing population).

"Job club?" Farhan adjusted his muffler — the muffler being wool, hand-knitted by Nasreen years ago, the knitting being another thing that Farhan maintained in her absence. "Tu kya kar rahi hai?"

"Log ko resume banane mein help kar rahi hoon. Interview practice. Job search." I'm helping people make resumes. Interview practice. Job searching.

"Toh tu apna kaam dhundh rahi hai ya doosron ka?" So are you looking for your own work or other people's?

The question that was Farhan's particular gift — the question that looked simple and was surgical. The question that cut to the thing that Ananya had not examined: she was helping others find jobs while not looking for one herself. The not-looking being — what? Avoidance? Purpose-substitution? The particular displacement that helping-others provided: you could not feel your own wound when you were bandaging someone else's.

"Dono," she said, the lie being obvious to both of them. Both.

Farhan nodded. The nod that said: I know you're lying, I'll wait for the truth, the waiting being the old man's strategy and the strategy being more effective than confrontation because the waiting gave the truth time to surface and the surfacing was voluntary and the voluntary was the only kind of truth that mattered.

She walked home. The morning was cold enough that her breath was visible — the breath-clouds that Pune produced for six weeks in winter and that the breath-clouds were the winter's proof, the proof being necessary because Pune's winter was otherwise invisible (no snow, no frost, just the ground-cold and the breath-clouds and the sudden appearance of monkey caps on auto-rickshaw drivers).

At home, she opened the school notebook. She wrote: "Netta Wilde's Job Club." Not "Ananya's." Netta's. The new name applied to the new thing. The new thing that was — the new thing was the beginning. The beginning that Ananya could not have planned because the planning required the knowing and the knowing was not available in advance. You did not know, at fifty, what the next life would be. You found it. In a church kitchen. With a ladle and a notebook and a homeless teenager who was your tech team.

The notebook's pages were the particular Indian notebook pages — ruled, with a red margin line, the margin that every Indian school notebook had and that the margin was the boundary and the boundary was the rule and the rules had governed Ananya's life for fifty years and Netta — Netta wrote across the margin. Deliberately. The across-the-margin being the small rebellion, the small rebellion that was all the rebellion available to a fifty-year-old woman with a school notebook and a pen, and the all-available was enough.