Jagan was having an issue in life and it had come to a point where it was becoming quite a bother.
No matter how hard he tried, Jagan just couldn’t get hold of time. He had tried everything, waking up early, planning his tasks at the office and doing them without a minute’s delay. He was even putting aside sufficient time to take care of any household work. But it just didn’t happen, Jagan couldn’t find time to play that synthesizer he had bought a year back.
Each day in the end he would return home tired with the pool of motivation dried up. During the day as the clock pointed toward the later part of the day, the life draining out could be felt more significantly.
The weekend, Sunday, passed by resting, doing laundry and if possible, hanging out with friends for a while.
Late work beyond office hours had become a norm, everyone was doing it without complaint and if asked the response would usually be ‘if one wants to continue with the job for a long time’. ‘Why’ was the question, why someone had to put his/her life in a place ageing like a rock that will definitely crack in a much shorter interval of time than the actual one? Why just because the guy on the top doesn’t have a hobby, or something more that he/she wants out of life, others have to follow in and then there are many without anything to look forward to as well. It was as if, if one could do something about it, then there would be at least one who would stay glued to that chair and table forever and would grin that smile with the feeling of his/her job being secured. What a great sad achievement.
These are some things Jagan thought in his mind.
One he had a nightmare; in it his manager in the form of a monster was pulling away the very path on which Jagan was standing. The path had numbers indicating time and they were being taken away and Jagan couldn’t keep up. He could see that he was inching farther away from a life that was waiting for his time.
No, nothing changed in case if you thought it would, things remained the same or maybe turned worse. Jagan’s nephew in school took away the synthesizer one day. I wonder if Jagan had started to become the rock he observed everyone becoming, surrendering to things as they are.
Written by Anuran Chatterji
The Occupied Time
Early Morning Memories 
One response to “The Occupied Time”
This is such a powerful and painfully relatable piece of writing. The story captures the quiet tragedy of modern working life — not through dramatic events, but through the slow fading of passion, energy, and time. Jagan’s struggle feels deeply human, especially the way he keeps trying to “manage” time while life itself slips further away from him.
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