Twenty Two Steps

Twenty-two steps. Up and down. Each a foot high, and long enough for five people to stand on comfortably next to each other. Made with the solid granite quarried in the outer districts - built to last. Sharp, jagged corners here and there but in most places well-rounded. Hot in summer, cool in winter; slippery when it rains. Crows and pigeons - lots of them - wait on these all summer, flying away when men and women walk up or down. Leading up to the one place I now dread to go - the Department of XYZ. Twenty-two days in these last three months, and each day twice, I have climbed these steps; now I know them all intimately. Still my application rests, waiting to be seen, to be sent across the room, about the Office, over it to the higher-ups and, then, taking the same mysterious route, back to me, hopefully, with the one signature that it requires below all the hundreds of meaningless words in those dusty, sweat-wetted sheets, words that will attain their final meaning in making me the sole owner of a few puny acres in the outskirts, where I will dig out more of this granite, root it out, so I can feed my family a few crumbs a day till my son gets to sit in this same Office to receive my neighbour's son in his long, tiresome pilgrimage to the centre of meaninglessness. And I could have been saved all the trouble if my father had had the twenty-two rupees that he was asked to pay as expeditionary charge twenty-two years ago - now I have the twenty-two rupees but the bribes are not so small any more.