Sunday Story- More Than Meets the Eye

Mrinalini was notably chirpy for a Monday morning. Her excitement was evident to everybody as she greeted all her colleagues with an extraordinarily wide smile on her way to her desk. And why would she not be? For others it was just another payday; but for Mrinalini, it was the beginning of the end of her family’s poverty.

Mrinalini’s parents had moved from their village to a metropolitan city in search of a better living. In the next few years, they welcomed Mrinalini and then her younger brother, Sahil. While they put all of their blood and sweat into earning a living, they still struggled to make the ends meet despite all these years. Watching her parents struggle, despite toiling more than their counterparts, broke Mrinalini every single day, and she resolved to uplift her family and bring it out of poverty one day. And today was that day; but little did she know that the discrimination her parents faced back in their day had been coming for her all this while and standing right at her door.

Mrinalini found it arduous to focus on her work; she kept checking and rechecking her phone in hopes of finding an email containing her payslip. A few hours into the day, when she least expected it, her phone’s screen lit up. Mrinalini stopped whatever she was doing and went for her phone. And there it was—an email notifying Ms Mrinalini Gupta that her salary had been credited. She couldn’t contain her glee! Mrinalini had finally received her first salary! She immediately started planning how she would use the money to start alleviating her family’s circumstances. And then came lunchtime.

Right from entering the cafe to being seated with their respective lunches in the cafeteria, Mrinalini and her friend from another department couldn’t stop discussing what they planned to do with their first salaries. They were peacefully having their lunch, chatting away in between mouthfuls of pasta, when Tanisha, another of Mrinalini’s colleagues quietly joined them. Seeing her sullen expression, they asked her if everything was okay with her. What she told her left both of them speechless.

Laabh, a new joinee just like Mrinalini, worked with her in the same department as hers. Both Laabh and Mrinalini had joined the office at the same position. They handled almost the same amount of work, and put in a similar number of hours, Mrinalini sometimes more than Laabh—in fact, Mrinalini had proved to be more reliant than the rest of her colleagues in her department, junior and senior alike. Just as in the number of responsibilities they dealt with, there was a difference in their remunerations; however, in this case, it was Laabh who received higher pay.

The pay gap was such that by the end of one year, Laabh would have earned a month’s pay extra as compared to Mrinalini. The reason, though unspoken of, was quite conspicuous—notwithstanding her innumerable qualities, the one characteristic that stood out among the rest was that Mrinalini was a woman; and Laabh, despite all his shortcomings, was a man. This information came like a blow to her. Whatever feeling of pride and excitement that she had been experiencing till that point in time, this entire revelation poured cold water on it—ice cold.

These three women had cruelly been woken from their dreams and jolted back into the reality of society. Life had seemed to come full circle. While their homeland quite actively decried the gender pay gap and championed equal pay for equal work, and boasted of considering every person living there as equal, it failed to implement the initiatives it had promised to undertake to combat these issues.