Another open-ended and one-word prompt: sunlight. More so, doing this for myself because I quite like fulfilling prompts lol. Do with as you please!

Sunlight came easy in the outskirts. I say this not to sound like a country hick, because cityfolk are perfectly well nourished, but because it is the falsest truth I could ever tell you. Sunlight comes easy in the outskirts to the rich. Droves of them, with their pearly white teeth and pale smooth skin despite living under thick smog and smoke, come up every six months in their big cars and buy out every hostel, inn and bed and breakfast for the next half-year.

They act like it’s saints’ work. Hogging our beds and working our fingers to bone in their little factories as if ‘stimulating the local economy’ for the ‘production of essentials’ is a worthy enough cause to justify the jars and bottles and sachets of honeyed amber priced higher than what the average worker out here makes in their lifetime.

Sunlight extraction is not an easy thing: but the pay is steady if meagre, and the work is only seasonal, so everyone around here snaps at the opportunity like a pack of hungry dogs over rotten meat. It comes in three forms: liquid, for the kids, elderly, and other pussies who can’t handle anything stronger than a glass of mineral water, pills and powders for the on-the-go career man, busy moms, gymbros and other assorted City degenerates who can’t possibly imagine consuming anything that doesn’t make them feel ‘alive’ again. Finally, there is the gel form, the stuff that gets absorbed into the skin: hippies only, the ones that go on about ‘natural benefits’ and ‘Mother Earth’s bounty’ and make up bullshit like ‘subdermal ultraviolet absorption’ to keep the prices high as possible. Your safety in one of these factories is negligible: processing and packing is a job for the kiddos only, and the earlier stages are identical no matter where you are.

My sister used to work in raw extraction before it blinded her, a maze of carefully constructed mirrors angled at the cracks in the sky and each other to produce a large puddle that drips down to lower levels. It is, to put it lightly, a display of deft scientific genius. If Kali had been a city kid, she would’ve been shipped off to one of those fancy colleges to study physics or some crap instead of being cooped up in the darkest room of our two roomed house for days on end.

It drips down to be processed—condensed, flash frozen, emulsified: all these things depend on which form you’ve got. I used to work in a condensation plant, alongside my little brother Chandra, who was just old enough to do the bottling. It takes three hours for 20ml of sunlight to be extracted and condensed: the daily recommended dose is 40. There is a quicker way to do it, involving machines and computers, but stretching it out costs less, which means they can charge more and wax poetic about ‘creating jobs in impoverished areas’ while shortchanging us like swine.

I am telling you all this, comrade, because freedom is coming. There is going to be a general strike on Friday: steal what you can and keep your family warm. We will smoke the cityfolk out until they realize how much they need us to survive.

— Saraswati Iyengar

The pamphlet was on paper thin as tissue, pressed into my palm by old Ramu during the shift change at the bottling plant. I didn't read it until I got home, didn't even want to look at it--my supervisor already watches me the like a hawk watches a field mouse--but alone in my room, with the door locked and my mother downstairs haggling with a vendor over rice, I unfolded Saraswati's words.

I've worked the condensation tanks for four years, of watching the thermometers, of measuring out the evaporation rates, of hands that crack and bleed from the chemical residue no matter how many times I wash them. Four years of forty-hour weeks paid like twenty, because there's always someone hungrier than you willing to do it for less. This system makes you grateful for scraps. My father died in a gel-processing accident when I was eleven. The foreman said his lungs gave out, and the city lawyers said sunlight inhalation at that concentration was simply an occupational hazard he'd accepted. We got the house because it came with my father's job, and they didn't bother evicting us.

Charity, Amma calls it.

I've been thinking about leaving. There's talk of work in the capital, real jobs, in offices, processing data where the pay is better. I could send money back, could get my mother a proper doctor instead of the old woman in the quarter who's best medicine is prayer, but all that requires paperwork and playing the game perfectly enough to seem valuable to them.

Saraswati's words sit in my lap like an accusation.

Freedom is coming.

If I strike, I lose my wages for that week. My mother is already counting on what I'll bring home. The rent comes due on the tenth. I've calculated it a hundred times in my head: we have maybe three weeks of buffer if nothing breaks, if no one gets sick, if the price of food doesn't spike.

"Arjun? Your dinner is ready," Amma calls from downstairs.

I shove the pamphlet between two books on my shelf.

We will smoke the cityfolk out.

I think of Mrs. Lawrence, who comes every summer to our quarter with her pale skin and her orders for custom batches of sunlight gel. She asks about my mother's health. She tips the hostel workers. Last year, when Kali went blind, Mrs. Lawrence's husband donated money to the medical fund, just enough to make them feel like they'd tried. It paid for exactly one meal.

I think of the capital, and the paperwork, and the recommendations I'll get if I don't strike when everybody else does.

I go downstairs. My mother has made rice and lentils, the cheap sort that are still hard even after hours simmering. She smiles at me, and I smile back, and we don't talk about Friday.

I'm counting down to it anyway.