Joy Family

Becoming Jerusha - Joy Family

Part 2: "From Dust to Days, in a City That Forgets"

April.

That word meant nothing special anymore. Once, it had been the month of summer mangoes and ice water in steel tumblers. Now, it was only a reminder that it had been ten months since Kathir left his house in Thanjavur.

Last May was when he had boarded that night bus to Chennai, his heart hot with defiance, bags full of hope, and pockets holding barely ₹2,000. He had left with the kind of fury that feels like courage in the moment - but slowly melts into silence when the days stretch and nothing seems to change.

His current world was a four-sharing PG room in Virugambakkam, stacked with tin cupboards and dreams that hung like damp clothes off the rusting window bars. The fan creaked in circles, pretending to help. The air smelled of socks and talcum powder, and the mattress was so thin that he often woke up with his hip pressed into the wooden board below.

His roommates - three boys from Andhra-were noisy, and none spoke much Tamil. One of them constantly played TikTok videos late into the night with that awful robot voice narrating every scene. Kathir kept to himself, pressing his old phone to his ears even when it wasn’t playing anything. A kind of fake cocoon.

He worked part-time now at a small biryani joint on the main road. Eighty rupees an hour. He cleaned tables, filled water bottles, wiped menus, and occasionally delivered parcels if the boy didn’t show up. The owner - a stout, sweaty man called Sulaiman anna - was kind on good days and thunderous on others.

"Unakku oru smile kooda varadhu da. Matta Pasangala mathri illa," he had once commented.
(You don’t even smile, da. Not like the other boys.)

Kathir had just nodded, like always.

College had started well, in the first few weeks. He had ironed his shirts, packed his books, taken notes, and sat in the front row with the kind of discipline that was born not out of ambition - but desperation. But the lectures turned out to be useless, the teachers disinterested, and nobody cared whether you came or not. In the beginning, he had gone daily. Then three times a week. Then once. Now, weeks passed between visits.

No one from home had called.

Not even once.

He didn’t miss them. But something inside ached -like a paper left out in rain, the edges curling.

He was still too feminine for the city.

Too soft. Too pretty. Too quiet.

Even in his oversized shirts and jeans, people stared sometimes. A few restaurant customers had called him “ma” by mistake. Sulaiman had laughed for ten minutes that day. The biryani boy had told him to "tie his hair up properly next time."

The only person he occasionally talked to was Shravya, a classmate from Commerce. Plump, warm-eyed, the kind who always had extra pens and extra sympathy. She didn’t pry. Just smiled, listened, and once even brought him two boiled eggs in a tiffin box saying, “You look like you skip too many meals.”

He had thanked her. Not just for the eggs, but for not asking about his past.

That particular evening, he had finished his shift early. The manager’s mother had passed away and the shop had closed by 5:30 PM. The sky was turning the colour of overripe guavas---purple-pink and the heat was just beginning to loosen its grip.

Kathir decided to take a walk.

Not down the usual stretch filled with loud auto horns and water lorries, but toward the quieter lanes across Saligramam. Streets he hadn’t seen before. He told himself he just needed fresh air. But maybe he was hoping to be someone else for a while, to imagine other lives.

As he walked past a gated apartment complex, he paused for a second. Inside, a family was sitting around a round white table on the terrace, laughing. Two kids chased each other with soap bubbles, and the mother - a slim, churidar-clad woman - was pouring juice into tumblers. The father leaned back, grinning at something the boy had said.

Kathir felt something stir.

It wasn’t jealousy. Not quite.

Just the awareness that he had never been part of a moment like that.

Further down, near the bend, a group of schoolgirls from St. Michael’s Matriculation passed by in white shirts and maroon skirts, ribbons bobbing as they giggled past. They had that careless ease only the young and loved carried in their walk. One of them looked at him and whispered something to her friend. They both laughed. He wasn’t sure if it was about him. Maybe not. Maybe yes.

He crossed the signal and turned into a smaller road. There, near the gate of a small church compound, sat a middle-aged man with a salt-pepper beard and a stack of flyers.

"Brother, unga kai-la oru blessing kudukattuma?"
(Shall I give your hand a blessing?)

Kathir hesitated.

The man smiled, a bit theatrically. He wore a navy blue kurta and a badge with a dove symbol.

He pressed a small white card into Kathir’s hand.

"You’ll be Joy today," it read in neat, embossed golden letters.

Kathir raised an eyebrow, a confused smile tugging at his lips.

“Enna sir, magic show-aa?” he joked softly.
(What is this sir, a magic show?)

The man only smiled back.

“Sometimes,” he said cryptically, “the Lord speaks in the form of a card.”

Kathir nodded politely and walked on.

He didn’t think too much of it. Just tucked the card into his wallet, next to an old passport-sized photo of himself he no longer liked looking at. In that picture, he had worn a shirt buttoned to the collar, hair pulled back, lips too pink. Someone once told him he looked like a convent girl there.

The road turned narrow and peaceful here. The buildings older, balconies shaded with drying sarees and potted plants. A lady fed crows from a tiffin carrier. Somewhere in the distance, a veena played from an upstairs flat. Jasmine and incense mixed in the air. This place felt… different.

Peaceful. Like a part of Chennai that hadn’t caught up with the rest of it.

Kathir slowed his walk.

Maybe tomorrow he would go to class. Maybe he wouldn’t. He had stopped making promises to himself.

But he kept walking, unaware that just a few streets away, the Joy family had unpacked the last of their boxes into a cream-painted villa. That somewhere behind tall gates and golden lettering, a photograph sat in a frame.

And in that photograph was a girl who looked exactly like him.