#20 Earworm (Flash fiction)

Everyone called him ‘the Cleaner’. He worked for the sanitation department and he cleaned the sewage lines for a living. Hence the name.

He hated being called the cleaner. But, the society was comfortable with it. It is normal for our society to address people by their job - Mailman, Driver, Ice cream vendor, or in the Cleaner’s case - ‘the Cleaner’. But, nobody addresses a banker as a banker or addresses a software engineer as a software engineer. Strange, right?

All Cleaner ever wanted was for people to call him by his real name. He tried correcting people to do so when he was new at the job but lost hope eventually. Every day he drank to forget his made-up identity along with the pain of physical labor and the stink of the society which he cleaned day in and day out.

Sometimes, before going to bed, he’d recollect his dad telling him the story behind his name - that he was named after his dad’s brother who died in the army two days before Cleaner was born.

As time went by, Cleaner stopped responding when people called him by that name. And, eventually, he stopped responding to anyone. He responded only if the other person is really loud.

One day his supervisor kept calling him at work, but Cleaner didn’t respond. After trying for a while, the supervisor came close, shook the Cleaner, and screamed his name. His real name.

Everything Cleaner felt after that point was silence.

When they took him to the doctor, the doctor said Cleaner suffered permanent hearing loss due to a prolonged ear infection.

After that incident, the world ignored him. People stopped calling him by his real name or his made-up name. If they needed something, they came up close and explained everything in hand signals. He was okay with it. He loved the silence.

But, every now and then, beyond all that silence, Cleaner would hear the faded voice of his supervisor on that day. The day he called him Suresh before the world went silent.