It’s the Small Things | Warming Up to a New Rhythm 

It was a Saturday afternoon at a high-end clothing store in central London. A young couple walked up to the till beside me. He was a tall Indian man; the lady with him, blonde and English, was likely his girlfriend. They were paying for trousers and jumpers picked from the men's and women's sections, respectively. I was folding cashmere nearby, and I realised, I watched them longer than I had meant to.

We were both Indian – the man and I – technically, though I suspected the word had come to mean something different for each of us. His family, I guessed, had arrived in Britain a generation or two before mine had dared to dream of. Probably, in the years when a degree here still opened every door, and they had simply stayed on. He carried himself like old money. I could be wrong, but fieldwork teaches you to read people quickly. I had arrived much later, anxious and in uncertain debt, chasing doors that had mostly already begun to close. 

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

A few months earlier, I had completed a master’s programme at the London School of Economics and Political Science. It was the newest stage of a six-year career that had begun in a rented room in Rajendra Nagar, Delhi, where I was preparing for the civil services examination. I had left that path a year in, unwilling to stake everything on a single,  uncertain bet, and moved instead into a two-year fellowship with Teach For India, followed by three and a half years as an Aspirational District Fellow in the Bastar region of Chhattisgarh. In that role, I worked alongside district collectors and IAS officers, revived sub-health centres and services that existed only on paper, in villages that had gone without a functioning clinic for over a decade. It was, without exaggeration, some of the most consequential work I have done. And then I chose to leave it for London, on a conviction that a master's degree would let me do more of the same, at a greater scale. My parents spent a fortune we did not have as they gave up years of holidays to make it possible. 

I did not expect to spend my first months in London folding cashmere. For students born and raised in Britain, retail work is a normal rung on their career ladder. For me, arriving with a résumé built from leading government meetings, it felt less like a rung and more like an insult delivered in a very polite tone.  

My store manager pulled me out of my thoughts by gesturing towards a customer holding an armful of clothes. I suddenly reacted: "Would you like me to put this in the trial room for you?" I asked, in the voice I had learned to perform by then. 

On my way to the customer, I passed the couple again, who by then were on their way out with their bags. What moved through me was not quite jealousy. It was more a colder, more impersonal kind of envy – not of him as a person, but of an accident of timing. His family had arrived two generations ahead of mine. I was here now, mid-scramble, reaching for a door that had already begun closing by the time I found it. 

I often think of others my age who left India with résumés like mine as student leaders, fellows, gold medallists, now stacking shelves and frying fries in cities that have no memory of who they used to be. 

I no longer solely work in that store. I now also sit in an office in London as a casework lead at a charity supporting women who have survived sex trafficking, still learning a new system from the ground up. It is a considerable distance from a district collector's office in Sukma, and for a long time I measured myself almost entirely by that distance. I have since learned to measure by other things: an evening with a friend at the park near my hostel, a museum to get lost in, the pond on the first warm day of the year. These are the details that leave me feeling, in the truest sense, warm, and not just the designation at work. 

Most months, my salary leaves for the loan before it has properly arrived, and the scale of  leadership I once envisioned for myself still lies somewhere ahead, unclaimed. I no longer  believe it is the only place worth arriving. London has taught me, slowly and without ceremony, that there is a self beneath the résumé of an immigrant of this generation, still learning what her own story is permitted to look like outside the one that was written for her in advance. 

There is a quiet relief in admitting that the story is allowed, after all, to be this small.

Siona Correia used to work with the district administrations in India’s Bastar region. She has a master’s from the London School of Economics and Political Science, which brought her to the UK, where she is now based.

We’ve grown up hearing that “it’s the small things” that matter. That’s true, of course, but it’s also not – there are Big Things that we know matter, and that we shouldn’t take our eyes, minds or hearts off of. As journalists, we spend most of our time looking at those Big Things, trying to understand them, break them down, and bring them to you.

And now we’re looking to you to also think about the small things – the joy that comes from a strangers’ kindness, incidents that leave you feeling warm, an unexpected conversation that made you happy, finding spaces of solidarity. Write to us about your small things at thewiresmallthings@gmail.com in 800 words or less, and we will publish selected submissions. We look forward to reading about your experiences, because even small things can bring big joys.

Read the series here.

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