What Drains a Day

It began, oddly enough, with Holi powder and wet hair.

On the screen from Bengaluru, Ritesh was explaining that what he and his wife had used was not really color in the watery sense. Not the sort of thing mixed in water and thrown around in buckets the way many childhood Holis are remembered. This was powder. Dry Holi. No pool, no splashing, no watery chaos. They had gone out at about one in the afternoon and stayed until four, and when the Mayor joked that Ritesh’s wife did not look especially pleased in one of the photos, Ritesh corrected him at once. No, no, no, it was not like that. She was not unhappy. She had simply had to wash her hair twice that day.

That was how the conversation opened: with a small misunderstanding, gently corrected, and a festival still clinging to the week.

Holi had been the previous Wednesday. Monday had arrived with its own less festive colors: tiredness, bureaucracy, meetings, digital overload, domestic negotiation, and the slow invisible leak of energy that seems to define modern life in very different corners of the world.

The Mayor, hosting as usual from Europe, moved the conversation forward in his half-wry, half-reflective way. He admitted that he had barely slept the night before from Saturday to Sunday and had felt pretty rough the next day. He slipped in a brief advertisement for a side project called Doodle Horse, developed with Yanita as a kind of coping system for busy mothers trying to hold together children, husbands, careers, households, and everything else at once. He said he had been testing it himself, not that he was a mother, and was finding it invigorating. It was exactly the sort of slightly absurd, entirely sincere introduction he often brings to these calls.

Then he turned to Ritesh.

It was around 6:45 in the evening in Bengaluru. A full working day already done. The Mayor, trying again to coax Ritesh’s wife onto the screen, was told she was shy. “Indian shyness,” he called it, and Ritesh accepted that description with a kind of amused resignation.

The line between teasing and truth stayed present throughout the exchange. So did the line between exhaustion and choice.

When the Mayor asked how he was feeling, Ritesh’s answer was immediate and revealing. He was not feeling drained, he said, because this call was not like office work. It was not something he had to do. It was not the kind of meeting where one feels trapped simply because attendance is expected. This was different. This was enjoyment. This was pleasure. This was his own choice.

That distinction mattered more than it first appeared to.

For Ritesh, energy is not only about the body. It is also about consent. An hour spent in obligation drains one way. An hour spent in chosen conversation fills quite another.

Across the world in Campo Grande, Ismar joined from the beginning of his day. He had begun, even before the formal topic took shape, with what he regarded as good political news: his party had a candidate for governor in his state. If the man won and governed well, Ismar said, it would be good not just for him but for two million people. The current governor was not bad, but not as good as they needed. He gave the example at once, in his practical, grounded way: most of the roads he had used in the last three years were in bad condition.

That was very much Ismar’s style. He does not speak in broad abstractions for long without fastening them to something concrete. Roads. Documents. Noise. Distances. A blender at eleven at night. Mangoes falling from a tree. He thinks by way of details, and in that way his realism never feels performative. It simply feels lived.

When the Mayor asked what his Monday would look like, Ismar laid it out with patient clarity. After the call, he would help his mother prepare lunch. Then he would go to the health department to solve some issues. At four in the afternoon he had Pilates. Around six he would go home. There he would study, because he was preparing some documents. Then a snack. Then bed.

The Mayor, hearing this, began informally ranking the day by likely emotional impact. Lunch with his mother: positive. Pilates: positive. Going home: neutral to positive. The health department: clearly draining. Ismar agreed at once. The problem was bureaucracy. He needed a request from a civil doctor and then authorization for his mother’s blood work and other exams. There was a WhatsApp number one could theoretically use, but he had tried many times and it had not worked for him. So he had to go in person. Five kilometers there. Five kilometers back.

That was the first clear shape of energy-drain in the conversation: not catastrophe, not tragedy, just administrative friction. The kind that consumes a morning or an afternoon while offering very little back.

The Mayor then asked Ritesh to tell his own day in reverse, as if returning home and answering a spouse’s question: what have you done all day?

Again, Ritesh did not summarize. He narrated.

He and his wife had woken at seven. They got ready and went to a nearby park, only about a five-minute walk away. They walked there until eight. By 8:15 or 8:20 they were back home. He bathed, and by nine he was ready. On Mondays, he often logged in from home first to check email and see whether anything urgent needed to be prioritized. Then around 9:15 or 9:30 he left for the metro and made his way to the office.

Along the way came one of those small marital details that says more than a larger statement might have done: when he gets off the metro, the first thing he does is call his wife and tell her he has arrived. He keeps talking to her while walking toward the office and ends the call only when he reaches the lift.

Then office life took over.

He had to be there by 10:30 because there was a stand-up call at 10:45. He said, with a kind of corporate deadpan, that he did not really do anything in that stand-up. He did not even usually give updates. He mostly listened, watched progress, and asked the occasional question. Then came an hour block reserved for focused work, though some days that was swallowed by iteration planning. If the block stayed intact, he worked on whatever was most important. During that time, he said, people started pinging him. On Teams they could not call him during focus time, but they could certainly message. And so the day filled with the modern office’s familiar rhythm of interruptions: planned concentration, interrupted concentration, reactive work, low-grade vigilance.

This went on until around 4:30.

Then he left office early on Mondays so he could be home by 5:30 for another call, and from 6:30 onward, this conversation began. If he was ever late for it by five minutes, he explained, it meant something had happened in that earlier meeting and he could not escape in time.

After the call, dinner would be ready. On Mondays he usually ate late because of the timing. Then he and his wife went for a walk. When they returned, she would begin reminding him, with increasing force, that he was using the phone too much and should go to sleep. He would endure this until 10:30 or 11, then finally go to bed.

That, he said, was the actual cycle.

The detail gave the whole conversation a steadier pulse. It was no longer just “work drains me.” It was this specific chain of events: walk, bath, metro, stand-up, pings, calls, commute, dinner, another walk, phone, wife’s frustration, sleep.

The Mayor then asked whether he was a morning person or a night person.

Ritesh said he was trying to become a morning person. The phrasing mattered: trying, not claiming. He then looked backward and opened a window into an earlier life. For three years, he said, he and the other bachelors he lived with had gone to sleep at one or two in the morning. There had been strict office timing then. No working from home. One had to swipe a card physically. They lived crowded together, six people in a shared apartment, sometimes in a 2BHK. Morning was a rush to the bathroom, almost like a queue at a railway platform. There was no proper breakfast, no grace to it, no gentle beginning to the day. One practically threw water on oneself and ran.

Now, over the last six months, especially since his wife had come to live with him, that rhythm had changed. They were becoming morning people. Morning, he said, gave energy. It made him feel fresh. But he added the condition immediately, because he is not sentimental about discipline: only if one has slept enough. That is the key.

Ismar’s answer to the same question was delightfully unromantic. He said he was an early bird, but not really in a stable way. He could be sleepy at any time. After lunch, especially, was terrible. To sit still after lunch, to watch a lecture, to do something that did not involve moving the body — that was the worst.

The Mayor laughed and confessed to his own half-accidental siesta earlier in the day.

Then came one of the oddly intimate practical questions that run beneath all long-distance friendships: time zones. Europe’s daylight saving time would begin at the end of March, and suddenly the current schedule might no longer fit. The Mayor began doing arithmetic across continents. He worried aloud that pushing the call later in Bengaluru might not be ideal for domestic harmony. Should Ismar start earlier? Could the slot shift?

Then came one of the oddly intimate practical questions that run beneath all long-distance friendships: time zones.

Ismar, with characteristic ease, said any time worked for him. Eight was fine. Ritesh, though, said he thought he had convinced his wife that the Monday call was fine. It was only one day. She knew who he was talking to and what the topic was. The issue for her, he suggested, was not the existence of the call in itself but the social context: once she knew the shape of it, it was acceptable.

That answer offered a small but important truth about how trust works in ordinary marriages. Very often it is not time alone that matters. It is meaning.

The conversation then moved out from schedules and into neighborhoods.

The Mayor was almost jealous that Ritesh, living in a city of millions, could still go for a one-hour walk in a park. Ritesh said it had been difficult at first. For a couple of weeks he had not been habituated to waking early and going out. He felt sleepy. Forced. But now the walk relaxed him. More than that, he had begun running. First he counted laps. Now he counted minutes. That morning he had run for about twelve or thirteen minutes. Their routine was four thousand steps first; then he ran while his wife continued walking; then they returned home.

What had once cost energy now gave it.

That led him naturally into describing the part of Bengaluru where he lived. He said he had benefited from taking a flat near a place where the municipality had a good habit of cleaning the roads every day and collecting garbage regularly. He and others put the garbage outside the building, and it was collected. There were good parks. There were libraries nearby, two or three of them. For him, it was a good place to live.

And then, again, the second side: such places help only if people use them. His friends often say they will join him for a walk, tell him to call in the morning, then fail to come. In six months, he said, they had joined him perhaps twice.

The Mayor, amused, observed that men often wait for a serious health problem before realizing that they should have started taking care of themselves thirty or forty years earlier.

Ismar was then asked about his own neighborhood. Here the emotional weather changed. In his condo, he said, there was no good sound insulation. That drained his energy because so much depended on the behavior of one’s neighbors. In Brazil there is a law against certain noise between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., but some people do not respect it. Sometimes someone uses a blender at eleven at night. Sometimes they wash clothes late. It is terrible, he said. But the truly frustrating part is not being able to tell exactly which apartment the sound is coming from. If he knew, he could complain to the administrator. Since he does not know, the irritation has nowhere to go.

Outside, though, the neighborhood was more neutral. There were streets, homes, a square to walk in, and some outdoor gym equipment. From some windows he could see old mango trees, and in December many mangoes fell into the condo’s open space. He had never managed to catch any. He never knew exactly when they had fallen. From another window he could see a small place that sold wood for construction. That, he said plainly, was not a good visual.

The Mayor asked what floor he lived on. Four-storey building, first floor above the ground.

Then he asked Ritesh the same question: what do you see from your window?

Ritesh described a street and, next to it, a school — Nita English School. Not a language school, he clarified, just one of the many schools in India with “English” in the name. From his window he could see classrooms. During the daytime, the children’s voices blended into that familiar schoolyard resonance that can sound like shouting from a distance. There was an old tree beside the building, though he did not know what kind. His flat was on the second floor. The whole area, he said, was full of trees. Not exactly jungle, but tree-filled enough that the roads felt lined with life.

Still, there was also noise. His building was on a road, not a main road, but in such a densely populated place even that brought morning and evening sound. If the window was open, it could become an energy drainer. If the window was closed and one did not focus on it, it was bearable.

So both men, in different ways, lived in neighborhoods that were neither ideal nor hopeless. One had trees and school voices and municipal cleaning. The other had mango trees and thin walls and uncertain nighttime noise. Neither gave a simple answer when asked whether place nourished or depleted them. The answer was always mixed.

Technology, unsurprisingly, pushed the conversation toward sharper discomfort.

The Mayor admitted that too much time on laptop and phone physically hurt him. He spent long hours in front of screens, and it burned his eyes and compressed his head. He had two phones: one older device still useful for internet access when away from the desk, and the regular one.

Ritesh answered with real force. Technology had started affecting him physically too. He used to be almost proud of how many videos and debates he watched, but now his finger hurt from holding the phone. His device heated up. He had tried several things to reduce screen time, but he did not feel he had reached any point of freedom from it. Anything he wanted to do could be done on laptop, yes, but the problem was that he used both laptop and phone all day.

Then came another very vivid marital detail. The first thing he does in the morning is reach for the phone, and this is a daily source of argument with his wife. They have even begun keeping their phones far from the bed, yet still he reaches for it.

He said it quite starkly: he had become addicted to phones.

But he also explained why it was not so easy to stop. After work, he still felt he had not done “his own thing.” His own thing meant reading, watching videos, listening to debates, checking X or Twitter. So even once office obligations ended, the digital world continued to claim him under the name of leisure.

He had tried app limits. He had tried phone sleep mode after ten, when the screen turned gray and only a few apps were accessible. He had disabled these controls when the feeling arose that he might be missing something.

It was a modern confession in its pure form: I know this drains me, but I also experience it as one of the only remaining places that feels mine.

Ismar’s position was almost the inverse. Some days, if he had no class and no meeting, he could pass most of the day without using phone or computer much at all. When asked whether he had any advice for the others, he was calm and unsentimental: their work required technology. Unless they changed career, there was not much solution.

Ritesh agreed. Even people outside classic office jobs are now surrounded by devices. Manufacturing, machines, paperwork, verification, communication — all of it is computerized. What one can perhaps cut is personal phone use after work. But that, as he had just admitted, is exactly where the emotional dependence begins.

The Mayor described his own attempt to go slightly back toward the analog world. He kept a paper notebook. He wrote down his day by hand, hour by hour. He used large sheets of paper on the wall with Post-it notes as a task board. It was a way of getting away from the screen and seeing work in a different form. But he recognized, and Ritesh pointed out even more directly, that this was a privilege of working from home. Ritesh could not do that. His work environment ran through Jira and other systems where every task moved visibly from to-do to in progress to done, sometimes across multiple teams and multiple applications.

In other words, one man was trying to step away from the machine. The other was describing life inside it.

Artificial intelligence complicated the picture further.

Ismar said he had first really started learning about AI from the Mayor at the end of 2022. Now he used it almost daily, especially to check English or French writing, ask about specific books or characters, and gather information. But he added a warning in the practical way he often does: one cannot trust the answers one hundred percent. Sometimes one must ask twice, or ask another intelligence.

The Mayor said he was now a heavy AI user. The Pineapple issue he had sent out had taken only a few minutes to assemble as a PDF because he had written Python code and built a process around it. Soon, he said, the HTML version would reduce the work further.

Ritesh then spoke about AI at work. Microsoft Copilot was now embedded in the tools around him. The company had recently upgraded to a premium version. It automatically summarized meetings and tracked discussion points. He said that one and a half or two years earlier, he had been very afraid that his role might become obsolete. He was still there, and the fear had eased somewhat, but the threat remained imaginable. He often asked GPT and other tools what he should learn and how he could progress. The advice, he said, was often quite good.

Then, just as he was explaining how AI could replace certain kinds of routine work, he disappeared from the call. His laptop battery had died.

When he returned, he explained what had happened. The charger had not been plugged in properly. His wife, trying to help earlier, had switched something off instead of on. The Mayor joked that perhaps she was sending him a signal. Ritesh denied it, laughing.

From there, the discussion widened toward the social atmosphere surrounding each man.

The Mayor asked Ritesh what it is like to live in a country with such a huge population, especially in a city like Bengaluru. Ritesh said it was not really a question of coping anymore; people become habituated to it. Even so, for him personally, these big places still felt crowded. He said very clearly that he did not see this form of population concentration as an advantage for India. It was a disadvantage because people kept migrating toward the cities, and the cities could not handle them properly. The infrastructure — metro, rail, roads — was under constant pressure. Rural areas were not being developed enough. Work and opportunity were concentrated in urban centers, which drew still more migration, which then justified still more urban concentration. It had become a cycle.

He even added that the budget for Bengaluru consumed an enormous share of the wider state’s resources, leading people in other regions to feel neglected.

That answer was striking because it came not from resentment but from fairness. Ritesh tends to think in those terms. It is not only what helps me, but what is happening to others because of the way systems are arranged.

The Mayor then flipped the question and asked Ismar what it would be like for him to live in a tiny French village of 750 inhabitants, with little infrastructure and little going on. Ismar said, for a short time, he thought he would appreciate it. He does not live like a typical big-city man anyway, he said. He is not interested in discos, bars, or that kind of outward entertainment. It would not be much of a problem, he supposed.

That answer carried within it something of his deeper solitude: he did not need spectacle in order to endure life. He already knew how to live quietly.

Then came one of the most intimate questions of the whole call: how do you know that your energy is sinking? What happens to you?

Ritesh answered with more precision than many people manage even in private. The first thing to go is focus, he said. It does not feel possible to work. Meetings are the biggest energy drainer in the office because even if they are only marginally relevant, one must pay attention; someone may call on you, ask something, expect input. When his energy is low, he stops wanting to pay attention at all. His response time becomes slower. Even replying out of politeness or professionalism feels forced.

At home, the signs become even clearer. His tone changes. If someone is trying to be sweet with him, or romantic, or simply talk, he does not want to respond. He wants sleep. Peace. Silence. He does not want to talk. Even listening feels like giving away energy.

The Mayor recognized the pattern instantly. He said he knew the same problem in marriage: after a day spent talking to other people, he often has nothing left when his wife wants to tell him what has happened, what needs doing, what has been missed. Friday evenings, he admitted, are often particularly bad.

When he asked Ismar whether bureaucracy at the health department would visibly alter his mood, Ismar answered with the quiet resignation of someone who has grown accustomed to disappointment. Probably not much, he said. He hoped not. He was used to it. One good thing about becoming old, he suggested, is that one complains less than when one is young.

The Mayor laughed and said that Ismar was ahead of him because he still complained quite a lot.

At this point, Ritesh offered one of the most interesting cultural observations of the day. In India, he said, people often feel the opposite: the older people get, the more they complain. Younger generations experience elders as attached to older ways and forever pointing out what is wrong. For him, this was so normal that the Mayor, by comparison, seemed almost ideal.

And then came the broad final question: what is the greatest energy drainer for people nowadays, even if they do not say it openly?

Ismar answered first. He said many people seem to believe that happiness exists in money. Of course money is necessary, he said. One needs it to live. But he did not think it was the most important thing. Many people work, chase money, complain all the time, and remain unhappy. He mentioned that one of his sisters often tells him he is a happy man because he has a reasonable salary and no financial worries.

Ritesh’s answer for Bengaluru was different and, in a way, harsher. He said it was the race. Everyone comparing themselves with everyone else. Everyone looking sideways. Everyone worried. On the metro in the morning, he said, very few people wear smiles. They look anxious. One fears losing a job. Another fears the office. Another fears something else entirely. He did not claim to know each person’s story, but he said he could see it on their faces: fear and insecurity are draining them.

The Mayor then brought in a story about a man from New Zealand who had told him that money gave him energy. The Mayor had pushed back and said that wealth comes from many places, including friendship, and that someone with good friends may be richer than a man with vast power and money but no one reliable around him.

It was a slightly philosophical turn, perhaps inevitably. But by then the call had earned it.

Because what had the three men really done for that hour? They had not solved fatigue. They had not fixed bureaucracy. They had not escaped screens. They had not stopped cities from swelling or workplaces from tracking every movement. They had simply described, with unusual honesty, the thousand ordinary ways energy is spent before a person even notices it has gone.

A wife washing Holi powder from her hair twice in one day.

A husband calling from the metro before entering the office.

A stand-up meeting where almost nothing is said and yet attention must still be paid.

A five-kilometer trip to a health department because the WhatsApp number does not work.

A condo wall too thin to block a blender at eleven at night.

Four thousand morning steps in a city of millions.

A school visible from a window.

Garbage collected regularly by a municipality that is doing at least one thing right.

A phone reached for before sunrise despite every intention not to.

A hand aching from holding the device that promises relief.

A mother waiting for help with lunch.

A man who can pass a day almost without technology.

Another man who cannot imagine such a day.

And a host, somewhere in between, trying to turn exhaustion into conversation before it hardens into silence.

Energy is not lost only in labor. It is lost in vigilance, in comparison, in being reachable.

The call began with Holi, but what it revealed was Monday. Not Monday as symbol, but Monday as lived structure: routines, interruptions, small loyalties, frictions, private compromises, shared laughter, bodily tiredness, and the quiet recognition that energy is not lost only in labor. It is lost in vigilance. In comparison. In being reachable. In bureaucracy. In traffic. In tone. In noise. In the effort of staying decent when one has already been overused by the day.

And yet there was one other truth visible by the end.

For that hour, none of them sounded more depleted than when they began. If anything, they sounded steadier. The call itself had not drained them. It had returned something. Perhaps because, in a world of pings and tasks and obligations, it is still possible for conversation to do the opposite of extraction.

Sometimes the thing that saves a day is not rest.

Sometimes it is being heard.

He overslept.

He got up at half past six instead of at his usual involuntary hour between half past three and four. But then the evening before had run later than was wise. He had been working on a report, and the mind, once engaged with duty, is not always disposed to release itself at a reasonable time. So he rose later than usual, and for a little while there was the modest luxury of breakfast and coffee in peace.

It was then that the automation idea came to him.

He asked the Fruitbowl whether it could be done, and it appeared that it could. He had already done something similar. It was the same process, only the content differed. He felt at once the strong temptation not to pursue the matter further. One can always find reasons to postpone a discussion that promises to introduce structure into one’s life. But priorities, if neglected, lead to misunderstandings; and misunderstandings, once they have taken up residence in a household, are far more laborious to remove than dust.

The Dustbusters arrived about ninety minutes later.

He printed them out and looked at them with the curious mixture of interest and suspicion with which a man regards a plan that may improve his life at the cost of altering it. The moment had come. Doodle Horse had quizzed him carefully about his needs and had promised to set something up. She had said, “in a little bit,” and then had sent him his cleaning instructions. The phrase had had an uncomfortable ring to it. Instructions for cleaning carried with them something faintly disciplinary, as though one had, without quite intending it, enrolled in a moral programme.

The week before, they had discussed shopping and food planning. None of this was entirely new to him. He was, in fact, a very observant shopper. He generally had a fair sense of prices, and of what was going on in the two supermarkets he usually used. Last week, perhaps in the euphoria of the whole enterprise, he had overspent. This week he intended to take a different approach. To sit down first and work out a complete food plan and only then go shopping did not, he felt, suit the temper of that particular morning. He had a rough idea of what he needed. So there would be no list. He would instead focus on habits, and he would not skimp in the fruit and veg section.

He bought some grocery cupboard items. There were two unplanned purchases: a bag of crisps and a bottle of peanut oil, not usually available, but useful given that the cooking routine at home was Asian-infused. He also noticed a promotion on rice noodles, made a swift calculation, and discovered that the XXL bags offered him three for the price of two. He took the last two remaining bags.

The shopping came to forty-seven euros, and with that sum came a vow: he would not go shopping again until the following week. The basket had been balanced. The pantry was doing well. He wished to experiment, on a small scale, with a food philosophy that interested him. Buy what you need and cook, or cook what you want and buy to replenish. It seemed simple enough, but he knew from experience that simplicity in domestic life is often achieved only after considerable complexity of thought.

By ten o’clock the groceries were stored, and the time had come to study the Dustbusters. The list looked a little overwhelming. He realised it would not be as straightforward as the page suggested, because the day was not to be devoted exclusively to cleaning. When his wife was away, tradition in the house dictated that Mother should come for Saturday lunch at half past twelve, and she had requested a pizza, with lots of mushrooms.

He was not going to buy a cardboard pizza. Cooking provided balance, and balance was imperative. Besides, he had made pizzas before. The first lesson, then, was plain enough: integrate the Dustbusters into your day. They were not a standalone product. He made himself a cup of tea and considered the order in which events must now be arranged.

Make the dough. Let it rise. Clean the living room, forty square metres of it. Try to finish in time for lunch to be served in a pleasantly clean environment. Finish the pizza. Serve at half past twelve. Sharp.

Then he remembered the laundry. It was the second wash. The first had been done almost immediately after he had crawled out of bed. The Guinea Pig had two problems: thinking, and thinking in processes. Thus the simple business of laundry became a complex operation. One must think with the end in mind. The clean clothes had to go somewhere. So how did one arrange them in such a way that no additional work was created later? His wife was not good at this. There was so much clutter that any process began with clearing space before one could get to the actual task. It drove him crazy.

The whites wash was hung, and he surveyed the scene.

The bedroom is supposed to be the intimate sanctuary of the house. Theirs was not. In fact, the whole house had become rather like a jumble sale. How did other people do it? Perhaps, he thought, they planned. Perhaps they worked towards long-term projects. Let us put new wallpaper in the living room. Very well. You begin with the idea, explore the options, set up a budget, determine who does what, execute, and then enjoy. Together, as a family, you build momentum and do it when time and money allow. Family time, spent away from the television. The notion had great attractions in theory.

The dough was done.

The Dustbuster had said that one of Saturday’s tasks, among others, was to deep clean a room. Guinea’s problem was more complex than the paper allowed for. All the rooms needed a deep spring clean. There had been neglect. There had been work priorities, and those had led to misunderstandings. There had been pressure, health concerns, and the chaos of a life that did not fit into the cheerful categories of household advice. It spread over two countries. There had been a life-changing accident over two years before, and what had once been called recovery was now merely the permanent state of play. There were mother and mother-in-law in their eighties, and a great deal of travelling, his wife doing that. The only constant was constant flexibility. It had taken its toll.

He stood in the living room and asked himself whether he could clean this monster in ninety minutes. And what, exactly, did “deep clean” mean? He began by shifting furniture into the adjacent office, and the answer presented itself in brutal honesty. Armed with microfibre cloths, which he had fetched from upstairs, he began. It was not difficult. It was merely a matter of wiping everything with a wet cloth and allowing the clean surface to reveal itself.

The dust vanished, and the meditative spirit arrived.

He found himself asking how dust thought. If one imagined oneself to be dust, how did one spend one’s days? Did one remain hidden in a corner and participate in family life from the margins, listening to conversations, doing one’s own thing, merely existing? How did dust see the world? Was dust colour blind? And how was it that dust seemed always to multiply? Was that, from dust’s point of view, fun?

Something odd was happening to him. He was entering into the flow of the work, and it was actually becoming enjoyable. It ceased to be a thankless chore, the sort of thing one did because it had to be done and because one feared what the neighbours might think, and worse, what they might say. It became instead awareness, relaxation, meditation. Zen.

He came to the trolley with his wife’s family photographs. His mother-in-law, a complex personality, had once said to him in the course of an argument, “Don’t you underestimate me.” He had chosen not to, and twenty years later did not regret taking the advice. It seemed to him that he knew her thinking sometimes better than her three children did. He saw the last picture taken of his father, about ten days before his passing. Other family members looked out from their frames. What had they been doing then? There was a picture of his daughter, now expecting a second child at the end of July.

His mother-in-law, a complex personality, had once said to him in the course of an argument, “Don’t you underestimate me.” He had chosen not to, and twenty years later did not regret taking the advice.

As he handled the objects and looked at them, each told a story and brought back a memory. Cleaning was becoming a storytelling session in his head. The phone was in jail. There was no music, and nothing else to distract him. He merely looked at the objects and touched them. He saw the tray with a teapot and two cups. It was not practical, but it was somehow beautiful. He could not remember the last time it had been used. Now it sat there like a lost child gathering dust. Why?

Beauty. Beauty matters.

Why drink tea from a branded mug with some design on it, on the go, when one could slow down and use what had been sitting there all this time? One could take time to savour not only the beverage, but the vessel, and remember how it had come into the house in the first place. He remembered them buying it. The shop no longer existed. And it seemed that the teapot and the two cups had somehow died as well.

He looked at the clock.

The dining end of the living room had been done. It had taken an hour and a half. The dust had moved out, unappreciated. The furniture had been wiped down. It was time to put things back for lunch. And he felt strangely calm. He was breathing differently. This, he thought, was how it was supposed to be. It was not exactly nice. The word escaped him. But it was right.

Then he went into the kitchen and found himself in the middle of a minor catastrophe.

The pizza toppings had been arranged. In fact, while the living room floor had been drying, he had gone back to cut the mushrooms and peppers. It was then that he realised his mistake. The shopping experiment — focusing on certain items, observing habits, even privately noting with amusement that the price of butter, which before Christmas had sunk to a spectacularly low level and had even made the media, had now gone up again by twenty cents — had taken longer than expected.

But he had forgotten to buy the mozzarella.

A pizza without cheese is no pizza at all, or so the purists say; and yet necessity has a way of compelling innovation more effectively than imagination. There was no time, and certainly no flexibility, to nip into town, seven kilometres away, and retrieve the missing culprit. He stood for a moment in the kitchen with the flat gaze of a man confronted not by tragedy, but by the ridiculous inconvenience from which the day will nonetheless take its tone.

But he had feta.

Would feta work?

He also had some leftover pineapple. That endless discussion. There are questions over which civilisation appears determined to divide itself, and pineapple on pizza is one of them. But the fact remained that some of the most interesting meals arise from experiments disguised as missing ingredients. He had no choice. And the feta, to judge by its general air, had already decided that it wanted to leave this earth anyway.

So lunch would proceed on altered terms.

At this point Mother came into the kitchen and noticed the casually but strategically placed Dustbuster sheets. A few minor words in translation were exchanged, and then there followed a brief explanation. He explained what the sheets were, how they were meant to work, and that they were not fixed in stone. They were adaptable. They had to be integrated into daily routine if they were to succeed. That required adaptation and priorities, so as to avoid misunderstandings. It was all, he said in effect, about mindset.

This led at once to horror.

Sundays, it transpired, had also been assigned tasks.

No. Sundays, according to Mother, was a day of rest.

She instructed him to say hello to Doodle Horse and to tell her that she disagreed with the Sunday task. He did. And Doodle Horse replied, say hi too, I agree with her, actually.

Guinea suspected that men needed to be kept on a short lead.

Lunch came. The pizza was appreciated. The feta had done its duty. The pineapple had, for the moment, survived its scandal. A possible domestic disaster had been converted into a meal. But by then he needed to recharge his batteries. There is a point at which a man is no longer virtuous in continuing, only less efficient. So he paused.

By two o’clock he was up again and doing the second half of the living room. He had by now got into the swing of things. Yet he still wondered why he had to clean up after the cats.

That thought in turn gave rise to a more interesting question. When is something dirty?

The answer came to him with the severe plainness of fact.

When you think it is.

On that basis, the recommended and already enacted task of cleaning the cat blankets on a bi-weekly cycle was axed. They needed changing every week. New law. If wife and mother were at loggerheads over the number of times the washing machine got used, then so be it. Cleaning was personal. If one did not feel comfortable, it drained energy and made one generally unpleasant. It was as simple as that.

Mercifully, the cats were out frolicking in the sunshine and warmth, so the operation passed without hiccup. He moved the table with the amplifier and the books he was supposed to finish reading, and then the lizard appeared.

It was not alive. But somehow it had undergone a strange transformation and seemed to have passed from leather to plastic. He was not at all sure, at first sight, whether it was some toy left behind. In fact, it looked like a bonsai crocodile. Guinea stared at it. How had it got there? The answer was not difficult. It had escaped the cats, but had died of starvation. The more humiliating question was how anybody could have missed it.

It was the low point of the whole operation.

When the cleaning had been finished and the furniture put back in its place, he made himself another cup of tea and sat at the dining table. The sun was pouring in through the window, and he basked in its glow. It was a strange feeling: deep relaxation, a sense of accomplishment, and a sense of being alive. The memories remained with him. The adventure of the lizard. The wooden tobacco container, once used for that purpose in the days when smoking was still considered socially acceptable, now repurposed as a receptacle for foreign coins from various travels.

The room spoke stories. They had been buried and forgotten, and now they had regained their shine.

The Dustbuster sheets were in front of him. He ticked off several items. Meal plan. He was not going to get around that. So he went to the office, got the shopping receipt, and systems thinking struck him. He wanted to know how his forty-seven euros had been allocated. The largest share had gone on fruit and veg. That was good.

He then put together the meal plan on the basis of what there was. There would be no need for further shopping that week. The meals would be simple, healthy, balanced, and doable, given the workload that awaited him. It is one thing to plan aspirational meals and another to plan those that can actually be made by a tired man on a working evening. He was wise enough to prefer the second.

But now there presented itself a fresh challenge. There were leftovers from the pizza — mushrooms, peppers, some feta — and he had bought some Turkish peppers. There was rice. He went to the office to get Raphael and asked him. The result was interesting.

The phone sprang to life again. He had shared his accomplishments with Doodle Horse. There was accountability in this. One had to show her that one was taking the matter seriously. It was, after all, her project, and he was the guinea pig.

The response was typical. Practical. Down to earth.

Well, to be honest, it took a long time but not too long. The idea is to not let it get that bad again. Hence the cleaning schedule 🤣🤣🤣🤣 a few minutes per day will save hours. 🤷🏼‍♀️🤷🏼‍♀️🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Tell me something I don’t know, he thought. It was a slight slap on the wrists, for being a below-standard guinea pig. Oh well.

He sat there, slowly emptying his brain, writing sheets of paper with thoughts, with things that had to be done. DYD, he had called it. Design Your Day. Or, as he had mentioned to her, Doodle Horse Your Day.

It seemed fitting.

For she had messaged him the adventures of her own morning: doing something meaningful with a new friend, winning a prize, and getting even more ideas for Doodle Horse.

He found this curious. Both of them had done something different. She had gone out to have fun and had come back more energised than expected. He had done what desperately needed doing and had come back much wiser. And in that lay the strange connection.

For that, perhaps, was the lesson of the day.

A house does not descend into disorder all at once, nor is it restored by heroics alone. It slips, little by little, through fatigue, pressure, grief, divided loyalties, work, age, illness, travel, accident, and the thousand domestic postponements by which people excuse themselves until they can no longer bear the result. And it is restored in equally modest ways: one wash hung out, one room cleaned properly, one lunch improvised, one blanket changed when it no longer feels right, one receipt examined, one week planned, one list adapted to reality instead of worshipped as law.

The underlying truth was now visible enough. Order was not rigidity. It was care. Adaptation was not failure. It was intelligence. A routine did not exist to dominate the day, but to support it. If it was not integrated into life, with all its interruptions and absurdities, it would collapse into one more source of resentment. But if it was adapted with honesty and followed with a certain steadiness, it might prevent misunderstandings before they began.

He sat there in the late afternoon, the cleaned room around him, the sun warm on the table, the papers before him, and felt that the day had become something rather more than a day of housework. It had become an act of attention. The objects had spoken, the dust had departed, the stories of the room had resurfaced, and life, which had lately seemed so much a matter of coping, had for a few hours disclosed another possibility.

Not ease.

Not perfection.

But a kind of rightness.

And that, in the end, was enough.

The Meals

A Turkish tavern–style fried rice (meyhane style) would lean into olive oil, peppers, feta, and a little acidity. It becomes closer to a warm pilav / sautéed rice meze rather than Asian fried rice. 🍳🌶️

Turkish Tavern Rice with Feta, Mushrooms & Sivri Peppers

Ingredients

• 2 cups cooked rice (preferably cooled)
• Leftover mushrooms
• Bell peppers from the pizza
• 2 sivri peppers, sliced
• 1 small onion, finely chopped
• 2 cloves garlic
• 3–4 tbsp olive oil
• 100 g feta, crumbled
• 1 tsp tomato paste
• ½ tsp pul biber (Turkish chili flakes)
• ½ tsp dried oregano or thyme
• Black pepper
• Juice of ¼ lemon

Optional tavern touches:

• chopped parsley
• a few olives
• toasted pine nuts

Method

• Start the base
  • Heat olive oil in a wide pan.
  • Cook the onion slowly until soft and slightly golden.
• Add flavor
  • Stir in garlic and tomato paste.
  • Fry the paste for about 1 minute so it darkens and becomes aromatic.
• Cook vegetables
  • Add mushrooms, bell peppers, and sivri peppers.
  • Cook on medium-high heat until slightly charred.
• Add rice
  • Add the rice and break it apart.
  • Toss well so the oil and tomato paste coat the grains.
• Season
  • Add pul biber, oregano, black pepper, and a squeeze of lemon.
• Finish
  • Turn off heat and fold in crumbled feta.
  • Sprinkle parsley on top.

How it would be served in a tavern

Serve warm with:

• yogurt or cacık
• tomatoes & cucumber
• olives
• flatbread

It becomes almost a mezze-style rice dish rather than a main.

🔥 Chef’s tavern trick:
At the very end, drizzle a little extra olive oil and lemon over the rice just before serving. It gives the dish that authentic meyhane freshness.