My Side Hustle Outgrew My Salary and My Courage
The numbers said quit; my father's voice in my head said pension.
For eleven months, I kept two spreadsheets, and one of them was a secret. The first tracked my salary from the bank: dependable, beige, arriving on the last working day of every month like a well-behaved train. The second tracked the other money. The money I was not supposed to be making.
By last March, the secret spreadsheet was bigger.
I should explain what the side hustle actually was, because when people hear "side hustle" they picture cryptocurrency or candles. Mine was stranger: I wrote poems for strangers. Commissioned, personalized poems. Wedding toasts for grooms who loved their brides enormously and articulately loved nothing. Anniversary verses. Retirement tributes. Twice, and these were the ones that wrecked me, poems for funerals, written from a stack of voice notes sent by a widow at 1 a.m.
It started as an accident. Three years ago, bored on a Sunday, I picked up a writing prompt that said: write a love poem in the voice of someone bad with words. I wrote one as my father, a man who has never once said "I love you" but has checked the tyre pressure on every car I have ever driven. I posted it on a community wall for poets, went to make tea... and came back to find it being shared by strangers who all seemed to have the same father.
The first commission request arrived that week. A man wanted a version for his own wedding, about his own tyre-checking father, sitting in the second row. He paid me two thousand rupees. I remember staring at the payment notification thinking... this is illegal, surely. Being paid for feelings.
Within a year I had a backlog. Within two, a waitlist and a rate card I kept raising out of pure panic, the way you raise a drawbridge. People did not want generic verses. They wanted their grandmother's specific kitchen, their husband's specific laugh, love with the serial numbers still on it. And they would pay for it, more than I would have believed, because it turns out the market for saying the unsayable is enormous and almost nobody is selling.
Meanwhile, at the bank, I processed loan files and attended a meeting every Tuesday about the minutes of the previous Tuesday's meeting.
Everything ever written about quitting a job for a side hustle assumes the math is the hard part. It is not. The math took me one evening. Poetry income: one point four times my salary, growing. Expenses: a laptop and my own sleep.
The math said go.
The math had been saying go for months, in an increasingly irritated tone.
The hard part was a voice, and the voice was my father's.
He never even said the words to me directly. He did not have to. The voice was installed early, like wiring. My father worked thirty-four years at the electricity board. In our house, "pension" was not a financial instrument. It was a religion, a compass, the moral of every story. Neighbours' sons who went into business were discussed in the tone reserved for boys who had joined cults. Security was not one value among many. It was the value, the thing his whole generation had bled for, and here I was, drafting a resignation letter because strangers liked my poems.
So I did not quit. Month after month, the secret spreadsheet outgrew the beige one, and I stayed. I turned down commissions because of Tuesday meetings. I wrote a bride's father-daughter dance poem in the bank toilet on my phone. I was, by any honest accounting, working two jobs and doing the wrong one better.
My flatmate staged what she called an intervention and I called an ambush. "You're not scared of failing," she said, jabbing a samosa at me. "Your numbers are boring, that's how safe this is. You're scared of a seventy-year-old man in Meerut."
"He's not scary," I said. "He's worse. He's proud of me."
In April, I finally did it.
Not the quitting. The confessing.
I took the train home, and after dinner, while my mother pretended to watch a serial at a volume that fooled no one, I opened my laptop and showed my father both spreadsheets. I had prepared it like a loan file, because I wanted him to see it in his own language: income streams, growth rate, six months of expenses in reserve. I talked for twenty minutes. He said nothing... His face did the thing it does, which is nothing, magnificently.
When I finished, I braced for the sermon. Pension. Security. The neighbour's son and the cult of business.
Instead, he got up, went to the steel cupboard, and came back with a file so old its edges had gone soft, like cloth. He put it in front of me.
Inside was a loan application. Nineteen ninety-four. For a photo studio. "Mehra Photo Point," in his handwriting, on a form from my own bank, four years before I was born.
Rejected. Insufficient collateral.
"I was good," he said. He was looking at the file, not me. "Weddings, portraits. Your mother's photo in the front room, I took that. Everyone said, Mehra, your eye, your eye. But your grandfather's voice was in my head. Government job. Pension. So I applied once, quietly, got refused once... and told myself the matter was decided by fate." He closed the file. "It was not decided by fate. It was decided by fear, and I gave fear your grandfather's voice so I would not have to hear it in mine."
The serial blared... My mother had stopped pretending to watch it.
"You have been listening to my voice," he said. "I know. I put it there. But beta, understand one thing clearly."
"I never wanted you to have a pension. I wanted you to never be afraid. I got the two things confused, because in my time they were the same thing."
Then he tapped the secret spreadsheet, once, the way he taps a tyre he has just checked and found sound, and said, "This one is real. That other one is just a habit with a salary."
I resigned in June. My manager, to her credit, asked only one question: "The poem thing?" Apparently everyone knew. Banks are terrible at secrets; that is why they need vaults.
It has been a year. Some months are fat and some are frightening, and I have learned that courage is not a feeling, it is a standing instruction, something you set up once and then honour on the days you do not feel it. I work from a one-room office I rent above a tailor's shop, and I still keep two spreadsheets, out of superstition. Neither one is secret anymore.
My father asks about the business on every call, with the studied casualness of a man checking on a fixed deposit. Last month I framed the 1994 loan application and hung it above my desk. He saw it on a video call and was silent for a moment.
"Good frame," he said... High praise. The tyre pressure of compliments.
Most nights I finish late, and before I lock up, I stand at the window for a minute. The tailor's sign hums below. The city goes on and on, lit windows all the way to the horizon, and I think about how many of those windows have a secret spreadsheet glowing in them, and a voice, and a soft-edged file in a steel cupboard that nobody has confessed to yet.
If one of those windows is yours: the math was never the question.
Ask whose voice it is. Then ask what they would say now.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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