Two families, one pandemic: What 'Kaal Katha' reveals about India's class divide

By Ravi Ranjan 

The COVID-19 pandemic was not merely a health crisis; it was a brutal revelation of modern society’s deep-seated inequalities. While the virus was universal, the experience of the crisis was sharply divided by class, resources, and occupation. One section of society worked from home in safety, while another—the vast labouring class—faced a catastrophic collision of hunger, unemployment, and the desperate struggle for survival. Santosh Dixit’s Hindi short story, ‘Kaal Katha’ (The Story of Time), captures this historic moment not as a news report but as a profound human document. Through the parallel lives of two families, the story exposes the class contradictions of contemporary India while simultaneously affirming those universal human bonds—love, waiting, fear, and hope—that persist even in the most adverse circumstances.

The Divided City: A Geography of Class

The story opens with a vivid spatial metaphor: a railway line that cuts a city into two distinct worlds. On one side lie slums, garbage heaps, and the daily struggle of workers like Krishna Bind. On the other stretch wide roads, multi-storey buildings, an airport, and the secure world of the affluent Vasudev Srivastava. This is not merely a physical division but a visible map of class relations. As the paper notes, from a Marxist perspective, the city’s geography becomes the geography of production itself—those who produce and those who consume inhabit separate, unequal worlds.

Krishna Bind represents the working class: his life depends on daily physical labour—pulling a cart, selling vegetables. His income is uncertain, his existence precarious. Vasudev Srivastava, by contrast, embodies the educated, economically secure middle class, cushioned by savings, global connections, and the ability to work from home. The story’s central power lies in placing these two lives side by side, showing how the same crisis—the pandemic and subsequent lockdown—produces radically different realities.

Two Families, One Crisis

For the Srivastava family, lockdown means safety, comfort, and digital connection. They make video calls to their sons in America and Britain, share photos on WhatsApp, and take pride in their children’s global success. For Krishna Bind and his wife Sundari Devi, lockdown is a catastrophe. With no daily wages, they face immediate hunger. Their sons, Ajay and Vijay, are trapped as migrant labourers in Punjab, their factory closed, their employer vanished.

The mobile phone emerges as a powerful, ironic symbol. On the surface, technology appears to democratise experience—both families own a phone. But the paper, drawing on a cultural studies perspective, shows that the same object carries opposite meanings. For Srivastava, the phone is a tool of convenience, entertainment, and global connection. For Krishna Bind, it becomes an instrument of anxiety: every ring brings either a moment of relief or the fear of bad news. Technology, the story insists, does not erase class; it merely adopts new forms of inequality.

When Ajay and Vijay decide to walk home with millions of other stranded workers, the story taps into the defining tragedy of the pandemic. The parents wait endlessly, their hopes and fears rising with each call. Here, ‘Kaal Katha’ ceases to be the tale of one family and becomes the collective story of India’s migrant labour force—those invisible hands that power the economy yet remain the first to be discarded in a crisis.

Dreams Deferred: Education, Labour, and the Myth of Merit

One of the story’s most searing insights concerns the myth of equal opportunity. Krishna Bind dreams for his children: he wants them educated, wants a proper roof on his house, wants a better life. But his sons drop out of school and leave for Punjab because the local economy offers no dignified work. The Srivastava children, by contrast, receive private schooling, tutors, and a competitive environment, eventually securing global careers.

The paper argues that this is not a failure of individual effort but of structural justice. Success, the story shows, is not merely the result of hard work; it is also the product of social and economic capital. Krishna Bind’s dreams are no less noble than Srivastava’s achievements, but the system allocates opportunities so unevenly that one family’s hopes become another’s tragedy. From a sociological perspective, education here does not function as a vehicle of mobility but as a mechanism that reproduces existing class hierarchies.

The Final Tragedy: Class as Destiny

The story’s ending is devastating in its quiet irony. Both families are waiting. Both have prepared food. Both imagine the joyful return of their children. The Srivastavas receive happy news—their son is coming home safely. At the same moment, Krishna Bind and Sundari Devi learn that their grandson has died in a truck accident on the migrant road.

The paper, drawing on multiple critical lenses, insists that this is not mere coincidence or personal misfortune. From a Marxist perspective, it is a class tragedy: the affluent possess the resources to ensure safe mobility, while the working class is forced into risky, unprotected journeys. From a subaltern viewpoint (influenced by Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak), the story gives voice to those whom mainstream discourse renders invisible—not as statistics but as human beings with names, faces, and shattered dreams. And from an existentialist perspective (echoing Camus and Heidegger), the grandson’s death represents the absurd, uncertain condition of life itself: humans make plans, but the world does not follow them.

Beyond Critique: Humanist Sensibility

Yet ‘Kaal Katha’ is not merely an indictment of inequality. Its enduring power, the paper argues, lies in its humanist core. Despite the chasm of class, both families share fundamental emotions: parental love, anxiety for children, the pain of separation, and the hope of reunion. When Krishna Bind tells his sons to come home, knowing he has few resources, he affirms something universal—that human bonds matter more than material security.

The story refuses to turn the rich into villains or the poor into mere objects of pity. The Srivastavas are not cruel; they are simply beneficiaries of an unequal structure. Krishna Bind is not a heroic martyr; he is an ordinary man struggling with ordinary dignity. This balance—compassion without sentimentality, critique without caricature—is the story’s greatest artistic achievement.

Conclusion: Literature as Witness

‘Kaal Katha’ is a representative work of its time, one that transforms the specific horrors of the pandemic into a timeless reflection on class, labour, and human connection. It reminds us that crises do not affect everyone equally; they expose the fault lines that ordinary life conceals. Yet within those fault lines, the story discovers something resilient: the will to wait, to hope, to love, and to keep struggling.

As the original paper concludes, this story does not merely record history—it illuminates the deep truths of human existence when stripped of illusion. For readers today, ‘Kaal Katha’ is both a memorial to a tragic period and an urgent reminder that the inequalities it portrays have not disappeared. They have merely, like the railway line in the story, been built into the very geography of our lives.

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This is the abridged version of the original paper by Ravi Ranjan, Professor & former Head (Retd.), Department of Hindi, University of Hyderabad