Available, Just Ask
Someone sent Shiva a meme two days ago. A man in sunglasses, sitting on a tower of gas cylinders, holding a sign that said: Available. Just ask. Shiva laughed the first time. Then he put the phone down and went back to waiting for his own cylinder, which had not yet arrived.
The shortage had arrived without much warning. Hotels in his area were shut. The small canteen near his office had a handwritten note on the door saying they would reopen once supplies came. The government had started regulating how cylinders were distributed, which Shiva understood as necessary, but understanding something and living with it are not the same thing. His kitchen had been quiet for three days.
He called the agency on the first day and was told there was no stock. He called again the next morning. Still nothing. That evening, a neighbour mentioned she had found one through a contact, outside the usual system, for twice the standard price. She had paid it without much hesitation. Her children needed to eat.
Get Dravida Seetharam’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Shiva had once read a book by the American professor Michael Sandel on markets and fairness. Sandel’s argument was simple: markets are good at moving things from one place to another, but they are not designed to ask who deserves something. They only ask who can pay. When a necessity becomes scarce, the market does not sort by need. It sorts by money. The man in the meme was not doing anything the market would call wrong. He had found a gap and filled it. That is what markets reward.
What the market does not ask is whether the woman who could not pay that price also needed to feed her children. Or whether the hotel owner who closed for three days had any way to recover that loss. Or whether the canteen worker who went without wages during the shutdown will get them back. The market is quiet on those questions. It was not built to answer them.
Shiva’s wife cooked on a small electric coil they had kept as a backup for years. The food was fine but slow, and the coil got very hot and smelled faintly of burning. The children ate without complaint. They had learned, as children do, that some situations simply require patience.
The cylinder arrived on the fourth day. Shiva signed the form, carried it in, and his wife turned on the stove. The flame came up immediately, steady and blue. He stood there for a moment before walking away. It is strange how ordinary things only become visible once they have been taken from you for a while.
