On Saturday, April 25, 2026, at around 5:33 in the evening, a PCR call reached the Netaji Subhash Place Metro Police Station in Delhi. The complaint was not about a crime. It was about a smell. The women's washroom at Inderlok Metro Station had been locked from the inside for a while, and something was wrong.
Police arrived, forced the door open, and found a man approximately 40 years old, unidentified hanging inside. Preliminary investigation suggested he was the caretaker of that very washroom. The man whose job it was to keep that space clean, functional, and open for others had been dead for at least two days before anyone thought to check.
Two days. In one of Delhi's busiest metro corridors. And no one had noticed he was gone.
That detail quiet, devastating, easy to scroll past is the part of this story that deserves to stay with us.
Think about the people you pass without seeing.
The man who mops the floor of the metro station before you step onto the platform. The woman who hands you a token at the counter. The person restocking the tissue paper in the washroom you use for thirty seconds before rushing back to your life.
These people show up. Every day. Often before you arrive and long after you leave. They exist in the margins of spaces that millions of people move through present enough to be useful, invisible enough to go unnoticed.
The man found at Inderlok was one of them. He had a job. He had a routine. He was there, in that station, every day. And when he stopped being there when the door stayed locked and the smell began, the first reaction wasn't concern for him. It was a complaint about the inconvenience.
That is not a judgment on the person who made the call. That is simply how invisible some lives have become.
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from a life lived in the background.
Not the exhaustion of a hard project at work, or a difficult semester, or a stressful week. Something quieter and heavier than that. The exhaustion of waking up every day to a job that pays just enough to survive, in a city that costs more than you can afford, surrounded by people who look through you rather than at you.
It doesn't announce itself. It doesn't come with a diagnosis or a leave application or a concerned manager checking in. It builds slowly, in the gap between what life costs and what life pays, in the loneliness of going unrecognized, in the creeping feeling that if you disappeared, the world would take two days and a bad smell to notice.
This kind of pain is real. It is widespread. And in India, it falls most heavily on the people who can least afford to carry it, the daily wage earners, the contract workers, the informal sector employees who keep cities running while remaining largely unseen by the systems designed to support them.
One of the hardest things about emotional pain in working-class life is that it often has no space to exist.
When you are living on a daily wage, you cannot take a mental health day. You cannot log off early. You cannot afford therapy, and even if you could, the stigma in many communities makes it nearly impossible to ask for help without fear of being seen as weak, unstable, or a burden.
So people carry it. They show up. They do the job. They go home or they don't go home, because sometimes going home means facing a different set of pressures. And from the outside, it looks like they are fine, because looking fine is often the only option available to them.
The man at Inderlok showed up to his shift. He locked the door. And no one thought to ask why, or how he was doing, or whether he needed anything at all.
In many working environments, especially informal or low-wage ones, expressing emotional distress is seen as a liability. Workers who seem "too emotional" or "unstable" risk losing the job that is holding their entire life together. So they learn to mask. To manage. To smile and say "theek hoon" when they are anything but.
For those with salaried jobs, a bad week can be absorbed, take a sick day, talk to a friend, maybe see a doctor. For someone on a daily wage or a short-term contract, a bad week means a gap in income that cascades into rent, food, and everything else. Financial precarity and emotional distress feed each other in a loop that is very hard to break from the inside.
Many of India's informal workers are migrants, people who left their home states for better opportunities in cities like Delhi, living in cramped accommodations, far from family, with no real community around them. When things get dark, there is often no one nearby to notice. No one who knows their schedule well enough to realize the routine has broken.
This is perhaps the most important one. The people we are most likely to miss are not the ones who are visibly struggling. They are the ones who seemed perfectly normal right up until they weren't. The ones whose pain was so well-hidden by circumstance, by pride, by the belief that no one would understand or care, that it became invisible even to the people closest to them.
The tragedy at Inderlok Metro Station is not just about one man. It is about the gap between being present in a space and being seen in that space.
Millions of people passed through that station. Many of them used that washroom. Many of them may have seen him, nodded, perhaps, or not even that. And yet when two days passed and the door stayed locked, the first instinct was not "something might be wrong with the person responsible for this door." It was "this door is inconvenient."
That is not cruelty. That is the default state of urban life, where we move fast, keep our heads down, and interact with service workers as functions rather than as people.
But defaults can be changed. And changing this one costs very little.
You may not know the name of the person who cleans the metro station you use every morning. But you can look up from your phone for a moment. You can make eye contact. You can say "shukriya" when someone does something for you. These things seem small. To someone who spends their day being looked through, they are not small at all.
If you live near a daily wage worker, a building staff member, or a neighbor who you see regularly and suddenly you don't see them that absence is worth paying attention to. A knock on the door, a quick check with a neighbor, a simple "have you seen them?" can be the thing that changes an outcome.
If you manage people, even informally, even if they are contractual asking "how are you doing, genuinely?" once in a while costs nothing. Not as a formality. As a real question, with a pause long enough to let the answer actually be something other than "fine."
In many Indian households and communities, talking about emotional suffering is still considered weakness, drama, or something to be handled privately and silently. Changing that norm starts in small conversations with family members, with colleagues, with the people around you who might be carrying something they believe no one wants to hear about.
If someone in your life seems to be struggling, withdrawing, giving away belongings, saying goodbye in ways that feel final, expressing hopelessness about the future take it seriously. Don't wait for them to ask. Ask directly. Be present. Help them find support. Being the person who shows up before the door is locked is the whole difference.
Delhi runs on the backs of people like the man found at Inderlok Metro Station. The cleaners, the caretakers, the security guards, the construction workers, the delivery riders, the domestic staff, the people who make urban life possible for everyone else while largely living outside its protections.
They deserve more than to be found two days after the fact, identified by a foul smell rather than by anyone who knew them.
They deserve to be seen while they are still alive to be seen.
That is not a policy demand, though policy matters too. It is something simpler and more immediate. It is the choice to treat the person doing a job you barely notice as a person, fully, actually, in the moments you share the same space.
The door at Inderlok stayed locked for two days. Somewhere near you, right now, there is someone whose door has been closing slowly for much longer than that. The question worth asking is whether anyone around them will notice before it shuts all the way.
Disclaimer: This content, including any advice shared here, is intended for general informational purposes only. It should not be considered a substitute for professional medical guidance, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of a qualified healthcare professional or your personal physician for specific concerns. Lyfsmile does not assume responsibility for the use or interpretation of this information.
Feeling suicidal or in crisis? Contact a helpline or emergency service immediately.
1. Vandrevala Foundation Helpline:
+91 9999666555 (24x7)
2. Sanjivini (Delhi-based):
011-40769002 (10 am - 5:30 pm)
3. Sneha Foundation (Chennai-based):
044-24640050 (8 am - 10 pm)
4. National Mental Health Helpline: 1800-599-0019
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