The Theology of Adjustments
Chapter I: The Theology of Adjustments
Stories from the Life of Parmin
The main difference is that the wrasse never sends an invoice, and the shark rarely asks for a seventh revision because its upper molars do not feel sufficiently “spiritual.”
Parmin woke at the hour when the sunlight was still negotiating its terms with the smog.
His rented room was narrow and practical, like a poorly phrased apology. A thin mattress leaned against the wall, a small plastic table held his laptop, and a fan rotated with the tired discipline of a government clerk. Outside, someone was already frying something in oil, the smell drifting up through the window along with the faint sourness of damp concrete warming under the first real heat of day.
He sat up and checked his phone. Three notifications.
One from a delivery promotion. One from a bank reminding him that his balance existed mostly as an idea. And one from a client.
He smiled faintly. Few small things were the most expensive words in freelance work.
He stood, poured water into a dented kettle, and waited. The kettle took its time. Parmin respected that. In a city that rushed everything—traffic, food, opinions—it was comforting that some objects still believed in patience.
The logo on his screen was for a new housing project. The developer wanted something that looked “modern, peaceful, and Islamic, but also luxurious.” It was a difficult balance. Peace rarely looked luxurious, and luxury rarely looked peaceful. Parmin had designed a crescent moon that subtly resembled a roof. He liked it. Clients, he knew, usually did not trust things that were liked too easily.
Parmin stared at the sentence. He wondered briefly how one increased the spiritual percentage of a geometric shape. This was no longer graphic design; it was a negotiation between geometry and the afterlife.
“Of course, sir. I’ll send a revision,” he typed.
He adjusted the curve of the moon by exactly three degrees. Sometimes design was not about changing things. It was about giving the appearance that change had occurred.
At nine o’clock, he walked to the coffee stall at the corner of the alley. It consisted of a metal table, a kettle that had survived several political administrations, and Pak Rudi, who ran it with the calm authority of someone who understood that caffeine was more reliable than democracy.
“Morning, Min,” Pak Rudi said, pouring thick black coffee into a glass. “You look like someone who was paid in promises.”
“Revision season,” Parmin said.
Pak Rudi nodded. He didn't know much about design, but he understood suffering. His daughter worked in a garment factory where shirts were redesigned three times a week because someone in management had suddenly remembered fashion.
“What are you designing now?”
“Houses.”
“You own them?”
“No. Just the dream of them.”
Pak Rudi laughed. “That’s how the world works. Some build the houses. Some sell the hallucination.”
Parmin sipped the coffee. It was black, bitter, and honest—three qualities most brands struggled to maintain simultaneously. Around them, the alley had fully awakened. Motorbikes moved carefully through the narrow street. A man shouted about fresh vegetables. Somewhere a radio played a sentimental song about love and regret, two subjects the nation produced in generous quantities.
His phone vibrated. A different number. An unknown client.
Parmin waited for the word. It arrived exactly where experience predicted.
Collaborate. A beautiful word. Soft. Flexible. Elastic enough to stretch across entire months of unpaid labor. In the creative economy, exposure was a fascinating currency; one could possess vast amounts of it online and still fail to purchase rice.
He looked at Pak Rudi counting small coins into a wooden drawer. Pak Rudi did not operate on vision. A cup of coffee required four thousand rupiahs and a functioning understanding of reality.
Parmin began typing: “My stomach doesn’t have an Instagram account, so it doesn’t know how to eat exposure.”
He stared at the sentence. Then deleted it.
Too honest. Too dangerous for a creature currently swimming inside a shark’s mouth.
He replaced it with: “I see. Let me prepare a proposal.”
Affordable. Another flexible word. Like collaboration. Like opportunity.
Parmin closed the chat and walked back to his room. The sun climbed higher, the city continued its ordinary negotiations with survival, and somewhere, in the quiet space between work and payment, Parmin began drawing the first line of a logo that might never fully belong to him.
For now, that was enough. He would keep swimming carefully between the teeth, hoping that today, the shark might forget to close its mouth.
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