Between Sleep and Spark: Three Men Searching for Energy in March

March began with a strange kind of fatigue.

Outside, Europe was doing what it always does at the first hint of warmth: the light turned gentler, the air stopped biting, and people started acting like they could finally breathe again. But the body doesn’t always follow the calendar. The Mayor—half amused, half resigned—named it the way people around him named it: spring tiredness. Not sickness, not sadness, just that dull lag between winter and whatever comes next.

On the call, three time zones lined up like a small experiment.

In Europe it was afternoon and the Mayor admitted he felt a little tired. In Bengaluru it was already evening, and Ritesh sounded like someone who had lived a full day before the conversation even started. In Campo Grande it was mid-morning, and Ismar—steady, matter-of-fact—carried his familiar relationship with sleep: a kind of lifelong gravity that kept pulling him back to bed.

The Mayor opened with a simple Monday question, aimed at Ritesh: how did he feel when he woke up?

Ritesh didn’t romanticize it. He said he felt lazy. He had planned a morning walk with his wife—alarm set, intentions stated, the usual adult performance of discipline—but the two of them made a quiet pact to switch the alarm off and stay in bed. Then time snapped forward. At 8:30 he got up, bathed, and the day started moving fast, the way it does when the first part of it is surrendered.

It wasn’t just laziness, he explained. The weekend had stretched him. The previous day he had done something that, in his own context, counted as a small adventure: he drove in Bangalore. Not a short, controlled hop. Fifteen kilometers, with his wife on the back of a scooter, heading to a park designed in a Japanese style—temple motifs, careful landscaping, a crowd thick with people doing the same thing: documenting life to prove it happened.

For Ritesh, it wasn’t only the distance. It was the shift in identity. He had a license, but in Bangalore he generally didn’t drive. In his family, even at home, there was a kind of protective control—parents and brothers stepping in, bikes discouraged, movement managed. This small act of driving his wife to a public place wasn’t just transport; it was a step out of the old structure and into the self-directed one. It cost him energy, but it also produced it, the way newness often does.

They returned late, ate dinner, talked until 11:30—late by their standards—and that late night spilled into the morning. His wife took time to get ready, and the walk disappeared again under the blanket of “we’ll do it tomorrow.”

Then the Mayor turned to Ismar: how did he feel in the morning?

Ismar had woken earlier than usual because he needed to go to his job department to get a health document. He spoke as if the errand was neither tragedy nor triumph, just a fact. Then he said something that made the moment feel oddly intimate: he always wanted to sleep more, and he called it one of his bad characteristics. Not “habit,” not “preference”—character.

The Mayor teased him gently—retired, “professional student,” perhaps philosophizing under the disguise of sleep. Ismar rejected the poetry of that idea. No. He said he had many things to do, and sleep made it harder to manage his life. Then he added, almost clinically, that he could wake up three hours earlier and still fall back asleep easily. It wasn’t age, he insisted; he had been that way since adolescence.

That pattern—stating things plainly, without decorating them—was classic Ismar. He didn’t perform emotions to make them easier for the listener. He described the mechanism, the practical reality of his body and mind, like a man giving an honest report.

Sleep, they discovered, was one of their shared energy currencies, but it behaved differently in each of them.

When the Mayor asked what happened if Ismar didn’t sleep well, Ismar said he could manage a conversation like this, but lectures would be harder; the lack of sleep would disturb him. Ritesh said something similar in his own rhythm: his face would look dull, his focus would vanish, and the whole day would feel “energyless.” Five years ago he could push through; now the rituals of the morning, and the rest of the day, got disturbed if sleep wasn’t complete. He didn’t become aggressive, he said—he became absent. His responses would feel like a lack of attention.

That admission did something important. It showed that energy wasn’t only about the body’s fuel; it was also about the social self. When Ritesh lacked sleep, he didn’t become a villain—he became unreachable.

His wife, he said, still wanted to talk. Sometimes he had to say, more sharply than he liked, “Let me sleep.” And she understood. In India, he added, a daytime nap—especially on a weekend—wasn’t shameful. It was repair.

The Mayor confessed his own version: a deep midday nap on the couch, half an hour that felt like drowning in rest and resurfacing with a clearer head. He asked Ismar about siesta culture. In Campo Grande, Ismar said, some people did it, but not everyone could. If he gave his body the opportunity, he would sleep after lunch—not thirty minutes, but an hour or more. Again, the description was unromantic: not self-care, not luxury, just biology.

From sleep, the conversation drifted to a different energy source: food as memory.

The Mayor asked Ritesh about childhood dishes—something that felt like foundation energy, something his body remembered as warmth.

Ritesh’s voice changed. He didn’t become eloquent; he became animated. He talked about jaggery—the unrefined sweetness that replaced sugar in his childhood. He described rice mixed with milk and jaggery, fed to him by his grandmother, and how the taste wasn’t the same if he ate it himself with his own hands. The energy of the memory wasn’t only in the ingredients; it was in the act of being cared for.

Then came chapati with ghee and jaggery—rolled up like a sweet bread. He could still crave it, but he couldn’t recreate what he missed. His wife could make it, yes, but it wouldn’t be the same. Something had gone missing that wasn’t recipe-based: the household rhythm, the old hands, the quiet certainty that someone older would feed him because that was love.

He spoke about rice ground into powder, turned into a kind of sweet chapati with milk and jaggery—foods that took time, foods that required patience. He said people were lazier now, or life was faster, or the art was “giving back”—fading—because everything was commonly available outside. When kids cried, people bought something instead of making something. He didn’t scold anyone. He observed it with the soft sadness of someone noticing a culture shift in the smallest domestic details.

Ismar’s childhood food story came from a different landscape. His mother didn’t like cooking, he said, but she cooked well for his taste. He grew up on a farm, far from the city, so his mother prepared many things: manioc dishes, cakes, jelly, jam, bread. She still cooked, but he said she did it like a duty, not joy—food as fuel, not pleasure.

When the Mayor asked whether Ismar cooked, Ismar made a distinction that sounded like a rule he lived by: he survived. He wouldn’t cook something to offer them proudly. The last thing he prepared was rice, beans, and fish—simple, functional, enough.

The Mayor then told his own story: a weekend of serious cooking while living alone temporarily, a small “peeling potatoes podcast” with a friend that nudged him from the office chair into the kitchen. Cooking was a hobby for him, a switch-off activity that gave energy back. He didn’t poison himself; his mother ate it too and stayed happily alive. The humor was light, but the point was serious: energy wasn’t always found in rest. Sometimes it was found in doing something absorbing enough to quiet the mind.

Ritesh’s answer to hobbies was revealing. He didn’t present a long list. He said reading. Sleep. Talking to friends. Work itself had become oddly recharging in its own way. And then he described something quietly beautiful: a public library near his home, 200 meters away, where he could sit on weekends with a laptop or books and disappear for two hours without noticing time passing. It made him feel fresh.

But even that had a cost. His wife didn’t like that he left home on Saturday and Sunday to read. She wanted their time together. In that tension, the theme of energy became more complex: sometimes what replenished one person depleted another.

The Mayor asked about exercise. Ritesh admitted he used to go to the gym but stopped before marriage. Commute time ate his mornings and evenings—forty minutes each way—and the gym disappeared into the gap. He promised his wife he would start again; he didn’t. He had started running a few rounds at a park—small beginnings, slightly guilty admissions. And then he said something many married people recognize: his wife’s good cooking made him “bad,” meaning heavier, softer, more comfortable than his body preferred.

If Ritesh’s energy was tangled with marriage and routine, Ismar’s energy was tangled with solitude.

The Mayor named what he had sensed for years: Ismar spent a lot of time alone, and he seemed comfortable with his own company. Where did energy come from in that solitude?

Ismar said that a year ago he felt stressed because he couldn’t control his life and time. Now he was more at ease because if he couldn’t control it, he tried not to think about it—he let it go. He said he preferred being alone to being at a party. It wasn’t bitterness; it was preference, acceptance, maybe a coping strategy. That quiet, resigned realism—“this is how I am”—was his signature.

When the Mayor asked what he was looking forward to that week, Ismar said he couldn’t see anything different that would energize him. No public holidays. No highlight. He mentioned that English classes used to excite him because learning felt like progress, but now he felt stuck at the same level, and it no longer felt exciting.

Ritesh, by contrast, had something coming: Holi.

It wasn’t just a holiday on the calendar; it was their first Holi together as a married couple, because the previous year had been marked by grief—his wife’s father had passed away on the same day. This year, they didn’t go home. They planned to celebrate in Bangalore by choosing an event: tickets, organizers, colors, DJ music, strangers. He described the uncertainty with the kind of cautious excitement that can happen when two people are building new memories without their families around them. He hoped it would go well. He wanted it to become a good memory.

And then, as if to underline how “newness” generates energy, Ritesh shared two more things.

He had decided to join a knowledge-sharing group at work—an engineering architect community larger than anything he had spoken in before. Fifty people. Higher-level colleagues. More knowledge. He described his internal back-and-forth, the negative thinking, the fear of not being “that level,” and then the moment of deciding: why not join and see what happens?

He also shared that after two and a half years, he had done a job interview. Forty-five minutes. He felt the same fear as in his first interviews after college—self-doubt, negative talk—but the interview itself went smoothly. He didn’t know if there would be a second round, but the bigger result was emotional: the fear had loosened its grip. Now, if another interview came, he wouldn’t be as afraid. His friends had encouraged him to interview not only to switch jobs, but to understand what the industry wanted and where his skills stood. The unknown had become training. The anxiety had become useful.

Ismar, pulled by the Mayor into politics, spoke about October elections and his party’s survival threshold—at least thirteen congressmen, or risk dissolution. He framed it in his familiar balance: two bads, two goods, one bad and one good. He wasn’t energized by local political work enough to pursue it intensely, he said; he had other priorities. Still, the way he described politics carried an emotional undertone: frustration with emotional voting, promises detached from productivity, and a sense that society didn’t choose logically. He sounded like a man who wanted his country to be more serious than it was willing to be.

Near the end, the Mayor asked a question he called horrible: did they feel energized after the conversation?

Ritesh answered with honesty that sounded almost affectionate. Before the call, he said, he was excited—truly excited. The call gave him a place where he could talk about anything, even if the questions sometimes aimed for different answers than he brought. After the call, he wasn’t always energized, but often he kept thinking about it. His wife asked what they discussed, and sometimes she worried he talked about her. Still, the anticipation of the conversation itself was an energy source.

Ismar said the opposite: he felt tired after the conversation, not because of them, but because of English—the effort to understand expressions, vocabulary, accents. The topic didn’t matter; the language effort did. In his honesty there was no blame, only reality: he was here because he struggled, and if he didn’t struggle, he might be doing something else.

And that was the quiet truth of the whole meeting.

Energy wasn’t one thing. It was sleep and food, yes—but also control and freedom. It was the safety of routine and the spark of something unknown. It was marriage asking for togetherness, and solitude asking for silence. It was a library 200 meters away, and a park four kilometers wide. It was an interview that didn’t even need to “work out” to still be worth doing.

When the call ended, the Mayor sent them back into their weeks with gentle humor: Campo Grande could only get better from 10:30 a.m., while Europe and Bengaluru were already further down the road. They would meet again next Monday—same time, same place, different energy levels.

And the month of March, at least for this small triangle of voices, had started exactly as it should: not with perfect motivation, but with three human beings noticing where their energy leaks, where it returns, and what it costs.