The traffic runs both ways: history shapes a worker's life, and that worker's life helps shape history. A migrant who takes up a city job such as driving a motorcycle taxi can get pulled into a political movement and become one of the people driving it.
People who move from a poor countryside to the capital for work keep going back and forth. They marry and keep family ties back home while trying to build a life in the city. Holding those distant relationships together is a lasting strain, and the question of whether to give up on the city for good never quite goes away.
Economic development can harm the workers who build it. Grueling construction work can push laborers into drugs just to keep up the pace. When a financial crisis wipes out the job, the addiction stays.
Large historical changes such as booms, crashes, new democratic openings and crackdowns don't stay in the news. They crash into, swallow, or lift up individual working people. Following one life through decades shows each upheaval arriving as a lost job, a new trade, or an injury.
A bodily injury, such as losing one's sight in political violence, changes how a person experiences the city. It also narrows which jobs are still open to them and pushes them toward different ways of getting by, such as selling lottery tickets on the street. The city itself can come to feel threatening rather than full of chances.