The street seemed no different from other days. This street that housed many such as me. Always dirty and grimed by footprints of muddy sandals and the bloody residue of chewed and re chewed paan. Always holding a faint hint of promise, reminding me of the story of the frog that turns into a prince at the touch of a pair of beautiful bow-shaped lips.
I walked quickly, vigilant of the muggers that crept behind dustbins and shadows cast by the roofs of shops. The muffler half obscuring my features, the shawl wrapped several times about my body, I walked, spraying light rainwater onto the hem of my faded black trousers. I don’t know why I had decided to wear the clashing combination of muffler and shawl. A symbol of east-west harmony, I thought wryly. The truth, I knew, laid much closer home- I didn’t have much of a choice. The muffler was my father’s before he died of tuberculosis and left me homeless and penniless, just like him. The shawl was a gift that some rich old woman had bestowed upon me on a freezing night as I sat shivering, my lips purple, and huddled in a damp street corner, the inadequate muffler managing to cover only my bare knees.
A
Sometimes I wished I could just lie down in the middle of the road so that my breath would leave me as my body jerked as thought electrocuted beneath the expensive wheels of a car. It is better to die than to live like this, I used to constantly think. But I never had the guts to execute my wish. Or maybe it was my insuppressible optimism of the next day’s fortune. Today I lived to see the dawn of a brighter tomorrow and tomorrow the next. But everyday I woke up to the disappointing grumbling of the grey clouds and the irritating patter of rain water. Everyday was the same routine. Waking up to the delicious smell of filter coffee and the bickering of vegetable mongers and ugly mouthed housewives. Walking ten kilometers to the despairing old building that was my sole means of bread and butter. Twining the green, blue and yellow wires in and out, repeatedly, with mechanical precision, the fumes blackening my brown hands, the sharp ends of the wires scratching their surface. Gorging on rock hard chapattis at 4 in the evening, served along with a dark brown watery rasam. Walking the ten miles back on numbed feet and settling down outside the kindly coffee seller’s stall. Gratefully sipping on a half cup of piping hot caffeine and water mixture for a mere 4 rupees. Nesting within the woven folds of a ragged sack I had chanced upon on my way home from the factory one day. Falling asleep to the screeching of tires and blaring of lorry horns in my ears and the blinking of stars in my eyes. Always dreaming about a green hill that I saw everyday on the display window of a gift shop. Always seeing the same waxy purple flower crowning the pinnacle of the hill. A light, straggly figure clothed in a sheer white silk petticoat running joyously to the top, the wind gushing past and sweeping the dress in glorious folds, the hair waving in spaghetti curls, the hands fighting the converse stroke of the powerful breeze as they reached out for the solitary fuchsia winged bird of paradise. The hands never once touched the coveted flower. My eyes always flew opened at the stretch of the tendons across the brown hands paled by effort.
Now, as I walked along the sodden asphalt and potholes that foggily mirrored the navy blue skies, my mind kept seeing the purple flower with a single palm frozen above it, almost but not quite touching it. I knew not why I dreamt of that flower alone, I knew not its implications. But I knew by some intuition, some instinct, that the only reason I still professed to live was to see that green hillock with its purple banner. I knew that the real world was very different from the world of my dreams and yet I yearned for that day in a distant but certain future. Certain because all my efforts, the flex of every one of my fingers and the strain of every one of my toes went into achieving this. This vision was my motive power, the cornerstone of my existence, and if it weren’t for it I would have let the blood drain out of my body a long time ago.
I have never stolen in my life, nor have I begged and unlike my fellow vagrants have never felt either of these urges. Even while in the deepest troughs of my life, when faced with the clawing of hunger in my stomach, I couldn’t bring myself to snatch a peeled banana or a paper cone of roasted groundnuts out of careless hands and munching mouths. It was another matter that people usually saw me, destitute and sickly, and offered me a five or two rupee coin which I clutched in the small of my palm, its warmth a pinprick of hope against the callousness of the universe. Everyday I toiled in that miserable black hole at the heart of the monster that heaved pitch black gases out of its twin chimneys. The meal at the factory was the only meal for the day. Sometimes a part of my brain would scream against the injustice of it all. “What for?” it would cry out. Then the other part of my brain would answer, calm and firm in its assertiveness, “For the love of life. For the dream.” I had collected two hundred rupees which I kept safe in the pocket of my kurta top at the price of several lip smacking dosas and delectable toffees. At times, when I walked back from the factory, the bones in my body threatening to break; only the image of the purple flower and the weight of the coins at my side kept me going. Going going going, until it was my time to rest.
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