It’s that festive time before Christmas.
India does not celebrate Christmas as the European countries and North America does, but it’s still a season of festivities and happy tidings all around.
I see people buying little electric lamps in the markets or bakeries selling the famous pound cake stuffed with walnuts, which in our childhood we yearned for but rarely ever got to eat.
The smell of the cake from the neighborhood shop takes me back to the time when I used to sit outside that Irani cake shop just ogling at them through the pane and inhaling the perfume that wafted through. It still brings back those memories every time I walk around that neighborhood blocks of Andheri station.
Months later when I am bored, I walk out of my hostel towards a newly constructed building adjacent to the street. I talk to Ramabai when she has a free moment. She is one of the day laborers working on the new wing of my college building. I gesture to share my apple and a vada pav (Indian burger) and she refuses with the shake of her head. People might be poor but they are taught to be on alert, to look out for an agenda.
In India, nobody does anything for anyone without having a motive, we are taught. It’s an integral thought process and I understand that. I break my vada pav into half and start to eat it. I hold the half and eat the remainder, nonchalantly.
She watches me eat first and then smiles and wipes her hand against her old saree taking the food and also the apple which she tucks carefully in the fold of her little cloth bag. It’s now safe to eat the half sandwich.
A toddler, around 8 years walks by and clings to her watching eagerly. It’s her son Munna. His face covered with dirt and caked with mud; he looks like an apparition in hindsight. She sighs and splits the half vada pav into a further half giving the bigger piece to him.
She needs some of it but the motherly instincts always win out in the end.
Sitting down on a rock, she gives me a lesson on how to sleep well while still being hungry. For half the week they are able to eat rice with either vegetables or lentils. The other half, it’s just rice boiled with salt and turmeric, and then there are five to six days a month when there is no food at all and they have little to do except just take it.
On these desolate days each month when there is no grain in the house and no work to be found, the entire family sets out in search of food. They scour the harvested fields of the landlords with their brooms and bamboo trays to gather the gleanings of stray grains of wheat and paddy that may have fallen unnoticed when reaping.
The irony of life is open in itself. Sometimes the entire set of misfortunes are handled by the less fortunate. Fate has never claimed a sense of justice.
The apple she saves it for her younger daughter.
“I am a bit sadder on those days”, the 10-year-old Munna says matter of fact, when his mother describes those days when there is no food.
“If there is any leftover food on such days, we give it to our children adding a lot of water so as to create enough to fill their stomachs.” It’s a trick that the poor learn early on, drinking lots of water before a meal so that it feels as if you had eaten a stomach full.
As she speaks, she mistakes the dismay in my eyes — in the flickering light of the kerosene lamp — for disbelief.
“We are facing the south Saab(sir), so we are speaking the truth,” she says with glowering intensity.
I recall using a similar technique during my hostel days when I would have nothing for breakfast except maybe a day-old banana, picked up from the mess kitchen overnight, which I used to chew very slowly, savoring it but also creating this illusion in my head that I was having a lot to eat. There were a few times that I even ate up the skin. It was bitter to taste so the trick was to eat it first immediately followed by the sweet-tasting banana.Hunger teaches lessons in survival that are learned fast and heavy, remaining etched in your psyche for a lifetime to come.
I often visit the flora fountain area where the vendors sell old books amidst the gleaming tall buildings. It’s the perfect blend of old and new, rich and the not so well to do , all commingled into a single area of existence. I meet Ramesh who is a bookseller tending to a bookstall a guy named Vijay owns. He is knowledgeable about books, latest trends, New York bestselling list, and the likes, something he has cultivated by himself in his spare time.
Ramesh often goes to the Jehangir Art Gallery and wanders about the paintings. He says he likes the Sabhawala exhibition, although I suspect he’s been taught to, by his illustrious friends in the poets’ salon.
Vijay pays Ramesh 50 rupees a day. The money starts going first thing in the morning when he has to pay 1 rupee to go to the toilet in a nearby facility and 5 rupees to bathe. The owner had suggested a nearby Dhaba that serves lunch for 17 rupees, but Ramesh can fill his stomach with some roti’s, for 6.5 rupees, and 2 rupees for four bananas. Dinner is 14 rupees in a nearby “hotel,” — rotis, and some vegetables.
“I’m lucky I’m vegetarian, otherwise it would cost forty rupees or more.”
So, miraculously, Ramesh manages to save from his salary; he has disposable income. He uses it to buy books, from pavement stalls all over the city.
“Sir,” he begins, one day, “there is a need of some money.”
“How much?” I ask, suddenly wary.
“Two hundred fifty.”
It is nothing, really — just $7 — but by giving him money at this juncture, I feel like am directly influencing the course of his life, the course of the story.
Instead, I buy him 500 rupees’ worth of meals at the Samovar restaurant in the Jehangir Art Gallery. That entitles him to fifteen good lunches of rice and vegetable curry. I wonder where I will pay my next month’s bill but it’s a selfishly impulsive decision that feels good at that time.
“I won’t give you cash”, I tell him.
“I won’t take pity either,” he says, looking squarely in my eyes.
One afternoon when it’s blazing hot outside, I take him to Mahanaaz a nearby sandwich café. He has never been to an air-conditioned seating in the restaurant before.
He is in awe as he mutters — “Air-conditioned” again and again.
I watch the way he eats his cheese sandwich. First, he lets it lie on the plate in front of him for a while. Then he eats one quarter at a time, very very slowly.
As long as a little bit of the sandwich is left on the plate in front of him, he thinks we won’t be hassled by the waiters to leave. So, he balances his hunger with the need to stay in a shaded place in the afternoon. It is a precise calculation: how much of the sandwich will he allow himself to eat, at what pace.
This is what life is for the poor. One filled with hardships but all the more with regret , tinged with a sense of hopelessness. Regret at things that they could have or couldn’t have done, regret at what life was or could have been.Hopelessness, in the knowing that they are so far deep that nothing they do would change the course of their future. That they are buried enough — In debt, in sickness, in joblessness. A pit if sinking sand too difficult to crawl out, not in this lifetime.
Speaking of lifetimes, it is a very important custom among the ancient Madiga caste to tie some grains of rice to the edge of the sari on a woman who dies before she is buried in an unmarked grave.
Ramesh’s greatest regret was that when his mother GajaLaxmi died, there was no rice in the house. None at all. It’s considered inauspicious for neighbors to donate grains for funeral rights, lest someone pass away at their own.
So GajaLaxmi had to be buried just as she had lived — without a shred of solace or even a shadow of dignity.
Without even a fistful of rice……
