Let not Ambition mock their useful toil
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the Poor...
Coming back from the Nivedita School today where I have been tutoring some girls, I was near despair, my head seemed to revolt from an age-old enmity, my legs refused to coordinate with my sleeping brain and sagging spirits and I was certain (for the umpteenth time) that I would die in the next instant...but, Yummy, I suppose has gone on a date with God-only-knows-which Apsara and so he didn't turn up . Finally, when I spotted ny bus, I could cry "yiiiiipppppppiiiieeee" or "Eurekaaaaaa" or "Thank Goddddddddd" or "bancha gelo"...or may be a mélange of all, did that matter???
The journey had been uneventful (well,yup, sorry to disappoint all those females who expected to be disgusted by another evidence of repressed sexuality in males and all those males who expected to be regaled by the story of the discomfiture of another hapless young lady who dared commit the crime of staying out late)....
Tried gobbling up some more pages of Kiran Desai's Booker winning novel "The Inheritance of Loss". The book is intriguing, to say the least and that made me scan it even in the little dull light of the bus :))
But God hadn't opened the box he stole from Pandora (imp: here God is a HE because a theft is involved ) .....
As I climbed into the three wheeler, the rickshaw , once I had reached Kalindi, I had my first whiff of the "something's just not right" instinct endowed only to the better sex(NOT fairer as it is assumed and asserted always) . The rickshawallah who was supposed to drive me home was shabbily dressed, as is the norm, he was some forty five or fifty, had a salt and pepper stubble,unkempt hair and he seemed tipsy. The other rickshawallahs told mine to drive carefully, and as he took off, my nose caught the obnoxious and offensive odour of adulterated country liqour....I was too tired to move even an inch and go for another rickshawallah. He, kind of tortoised on (my lazy brain has unwittingly coined the word on an impulse for the lack of a better one) and I was grateful that I didn't have to drag myself...
Then all of a sudden, a car, a Maruti Zen to be precise, stormed past us, rather recklessly, I have to admit. Before I could react, I heard the rickshawallah's strained voice that rose to a crescendo:
"Ki bhabe ki era, boro gari te jara chore...aamra choto gari chalayi bole ki manush na...amake dile amio dekhiye ditaam, amio pari, ki mone kore ki nijeder...."
he went on and on in the same drab drone and I wouldn't have paid the least attention if my dazed and dozing mind wouldn't have been so drastically hit by a string of english sentences that dropped from my rickshawallah's smelly mouth...(yup....you read that right....ENGLISH) :
"What do they think...have no sense...lost sense, all nonsense...I will show them, all big big people, no sense, what think..."
I was stupified, to say the least...amazed, surprised, even shocked to hear him enunciate such grammatically perfect english. May be my so-called superior upbringing had not prepared me for an alchoholic rickshawallah to rattle off in english. I had little time to recollect myself, but that little he spoke made me ponder a lot...
At home Dad informed me that he had once travelled in the same rickshaw and that this old man had once been a Western Railway employee but due to his excessive drinking habits, he had been show caused and had left the job eventually. Now he was driving a rickshaw trying to make God-only-knows-how-many ends meet.
I realised that being confined to my own world, I have always come to regard rickshawallahs as illiterate. I almost expect them not to know english, though I know another one who stays near my grandparents' house who has cleared his B.Com and unable to procure a job has turned to driving a rickshaw but he doesn't indulge in alchohol. May be we expect a certain class of people to converse in english and this rickshawallah could not be fitted into that group, yet by some kind of ironic twist that left me befuddled, he had trespassed into that territory...
I hope to encounter him once more, in a sober state, so that I get to know him better...
Till then I pray to God that SHE look after him( imp: it's a job only women are capable of)...
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