vivekbhadra

The other day I went to Baruipur. Just to get out of the city’s crowd, strill horns, roars of engines and especially to be out of the red ants’ reach–they have made my life a night-mare. We took a bus to Garia. Then an auto-rickshaw. It was quite a ride! It started raining heavily, perhaps to make our journey more adventurous. We asked the auto-driver whether Baruipur would be worth visiting. Whether we will have some sort of serenity. “No way! It’s more crowded than this place!” said he. We were disappointed, no dout. Still we decided to go, perhaps not completely believing the guy. The rain drenched me upto at least 23 per cent. I was enjoying, hoping to compensate it with the joy I was going to get. But it seemed to be a distant dream. The crowd of houses did not seem to be willing to go. Instead, they began to show up more densely, the crowd of houses increased. Then I started looking more closely at the houses, the people, the shops. They all looked shabby, dingy and morose. There was a sign-board in front of an STD booth. It was languishing on the ground, uncared for. I wondered if anybody bothered to look at it– reading it seemed to be out of the question. I realised, almost sensed the condition of the owner. Perhaps he could not bear the expense of renovating the booth. Then I saw a tea stall. I almost laughed aloud. It seemed to have been carefully designed by a comedy-movie director. It was made of two pieces of bamboo, set across a drain, parallel to each other with one seat resting on them. Then I realised, and almost cried aloud! It saved, or perhaps struggled to save, someone, or perhaps a whole family  from starving. It meant food or no food, existence or no existence for them. It was the only weapon in their struggle for existence. I tried in vain to imagine how a life would be if the faint prospect of sale of some cigarettes or biris meant food or no food. Then what about education or higher education, if we completely ignore any need for entertainment of any kind? The auto ran at its normal pace. I wondered whether the other passengers were thinking or getting worried about what I was thinking? But the middle-aged woman in the back seat seemed to be only concerned about his over-pampered son. The other passanger? She was a woman in her forties. Given her attire, she seemed to belong to a representative of the same income group as the stall owner. So her getting concerned was out of the question. Then I looked at the auto-driver. He was perhaps marginally better off. There was another passenger. A girl wearing what she perhaps wore everyday. The poor passengers almost outnumbered us, the rich ones. After a long drive, thirteen kilometers, as the auto-driver had said, we came to what appeared to be a sub-urban, over-crowded area where rickshaws, padestrians and auto-mobiles move at same speed, despite struggling to their respective limits. There was a stage for a meeting. Political meeting. A local leader was shouting over the microphone the loudest he could. Inflation and Manmohan Singh’s recent failure to save the nation’s sovereignty by getting engaged in the nuclear deal with the States. My ears started aching. My friend and I decided to have tea in a tea-stall. I asked whether I can get a cigarette. He looked sorry and said ” I can give you biri instead”. My friend was contended with a biri, perhaps because he was not a regular smoker and wanted to experiment with yet another tobacco product. I went to a nearby shop and bought a cigarette and came back. We finished our tea and wanted to pay for the tea and biri. The shopwoner, perhaps belonging to an economic backgroud only inches above that of the owner of the tea stall over the drain, smiled and said ” No need to pay for the biri. It’s very cheap.” So he had the sense of etiquette any civilized person is supposed to have, at least in theory. I again wondered whether I was right in thinking that subsisting people can not afford anything which does not directly fall under the category of will to earn raw money. Perhaps he also managed to get some entertainment. Everyone’s life seemed to be the same. Everyone, despite the cruel struggle for existence, the want of food, the frustration of not being able to meet all needs, somehow managed to save some of his efforts for other aspects of life as well. On our way back, we were walking to get to the bus stop, I saw an old woman, perhaps a beggar, was eating a rotten guava. Baruipur is famous for its guava production and we saw mounds of guava stocks on the road-side. But perhaps the amount of production was not enough for offering a fresh one to the poor beggar. We waited for the bus awhile. It came hurriedly. We got aboard. It started. We came back. Perhaps we had enough experience for a day’s outing.

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