Life doesn’t Smile Back

Early winter mornings are fresh even in the most polluted and dirty places of the NCR. Heavily encumbered sectors in Noida do have their share of early-morning charm as these try to find out the order and symmetry meant for them in the master plans. In the industrial-cum-service-cum-slummed sectors one might get daunted by the defecating, exciting, commercial, crass and crying hullaballoo raising its hood against any voice of sanity and order.

The buildings are semi-daunting: a curious mix of residential-cum-commercial styles. You see a bit of house, a bit of manufacturing unit, a bit of service industry, a bit of business, a bit of exploitation, a bit of comfort, a bit of pain, a bit of life and a bit of death. It is a self-absorbed world, a cesspool, a whirling system drawing so many survival-lorn masses from the nooks and corners of India. They live identity-less here. The enterprise thrives here. The owner goes smirk in his big car. The labourers go pitifully, deeply shackled by the unending tasks and limitless responsibilities.  Many of them are losing the bodily and mental feeling of being a human; they act, feel and think like the rodents in the open gutters, their bits of the holy Ganges where they eat, drink and sleep at the very place where many others defecate and procreate. But then very near to these hell holes, just round the corner of the next street, you have plush glass-fronted offices, closing its air-conditioned interiors from the grisly, blackened and metallic world of manufacturing just in front across the dusty, potholed road. Within a radius of just half a kilometre you might even have a world-class swanky megamall and cheesy shopping centres, restaurants and multi-starred hotels. It’s a world beyond any notion of perfection, the best and the worst face to face, darkness and light mixed in a curious haze.  

She is walking with slow, struggling, almost painful steps. Just like the surroundings around her stand out with their teasing oddities, and she cannot avoid looking at these pinching realities however hard she might try to ignore and however tough her own situation might be, they, things, people, scenarios around her also cannot ignore her presence. They turn back to have a look at her. She carries a big looming attraction with her persona.

She passes a kid left alone in this uncaring world. Forgetting its own suffering and neglected self, the little boy creature looks at her, rather stares at her. A small sack on his back, the rag picker, dumps his burden and looks as she crosses him. He watches from behind. She is aware that she has drawn his curiosity. She looks back and gives a feeble smile that she can afford for this orphan. He does not smile back, getting conscious he turns his head. Maybe she has to smile differently now to make it look like a smile, she thinks.

She has had a moment of look into his eyes. He had manly eyes on a kid’s face. When you are left alone so early in your life to enjoy or suffer life on your own terms, you just become one of the thousands of flies fighting for space on shit and sweets with the same relish. You just know one side of life—survival, by any means and at whatever cost. And what does this survival produce: stunted, frail, sick, dehumanized, spiritless multitudes who just add to the census sheets of India. But they serve a purpose. They carry the shining tag of economic boom and growth on their frail shoulders. They survive by any means. That is their biggest achievement. She realises all this. Even she has to work, come whatever may. She has to reach office on time. She has decided to walk through this stinking short-cut from the metro station to her office. She needs to appear physically fitter so that they will stay positive about her after this long break. She needs a bit of walking, some exercise, to make her appear a productive part. The famed Indian corporate mechanically operates on give and take principle: you give your 100% in an unsparing competitive environment; it will give you survival crumbs.

She sees multiple females in the same body: The widow, the prostitute, the raped girl, the mad women (carrying the sex toy for so many frustrated and hungry souls). The hydra-headed creature begs, picks up rags, sells its diseased body, part time even operates a tea stall in front of its ghetto, tries to pick out the moments of the day. She herself is far better placed, she realises. She at least has one identity, however tough her situation might be. ‘Look at the ganji aurat,’ his soul almost dead, he sells the harbingers of cancer and there are many around him who ignore cancer warnings to buy those poisonous sashes carrying gutka and tobacco. All of them look at her, in the typical Indian way of staring at a woman. It is beyond lecherousness, they are watching a spectacle. She has no hair left, eaten by chemotherapy her beautiful locks of hair are gone. Her face has become a mask of terribly suffering expression. She is out of breath and each step is a struggle. Their glances pierce through her, it’s even worse than those lecherous glances thrown at her in her pre-cancer condition. She tries to ignore, but she can feel the burning red gazes piercing through her back, more painful than chemo rounds. She stops and comes back. Walks straight back to the tiny wooden stilted outlet. They become apprehensive and stand mute avoiding her look. She is looking straight into their eyes. She picks up a cigarette pack, points to the warning and shouts, ‘It’s cancer, haven’t you seen it, better to realise after having it.’ She leaves the shame-faced group behind and tries her level best to regain her composure. She knows she looks different, and will look complete stranger to her colleagues, who would address her by her name but their eyes will be looking at an unrecognisable stranger.  

She thus goes along a dead poor world that even cocks a snook at the great plans in the plan books for this great Delhi suburb, the pride of Uttar Pradesh, Noida. This group and many others like them, nameless, faceless, just settle down at any place among the industries, their tiny hovels, a curious world of dwarfs. But they live and survive as the tall people who sleep and fuck proudly in congested, hiccupping, afraid air and bring about additions to their teeming world like ant-swarms. They have their holy places as well. A drop of gangajal in the sewage nullah gurgling with puss and bacteria of the uncaring humanity. The mandir stands nonchalantly. Its Gods having forsaken it. It seems never to have been accepted as their earthly shelter at all. Anyhow a poor man's God is no God at all. It has been proved. But she has to believe even in the poorest of the poor Gods, to survive, to stay in her job, to support her daughter who in standard eight shows prospects of a very bright student. More importantly, she cannot afford to lose her job because her husband does not earn at all. She stays with him because in India staying with the worst of a husband is perhaps more convenient than a husbandless woman. So she needs blessings even from the whatever types of Gods this ghetto has to offer. Passing by the makeshift temple she puts her right hand to the left of her breast. It falls into a vacuum. Breast cancer, half of her maternity that fed her daughter removed. She is praying and gathering courage to face the office staff with her changed exterior.

The mosque minaret too sulks over this majestic swarm lost in a terrifying fatality just somehow holding onto faith like their broken spirit holds onto their more broken bodies. A mere purposeless appendage. They have their open shit plots. The stench too overbearing and thus fighting to retain its status and repel any encroacher coming with a non-shit purpose. Just imagine what will be the garbage dump site of this bigger garbage pit—it is literally a hell hole. It but serves as the playground-cum-business-cum-schooling arena for the orphans, half-orphans, bastards, urchins, nameless boys and futureless girls. A fat pig brushes its shit-smeared snout against the holy muzzle of a robust bull chewing the half-shit fodder lying in abundance in this kaliyuga  playground.

Well, well...she just has to pass through one more street carrying the dirty gist of life in these perilously throbbing veins wherein the blood is poisoned, the organs are diseased and the future is nonexistent. May be even God does not know what stays in these streets. Probably He is not bothered either. And why should he be! He is the king of the heaven. Why should He have any business with such hells? She but has a business in this hellhole, each step is meant to draw courage. Just cross this street, pass the main road, walk a few paces and turn left. It’s there, her office, an academic publishing house where she works as a receptionist, the job that requires an attractive, healthy, chirpy, enthusiastic persona. She has to retain her job. She just stops for some moments, unseen to the better world outside and takes a final sip of courage to face the world as it is.