Perfect Nights

 

He doesn’t try to see the entire sea; he merely looks at a drop. It’s not that he isn’t happy about the sea. The little fact is that he simply understands the value of a drop. Drops make the sea, not the vice versa. In the same way, he isn’t worried about millions; instead he is bothered about a single rupee. Lots of one rupee coins make a million, not the vice versa.

In addition, being busy like a bee collecting tiny bits of pollen gives him a clear conscience and a satisfaction and belief that hard work gives one a long, peaceful and undisturbed sleep, so much so that a new dawn looks like the freshest chapter of life, a new life literally. And he would always remark that a sound sleep is the main takeaway from all the honest drudgery during the day.

‘I sleep like a King!’ he says to anyone who brings to mention the role of hard-working nature in defining one’s life.

He is in early forties, but like anyone lynched by poverty and deprivation, looks a decade older on any day. Short, thin and black, he is easily recognised with his Bhojpuri accent in this Haryanvi town where he stays in a rented accommodation with his wife. His little children stay with their grandparents in native Bihar.

He is a kabadiwala, a small-time scrap and garbage collector who roams around in the streets of the villages around the town. His carrier rickshaw is full of cardboard boxes, newspapers, redundant stationary, recyclable plastic, bottles, iron discards and much more. It’s a huge pile. One may wonder how this small kabadi manages this kind of load on his rickshaw. While he roams in the streets, shouting kabadiwala, he can go to the last ounce of his strength to get more discards. After all, it is no small matter to earn a living from something that has lost its utility. It’s like drawing life out of the dead.

Mention this big-hearted effort on his part to scuff out morsels of economic survival from the trash and he proudly smirks, ‘Oh, these few hundred rupees are nothing; my main reward is my perfectly undisturbed, long sleep after the day’s work! My nights are perfect despite so many imperfections of the day. But I’m lucky, not too many people have perfect nights, especially the wealthy people have very poor nights.’

He fights at many fronts. He has to squeeze out each and every faculty managed by his brain to beat the scrap owner in terms of price and measurement. The per kilogram price has to be low, but not so low that the owner kicks him out straightway. It has to be the lowest in the acceptable range. His fight is not over rupees, but over paisas per kilogram. Even from the rounded figure he tries to nibble away some 50 paisa, a small cut, to make some rupees at his end. Well, that’s what a small-time scrap dealer is all about, creating the chances of some odd rupees from the junk piled in front of him.

As he moves with his huge pile on his carrier rickshaw, heaving it like a huffing-puffing skinny bull struggling with its laden cart, commend him on his laborious endeavour and promptly comes the reply, ‘Honest hardwork cleanses the soul, one gets the best of a sleep, like I do.’

Well, listening to his main takeaway—the best of a sleep—people sometime even wonder it surely must be a ‘special’ sleep.

Apart from his bargaining tongue, it’s the rusty iron scale that helps him like a faithful instrument in his humungous task of drawing pennies out of the gutter. He has worked very hard on his weighing scale. It’s a subtle trick to save him from a direct measurement scandal. Here again it is a small kitchen knife that helps him to cut the owner’s pocket in small amounts, bit by bit, like a mouse nibbles at the bread that you come to know in the morning.

During the absorbing and highly engaging phase of bargaining, sorting, weighing and calculating, the talk between the two parties has intermittent reference to that special sleep of his. He is really proud of it. Let there be no doubt about it anymore.   

The hand-held weighing scale’s pan where he prefers to put the purchased discards, in normal condition hangs above the other one where he puts the iron measurements. This slight off-balance saves him many grams without being caught. Then during the act of holding the scale aloft, he ensures that the commodity pan gets a bit more of the discards in lieu of the measuring weight put in the other pan. It’s done by expert manoeuvring with his fingers.

In this way he earns a bit of extra profit among the showers of curses and abuses by the farmer. Even a kick cannot turn the scales in the other direction. That is his sacred law. After all to earn a living from dead things is no small matter. To all the accusations of tricks during weighing, he says matter-of-factly, ‘I am honest, just hardworking in my elaborate task. If I cheat, I won’t get such a sound sleep.’

Suppose he is weighing the discarded agricultural tools like sickles, shovels and scythes, he dupes the owner by exaggerating the weight of the wooden handle that won’t be counted with the iron. He knows how many grams he saves in that. He has the very same assessment in plastics. A cycle tyre pump, for example. He forces the owner to sell it at the price of cheap plastic because it is made of almost useless, thin sheet iron. In fact, he says that he has done the owner a favour in taking it at all.  

‘It’ll just add to my load without fetching me a paisa. I’m just taking it away to save your house from the clutter of negative energy,’ he elucidates the big favour he has done in taking it away.

He tries to assuage the scrap owner’s bruised self by saying, ‘And due to all these small bits of service, the God always ensures that I get a better sleep than most of the people possessing huge wealth. This is a proof of my good ways!’  

Then he scores the number of kilograms to even sums, thus saving a few hundred grams in that regard. After calculation, like a maths wizard, he rounds off late forties of paisas into perfect forty. His each and every thought and movement is guided by the goal to earn an extra paisa here, a paisa there, which would make a rupee, and some rupees would pile up to make a perfect hundred. He is very patient. He just doesn’t see anything beyond all this. It’s such a fight, a fight that gives him perfect sleep.

His wife is seventeen years younger to him and very fair. Being petite and delicate featured, she looks far younger than her years. She draws a special attraction from most of the persons of the opposite gender. Among the scarp lying around to be sorted she looks worth coveting. They stay in a rented room at the outskirts of the town where a village has merged with the urban sprawl. There is a longish yard and a row of tiny rooms. The owner is a portly sixty something farmer, who drinks daily, and allows them to dump the collection in the yard.

In the third room from theirs, there is a 30-year-old local man from some other district in Haryana. He works as a salesman in a wine outlet nearby. There is special bonhomie between the owner and this chap because of the common factor, wine.

The property owner takes his lecherous share by shamelessly staring at the kabadiwala’s wife. The poor scrap dealer is well aware of the old man’s tendency to have an eye-feast even at this stage of life.

‘He has a bad worm in his mind. I don’t think he can sleep peacefully like I do,’ he observes to his wife sometimes. The charming wife gets a faint smile around her lips and stays mum.

Well, the wine salesman has a bigger role in the scrap collector’s sound sleep, bigger than any purity of conscience born of hard work. All along he has been helping his neighbour sleep soundly after a hard day’s work by providing decent stocks of sleeping pills to his wife who in turn serves it lovingly to her husband. So the hardworking scrap collector sleeps very soundly while his wife and her paramour most often have busy nights, or we can say ‘poor nights’ in the scrap collector’s lingo.