Taking a grip of the trade

Coming from a deprived and underprivileged social strata, that requires one to hone a wide repertoire of survival techniques on a daily basis, Kala is now getting a foothold in the new trade. Befogged by tiny pinpricks in the back alleys, when one emerges on the main thoroughfare, it seems nothing short of a fresh dilemma. But braving against all odds, he has firmly established himself as a dependable vegetable hawker.

Earlier he struggled to remember even the name list of the vegetables loaded in his cart. He sounded plucky and lacking confidence in his shouts. But practice makes a man perfect. ‘I have been shouting all these names in the privacy of the fields. But the problem is that I have crammed the entire series. I have to speak all of it. Problem arises when the item that I have shouted isn’t found in my cart and then they complain that if I don’t have that particular vegetable why did I shout its name. I try to cut out the names of the missing vegetables on a day but then I forget the entire series,’ he confided in me.

But he seems to have crammed a long series, longer than anything that he memorized during his few years of schooling. The villagers may keep grumbling but he keeps shouting the names of his vegetables like children shout while playing.

In his mid-forties now, he honorably spent three decades in the testing job of a daily wage laborer. He worked with consummate zeal and carried out tasks with amazing physical felicity. He lifted weights with throwaway ease. His vision’s breadth was limited to the tasks required by a mason’s helper. He mastered it eloquently. But then he started to feel a bizarre pull at his knees. His knees wobbled and gave arthritic pain. His life was thrown out of gear because he couldn’t perform the heavy duty of a mason’s helper anymore.

He had to dig deep into the repertory of his faculties to seek an alternative. He turned the spotlight on another source of living. He saw so many Biharis wandering the streets as vegetable hawkers and decided to join their league. But his rendition of vegetable names was far below par. They sent down shrill, fluid, distinctive notes of their products, while he gave muffled, dithering notes. In any case, here he is at his best after lots of cramming attempts in the solitude of the agricultural farms.

Pulling a rickshaw laden with vegetables seems a cakewalk to him. ‘It’s almost no work. I just have to walk around and shout!’ he tells gleefully. Little does he realize that salesmanship is a totalized endeavor requiring many traits to fleece, cajole and bind the customers. His sales are lowest among the vegetable hawkers. The people complain that his vegetables aren’t fresh. ‘Start buying from me first, so that I save some money and buy costlier fresh ones,’ he tells them.

Above all, he is happy at least in matching his rivals in yelling out the names of vegetables. Most importantly, he finds the job very easy. Well, everything is relative. His new job is almost no work to him. There are but broken-spirited vegetable sellers who move around as if the entire world’s responsibility is on their shoulders. The reason is that they haven’t gone through the furnace of plain physical drudgery like Kala has. In order to digest your current standing, take some time off and try some harder job. You will then realize the significance of your undertaking.