A smart worker

 She is short, chubby, dark, funny-featured with a clearly discernible moustache. My niece has fever and we are sitting in the waiting hall of a hospital at the town. There are dozens of patients on the steel chairs. She carefully scans the scene. A smart hunter who knows whom to approach without dicing with danger too much. The target is locked. A struggling countryside writer is most eligible to be hunted. She reaches me, wincing with pain, looking like someone in urgent need of medical attention. ‘Can you please give me fifty rupees?’ she asks. ‘Are you running short of money for the doctor’s fee?’ I ask with full sympathy and complete bookishness.

Writers are very imaginative so my imagination saves her from the trouble of explaining her woes. With my fragilely inflated sense of pity, I see myself opening my wallet and giving her fifty rupees. She waits for three or four minutes then gets up with an effort. ‘I think the doctor will take some time to arrive so in the meantime I can take some fresh air outside. It’s suffocating here,’ she informs me. I shake my head mutely. After all she looks so confident about her act. She goes out, never to return. Well, she will of course return but not till we are supposed to be here.

All I can say is that begging is getting improvised. Poverty is always busy in the act of fervent procreation of miseries for those falling in its grasp. She has to be innovative. The business rivalry is picking up. Attractive, scent-laden, panoramic transgenders with tight-fitting jeans, gaudy shirts, colored hair, luscious red lips and jutting pointed bust—a bubbly assemblage carrying starry ambience—get far more in alms than dirty mothers with malnourished infants suckling their dry breasts. True tears and silent screeches hardly sell in the market of alms and charity. It has turned plaintively exasperating having run its miserable course over the centuries. The real show of genuine poverty is a prodigious waste in eliciting emotions these days. Maybe it has become too normal, a routine thing to see stray dogs and dusted, dying humans by the pavements.

But I reckon this sweet imp has plenty of skills to survive in the game where the dogs of hunger are perpetually preying upon those without a roof over their head.