The obstinate colors of life on the face of derisive death

 

Mid February. An adamant winter giving a gentle, pleasant rebuff to the summer slowly treading ahead. The mornings dawn condescendingly on the vegetable market at the town, the town that’s itching with urban lust to become a city, then a metropolis and finally merge with some mammoth urban megalith. The clutter and chaos going up with the rising sun. There is an ineradicable typical smell of a vegetable market in a town. The seasons change but this smell remains the same. A myriad-colored smell—the smell of fresh vegetables entwining with decaying organic discards, mud and dung. It unleashes its assault on your olfactory senses with a squinting spurt. The dealers and sellers shouting hoarsely. The monkeys nimbly crawling on the wires, doing antics and jumping down to run away with something eatable, or at least fir for giving it a try to chew at.  

A bleak, pathogenic, primordial smell pervading the congestion. Paddlers and roaming hawkers arriving with their carts to buy vegetables wholesale and sell them in the streets in the neighboring villages. Householders, directed by their budget-calculating wives, arriving on bikes and cars to buy a week or ten days of vegetables in one go and store them in refrigerators and thus save money. An economizing tussle.

Life trying to ward off death. A dreadful chasm between the two. There are many who have fallen in it. The outcasts, born in hideous circumstances. Their faces speckled with haunting melancholy. The broken pot shards that feel they can still hold water in their shallow curves defined by jagged, broken, sharp edges. A soundless cry on their dark, unwashed faces. It’s a group of children. They walk around with imperious timidity. They compete with cows in salvaging the castaway fragments of stale vegetables from dirt heaps.

Are they Rohingyas, or Bangladeshis, or some tribals from India itself? Whoever they are, they carry the same passport of misery. Their eyes full of innocent but still vile determination to beat the stray cows and bulls in salvaging the castaway, stale, spoiled chunks of unusable vegetables. It’s a childhood copiously fed on spoonfuls of sorrows. Their lightless serious eyes furtively darting around on the filthy ground looking for their treasure hunt. Aaah, poverty the depraved seducer! The dung-smeared bulls move around with a sleepy enchantment and languor. Emphatically moody monkeys crawling over cables, jumping on the tin sheds with clang-bang jocularity.

Furiously flaming frenzy of survival. Harassing, haunting, gnawing, devouring. Horrible paroxysms of the will to live—an eternal tenderness beating somewhere deep down in the womb of worldly garbage. The ground-sloggers amidst rack and ruin. The hawkers and middlemen shouting with burbling, stinging energy. The capricious coax of currencies mollifying all vileness and crossness faced on the path.

It’s a bearable world as long as you can sell your stale vegetables dabbed in acidified colored water to make them gleaming fresh with false promises of health and nourishment. Consumerism sets forth lynching questions. The bloodhound is baying for your blood in the tumult. Scuddling along, it’s always sniffing at your strained smell. Its bestial fangs ever-present, ever-lasting. You have to keep abreast of its swift trot. Either you eat someone’s chance to life through adulteration, giving them a slow dose of poison—your buyer whom you give such a nice welcoming smile—or get bitten by the spiteful hound and find yourself in death throes.

Hard-driven by destiny, withstanding the shameless stumbles, spirits all cheerless and discharmed, absorbing the acute pangs, you try to emancipate the sour most morsels with some weird dignity. Destiny dastardly debased. The migrants pulled in by the delightful roar and potent frenzy of the bazaar. Running away from the monstrosities of life drooling at their native places. The frenzied, spasmodic, sobbing circumstances swatting them away like a gunshot pierces through the fabric of peace in a forest and scares away a flock of sparrows. Running away from nightmarish tormentors of deprived life, they land at a distant place and try to cope with the ingenious cruelty unfolding at the new place. Miseries hop along with a frenzied scampering.

They squat on a little space in the open area in front of the vegetable sellers. With a groaning and grinding effort, like the persistent rub of a rope leaving a mark on a stone, they wriggle, relentlessly haggled by the rival claimants, to get a foothold—their self-marked space to set up a temporary establishment in the morning. There is no legal right to it. It can be swiped away like any garbage heap on the market compound. They also have to pay some monthly money—some kind of protection money to the neighborhood bully who controls the unofficial market affairs—to further cement their claim. Then they have to fight with the visitors who come to purchase vegetables and park their vehicles exactly on top of their little space where they have been cleaning the ground before setting up their shop. They sell cheap clothes, utensils, groceries to the people who are exactly like them but are struggling to survive through some other means.              

They have to arrive early, lest someone takes their marked place, necessitating a brawl. They carry a swaggered dark, grimy look in order to ward off any competitor to the space just with a mere look. They arrive with huge bundles of their wares—clothes, groceries, toys, utensils—heaped on carrier rickshaws, pulling in with purpose. It takes about an hour to clean the dirty floor, pitch poles, draw strings and ropes, put their products in presentable order. They do it with a strained and flustered expression. They count upon the footfall of their own types who work as laborers in factories and farms.

Two little boys, aged six and eight at the most, confront the falsehood and misery of life. Their father has pulled the heavy sacks of clothes laden on their carrier rickshaw early in the morning. He has left them to set up the shop and gone to attend some other task that will add some more bucks to their meager purse. The boys are clad in their school uniforms. They perform the task masterfully. Setting up poles in the cemented holes, cleaning the ground, drawing ropes, spreading a tarpaulin sheet, laying shirts, pants, jeans, shorts, socks, caps, hankies and belts in nicely segregated order. The other day it’s their mother who pulls into the ground with the cart and does all the stuff by herself. She has a dull and drowsy look on her weather-beaten face having fine features.

A thickset short old woman sells peanuts, gazak, grams and colored rice crunchies. She scans the passersby with one eye; with the other she tracks the monkeys who rob her at the slightest lapse in concentration. She holds a big stick to ward off the robbery. She says that her son has betrayed her for his wife. To further worsen the already strained relations, he operates a rival stall nearby. Her husband is partially paralyzed. He moves dragging his left foot. Another paralyzed man operates a tea stall. It’s a tiny sheet iron box on a mobile cart.

Young shop helpers are rubbing potatoes in sawdust to give them a freshly dug look after dousing them in acidified water. These are then sold as fresh arrivals from the fields. All the sellers are looking to sneak in a percentage of stale products into the fresh ones to increase profit. While the monkeys scamper around to cut that profit by a little margin.