The Hawker of Handmade Fans: The Fading Trade of Airy Comforts

 **2003**

The hand fans which used to be so handy during not-so-old days in the villages, when people would take them in their hands and start shaking to undo the summer-born sweating miseries.

We always wanted to put on airs.

It is necessary for the perspiring skin as well, or even more so necessary for the perspiring, suffocating inner self, full of vacuum containing elements of cravings, desires and needs.

So, across times, the common mortals have held handheld pieces to create airy ripples around their faces.

The kings had beautiful maids bearing whisks to freshen the air of sovereignty hovering lugubriously over their crowned heads.

The colonists had hand-pulled ones swaying from the ceiling to do the same, or to put away the whiff of filth-laden air of natives and their supposed diabolical entity.

Then came electricity. Electric fans with blades whizzed to do the very same for the entire planet.

But then, need is, and has become, or even will ever be, such a prominent feature of Earth that electricity is yet to reach the dark interiors of scores of habitations on the face of Mother Earth.

And where it is, the timing is yet to be brought up to the real existential level.

In the village streets, on bucolic and hot noons, there still wander poor, old, frail Muslims hawking their handmade airy conveniences made of natural fibres.

But clearly, electricity has dimmed the glimmer of the trade.

And the huge lacuna which could have been, and in fact has been so far, left by the real need and production of electricity, now of late is being filled by generators and inverters.

Out of the still slimmer chances of selling a piece, the majority chunk is eaten away to satisfy the merciless need of bargaining by the country womenfolk, who consider it a sovereign right to haggle in an otherwise male-dominated society, where occasional fistwork and abuses are not considered too much out of the norm.

So they stick to this right, wring out the last ounce.

Thus the poor man has to suffer.

He hawks in his piteous voice the gusty, sweating clouds of peril for his trade and prospects.

Light whorls are had.

His white beard sways to their command.

The larger command of a larger fan.