The hawker

 

Kala walks, hawks and talks like an expert vegetable seller now. But if you make a list of their success rank, he comes last. There are very serious quality issues about his vegetables. ‘But how will I purchase better quality if you don’t buy these from me, giving me some profit so that with the money I can get the premium class,’ he says. Well, he has a point here and makes some sense in this. To help people to give him more profit he generally overprices his substandard veggies.

He is from the village itself and more successful ones are migrant Biharis who visit from the town. So he brings personal touch in the bargain. He shouts people’s names also after the list of his items. He would shout your name for ten days at a stretch. If you never even say ‘no’ and stay hidden in your house, it doesn’t affect him. The next day he would call you with the same sweetness. He called me for ten days and I kept hiding. Finally my own conscience reproached me and I came out of my hole like a crab from the seaside rocks. I could see his triumph for having drawn me out. He gave me his severely substandard bananas at eighty rupees per dozen. At the city you get very good ones at sixty rupees only. But then you have to pay extra for being specially addressed by your name by a hawker.

His vegetable-hawking song went like this: aloo,  piyaj, tamatar,  bhindi, tori, ghiya, kheera ... suppee (this one for my name Sufi). It sounds like he’s selling suppee along with the vegetables.

Claim your little greatness

 

If you cannot climb Mount Everest, don’t get disappointed. You can try to do your best the way you find it the most suitable for your individual make-up for greatness and grittiness. Just don’t compare your feat with others. Let it stand alone. Like this man who created a world record in his pumpkin boat. An American, named Duane Hansen from Nebraska, travelled 61 km in a pumpkin boat. The gentleman grew a 384 kg pumpkin in his garden. Lesser pumpkins are meant for the kitchen. This one was special, meant to make history.  He cut a part of it to make it a boat and set foot aboard and away they went down the Missouri river and treated himself with the Guinness World Record on his sixtieth birthday.

A sane man walking

The farmer cheated me. He left the tubewell system plundered to the core. If you challenge them on their own terms—like shouting, fighting, going to police—only then they think you are worth your salt. Since, I am hardly interested in any of the three—because all of them would reach the same end—he thinks the bookish man is scared of him. So that made him still happier. He boasted about it also. The only option for me was to talk him into a resolution of the issue. But it was as good as talking to his buffalo. I found it suitable to use my energy in fixing the set again by investing money to buy the entire set again.

Thinking and pondering over the human trait of grabbing more and more I’m walking by the side of the road. It is a busy road. Earlier it was a cart track, then district road, then state highway and now a national highway with a toll plaza to collect the charges for speeding over it. There are signs of change on both sides. Agriculture is giving the baton to business and enterprise. The models of cars are getting costlier. The road is getting busier with the passage of each day.

He is walking by the side of the road. His long hair unkempt, his overgrown beard saggy, shirt buttonless and pajama somehow tied with a cycle tyre’s tube working as a belt. He has a trash bag. He is not a trash collector in the business sense of the term. He is just carrying on with the momentum of collecting just for the sheer habit of carrying some load. He is just an unrefined lunatic clinging to his possessions and further adding to them.

All around him are refined lunatics doing exactly the same: running around in the competition to gather more and more, to carry bigger bags. But ultimately the lunatic’s trash collection and the factory owner’s collection—just opposite the road—will stay here on earth. The lunatic trash man and the wealthy businessman have to go empty handed. Just that he picks up small throwaway items. The others are running for a bit more nicely packaged items—the things still in use—but the race is the same and finally both come to a naught.

The first week of September

 

It is the first week of September. It has been a dry August. Very hot. They have now air conditioners in the village. There might be some cool moments inside but the exhaust leaves it burning outside at night. Earlier, we had tolerably cool nights at this time of the year.

It is late evening. Fluffs of clouds are tinged orange by the setting son. A shikra is perched on the top of an electricity pole. A wiretail swallow is whoozing around its head. It flies dangerously close to its head with agitated chip-chip sounds. Maybe the hunter is after its chick that they are training to fly.

A perfect half moon is visible in the sky. There is a commotion in the street. A big rat snake has been sighted. It is hiding under a narrow duct in the small open water drain by the street side. People cannot believe that such a big snake is harmless to the humans. Three huge bullfrogs are wallowing in the muddy water near the duct’s end. Maybe they are very confident that their size is beyond the range of a rat snake. They can easily see the snake peering at them from under the duct just five or six feet away but they are not bothered about it. Sometimes big size helps.

Something for the pigeons

 

India completed seventy-six years of independence. The government of India initiated ‘Har Ghar Tiranga’ program to celebrate the occasion. Many roofs had the national flag even in the villages. But the national flag on one particular pole served an additional purpose also apart from celebrating the republican spirit. It liberated white pigeons from a tricky situation. The boy keeps many white pigeons. He has fixed a long pole on his roof with a little perch platform at the top end. The pigeons roost there. They are habituated to land on it after their little struggling flights. The sun is extra bright in the rain-washed skies. It was a little sad to see the pigeons sitting under the harsh and hot sun. Then the tiranga campaign caught the boy’s fancy. He dismantled the perch platform and now the national tricolor is flying proudly among the late monsoon winds. The pigeons have got their freedom from the heat at least.