WE………..THE PEOPLE(PART1)

 

            THE DREAM INFANT

What is life without an impossible dream………………
Anonymous

Prologue:
I get started here with the first of a series of my posts prissying myself into a departure from my ostensibly distinct style and heavy philosophical stuff. A lot has been said and done about good Samaritans and the social strings in this society that bind us. Things that make us an important cog in the progressive wheel of this society. Things that make us we….the people…and things that don’t…..Circumstances that make criminals and heroes out of the most ordinary lives, dimensions that make us the victors and the vanquished and qualities that make us proud citizens and shameless culprits. I’ve often discovered that when you look at such things you better look at them from an outsider’s perspective, for the simple reason that when you’re involved in it you tend to lose the perspective and direction completely. So here I am with nothing to do in my own blog than to sit and watch this little boy stealing my show with his wanderings and discoveries from right under my nose, His life and means of life, His pains and pleasures and experiences he’s had with the tiny world surrounding him.

Jehangir Khan could’ve lived more if he wanted to. Only that he didn’t wish to. Life had made him suffer the way death couldn’t. Begum Noor had died half a decade ago and his license to mill was snatched by the very men he detested. Those were the prices you had to pay for resisting and defying the devious ways of this world. Our family name and reputation was besmirched by perpetual darkness. And the light was nowhere near. My old man hung himself to the ceiling and abandoned me at the age of four when I hadn’t even forgiven him for dying yet. If only he could see hope……And since then I have grown up in footpaths and have ended up on a railway station having nowhere to go. I’m Sher Khan, a khan by birth and a sher(meaning tiger) by heart. I’m 18 years old now looking no older than 12 by appearance .My waif like body succumbing to years of poverty and tasteless hunger. They call me a pint sized dwarf. But hey I am no dumb person!

It is morning time right now and I’m trying to brush my teeth. Don’t ask me the colour of it for I cannot identify it myself. But they say we have thirty two teeth having white as their colour. I know that much. I’m no dumb person. I have a penchant for thirst as soon as I brush my teeth. I try to forcibly gulp down water overflowing from the bursted pipes diametrically across the slum behind which I place my head and stretch my tiny body. My hands have a deformity which I wouldn’t like to talk about so I have to literally stick my mouth to the pipe. I cant even keep my feet away from the sewage pipeline that lies beneath me and parallel to the water I am consuming. It’s hard to imagine people living in fine abodes and royal mansions being subjected to the same kind of water. It is here that I change my clothes and head for a cigarette(Ah it feels heaven) stop before I start collecting the dust in peoples minds and also their shoes, thereby polishing them. I love the brand 555 (I have my tastes!!) but I will settle for pines as the cheaper ones don’t have a filter( I knw that much!! i’m no dumb person) and I can’t survive on cigarettes alone. If only I could. After having satisfied my taste and pain buds with a dozen pines I decide to leave early for work. I can’t sleep as it is. If only I could (I’d never wake up.). It is early hours in the morning now and it’s damn cold as I watch the people swarming the station by their bodies. Like tiny ants assembling all over my slum. It’s an unusual morning today because for once the 7:12 churchgate train has arrived before the 7:14 one. Now is the time to service my first customer.

Mr.Deshmukh’s first name could have as well been darkness or andhera if it hadn’t been suhas. For standing besides the man makes you feel like a hapless man locked in a room of darkness with no trace of light anywhere nearby. The man has a taste as rotten as my pines for I find it strange that a man as high in terms of position as him has to wear second hand white shoes on black trousers and orange shirts(pine definitely tastes better!!). I often wonder the reason for this comedy of error and the only answer I find is that…..off course he dresses in that manner so that with white shoes and white teeth I’m able to recognize him in the darkness of night. For it would scare the living daylights out of me if I saw just the orange shirt roaming around. I’m dark myself but you can’t term anything in me as darkness except for my past and the years of nicotine still burning in my heart. Looking at him makes me feel as if I can own his bank 1 day. The rest of the day goes on with usual chaos on the station. A plethora of ticket less travelers and avarice prone ticket collectors who seem to be making a law of their own.An indian baba who with black glasses and stuttering mouth looks blind. A blind casanova who only asks young girls to drop him from place to place! imaginatively thinking things im ashamed to even speak. And then i think why have we become so sex starved? Hell,he cant even wait for the pimp who waits endlessly on platform no.7 every noon. It’s evening time now and I can see the television on the railway station for about half an hour (only news channels but I like it anyway as u see some of the biggest beggars and cartoons there itself!!i can see their foolishness!! I’m no dumb person you know!). I see my friend kailash kher crooning the most wonderful songs I’ve heard and its heartening to see him living quite a dream. I still remember him struggling to no end. The way he used to run from pillar to post to no avail. If only I would be as lucky as him. While heading back to my stool I see the policemen in action for once. The Paandu(that’s what a constable is called) is pissed with this guy for ignonimously making love to his girlfriend amidst public glare. It’s reminiscent of my own street side dalliance with shaanti the rag picker. I’d loved her so passionately as if there was no other woman in this world! I can still feel the tenderness of her body brushing against my own……her long legs…..those refulgent eyes that contained a beautiful world inside them. The intensely passionate kisses which felt like the last drops of monsoon. I remember it as if it were yesterday. The day I lost my virginity, the day I realized my dream, the day I met my living relatives, the day I’d known of my guardian and the day I’d first got drunk. And such moments would often come at most unexpected times. The first time I made love was the same day when I’d first learnt of some of my abbu’s exhorbitant debts. The day I’d lost my virginity was the day when I got caught by the paandu for the pettiest of reasons. It was more than a 50 rupee note and a mouthful of praise that got me out of that quagmire. I’m not a dumb person you knw. The first day you get drunk is often the day of endless grief in ones life so I needn’t bother to tell here that it was a day when I’d lost Shanti. It often makes me feel why this fair guy in black clothes having floppy, unkempt hair and an oft. Recalcitrant but jonty mood is depressed? As to why a guy quite colourful and ebulient at the surface is often so black and white beneath it and its volatility. How often do I see him depressed? How often do I see him complaining? How often do I see him drowned in melancholy? And then I almost begin to pity him and it often makes me wish……….. if only I had a life like him……..

Epilogue:

Sher khan now handles a canteen at bandra station. Im sure he will go ahead and own it one day. And since he has turned into an overnight celebrity now courtesy my blog I can say proudly that he knows me by my name. The people who know me needn’t be told as to who the guy with floppy hair, black clothes and often in a depressed mood these days is!(outsiders arent unwelcome so ill confess that this mysterious person happens to be the author of this blog) Perhaps the guy with floppy hair has had floppy life. He might have seen and suffered a lot. But its still light years away from what Sher Khan has. In that sense and probably every sense he is possibly the luckiest guy in this world Most of the things in our lives are often taken for granted. Yes, the two multi tasking hands(with no deformity in them) the two wonderful eyes, the god gifted ability to think and the desire to dream. Even the position to smoke 555’s instead of pines. lol. Most of us are so confused that we lose the ability to think. Some of us are still trying to find the means of our existence and almost of all of us have lost the ability to dream. Dream things that are probably not possible. But Only probably. You must be thinking that a boot-polisher at some x,y,z railway station in Mumbai( I didn’t bother getting into such persnickety stuff because it is not in anyway concerned with the paandus or railways or politics) can fool paandus ( and you thought you were the smartest1 around!), make mind boggling love at bed(well im sure he never got a bed!lol! at the most he got a haatgadi…..an indian cart trailer it also makes me feel as if ive done nothing my entire life! Lol!) has a good taste of cigarettes and has all the fun and frolic in life( he’s no dumb fool you know!) despite being in dire straits at every turn of life, the uncertainties of life and destiny making him writhe in pain with every trial and tribulation. Just when he seems to have passed the panic bridge. And what exactly is your dream by the way? Being a successful engineer or a decent doctor? To live your life with loved ones and become good human beings? To have kids and retire at fifty? Such dreams are clichéd and the thoughts behind them parochial. We’re stuck up in a shell that when hatches is going to rock the ground beneath our feet and shatter the very root of our beliefs.

10 Comments

Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI