traffic signal

Posted on | June 17, 2009 | 1 Comment

he had left the office early,today…nearly half an hour saved,and yet,he was dog-tired.sitting in the autorickshaw he realized that he could not even listen to radio on the phone,because he had left his headfones with the other laptop,locked in his office drawer.oh damn!!and a hell lot of traffic and noise.the auto slowed down at the goregaon flyover redlight,on s v road,and he sat,too tired to think anything,with a blank mind,waiting for the snarling,moving,molten multicoloured, flowing mass of metal which shelled the fragile humanity encased in it and got it from one place to the other, to crawl forward. too tired, he was seeing things,but his mind was not registering them…his vision as vacant as that of a man in a faint…or an alcoholic who has had a dozen glaases too many…and then he saw her.

she was old…very old.and very dirty.poor.but then if she was not,she would not be begging here on the redlight,knocking on the power windows of AC cars who would not roll down.her hair was a tangled mass which looked from afar as if a nest of a bird,her dress was a patchwork quilted mix of men’s and women’s clothes,all dirty and torn and sewn and gone to hell and back.she wore on her eyes dark glasses of the kind blind men wear, or people with injured eyes,the ones which have shades on the sides to prevent light coming onto your peripheral vision, only they were tied by a string that went around her head. and on her feet,dirty,black pump shoes of cheap plastic, and around one ankle, a thick ring of whitish metal, which might have been silver, but was probably aluminium or tin. she had been knocking on the closed window of the car right in front of his auto for the past few minutes, and of course, the owner did not lower his power windows…the heat and dust might invade the airconditioning…oh…and the noise.

he turned his eyes away, deliberately looking very hard at the opposite side of the road, in the gesture of someone who does not want to see, as he sincerely hoped either that the light would go green or she would ignore him and go someplace else in her quest of alms.the lights stayed red,and she did not go someplace else.

she held the sidebar of the auto and began pleading unintelligibly.he continued to stare at the other side of the road, as if there was something very fascinating about the exhaust pipe of the truck next to his auto,which was persistantly and deliberately pumping hot and ugly smoke into his auto, and thus into him. she stayed.

he turned and waved at her to go away.she stayed.

he made the mistake of looking into the glasses…more accurately at the face.she was hideous.worse pathetic.her nose was flat, as if it might have been broken by the innumerable beatings her husband or lover or parent or pimp might have given her in a youth long forgotten, and even then she would have been ugly. her lips were flecked with dirty saliva,and cheeks like dry and shrivelled like a paper napkin with too much dirt accumulated on it.he took a glance at the shrivelled hand jutting towards him-the grime covered palm,the fingernails black with the accumulated dirt and grit and smoke of god only knew how many weeks of dust-and reached for his wallet.

he was swearing very silently and very fluently to himself as he handed her the tenner,and stared stared straight ahead,with a stonily expressionless face,his insides trembling with the rage threatening to boil over and overcome him.he did not who it was directed against,himself,or her,or her husband/lover/pimp/father/family/children or the other people who turned away like he himself had done….he spat on the road angrily…it was none of his business.he had paid his tenner,and that was more than was worth…whatever.maybe there would be others with other tenners that evening…and maybe she would get a decent meal or two.but then again…may be there was a son…or a beggar master,who would beat her up and take the money.none of his bloody business.violently,he spat at the road again,and glared at the passing vehicles on the goregaon flyover.

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