The door opened with a squeal as Manu entered my room with my breakfast. A thick oily parantha stuffed with potatoes and a cup of black tea. He took a newspaper from the stand, spread it on the table and placed the plate on it. He looked at me, smiled in his usual way and then looked at the cooler.
“Isme paani bhar doon tumhare liye? (Should I fill the cooler for you?)”
I looked at him in surprise. His smile was still there, only after that act of gesture, it had become more intriguing. A nod came involuntarily from within me.
Once he was done, he came back into the room, smiling as usual. He informed me that the cooler was fit to cool again and stood there. I stood up, grabbed my wallet, paid him twenty bucks and he left, smiling.
“You think he’s your friend?”
I looked at my roommate, quite perplexed. He worked in the mess of my hostel. The cook was known as the maharaj and he was an assistant to the maharaj. He’d deliver what the maharaj would cook, to the rooms and would do errands for everyone in return of monetary benefits. But was he my friend?
“He’s a nice boy. He’s always smiling and helps us with so many things. I’ll help him too if he needs me, so yeah maybe he is my friend!”
We were walking to the college when I saw him come out of some room, a few yards away from me. He looked at me and smiled. He always smiled at me, maybe because I was the only one who smiled back at him.
My roommate had talked him into agreeing to dust the floor daily for us in the morning. Since then, he’d come every day in the morning, sweep the dust out of our room and leave. While he swept the floor, I observed him, with partly open eyes, closely every time. He’d look at the newspapers in the stand while sweeping from around it. I knew he couldn’t read them, but he was always observing them, maybe the pictures, yet observing them. He’d pluck the strings of my guitar, making sure they didn’t make enough sound to wake us up. He’d look at everything that was alien to him, gave them their deserved looks of curiosity and then continue sweeping.
That day, after I was back from the college, I was sitting in my room, in front of my cooler. The day had been humid and the insane heat was really a turn off. The door squealed again and Manu entered the room, his face all full of smiles. Trust me, to see him smile like that pacified the hypothalamus and I felt a respite. I welcomed him to sit on the bed beside me.
“Hum aaye the aaj subah. Darwaza khula tha. Safai kiye or chalegaye. (I came in the morning. The door was open. I cleaned and I left.)”
I smiled back at him.
“Thank you, yaar. Tu bohot accha he. (Thank you dude. You are really nice.)”
The smile blossomed into laughter. He looked at the guitar, went close to it and started plucking the strings.
“Ye kya hai? (What is this?)”
I stood still for a moment. He didn’t know what it was?
“Ye filmo me bajta hai na? (They play it in the movies, right?)”
I consented without even waiting for him to finish. Apparently he did know it was a music instrument but didn’t know anything more about it. I told him to bring it to me. He brought it to me and placed it in my lap. I gave it back to him and asked him to hold it. I told him that it was called a guitar and how it was played. I showed him how tension produced sounds. The smile pulsated on his face as he struck the strings to produce different tones.
He asked me if the cooler needed filling. I gave him a nod. As he stood there, setting the pipe, he asked me what day it was. I replied “Thursday”. His reply was “Hindi me batao”. I gave him his answer and then asked him if he were interested in learning the names of the days in English. I had given him a choice, but it seemed he didn’t realize that. He waited for me to begin without saying anything, just the smile. I made sure I was slow and as easy on him as possible. He was a quick learner; he grasped four names out of seven, though he messed up with the chronology but that’s okay. Once we were done with the names, he seemed happy. I was happy too.
Over the next few days, I learned a lot more about him. I had offered him to learn the alphabet and other things from me, but he had ‘a busy schedule’. You, reading this, must have grown sympathetic towards the boy by now but the next few lines will change your entire perception!
His busy schedule apparently earned him money enough to buy a phone! He came to me with his brand new phone and asked me to feed some songs into it. I was happy for him. He didn’t know the alphabet, didn’t know much about what we learn in the books but he knew counting in Hindi, names of the days in Hindi, and many other things! He could play with snakes that came out in the wild during the rains, he could tell you a lot about stuff that we just read in the books, but he really saw! His life wasn’t miserable at all. Perhaps that’s why he was always smiling. At the age of ten, he was earning two thousand rupees all by himself. He knew the art of cooking small things, peeling all sorts of vegetables, doing the flour dough, and many other things that we could never imagine a kid of ten to do!
He came to me this evening; with a pigeon he had caught hold of, on the terrace. He asked me if I wanted to keep it. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I asked him to keep it with him for me. He gladly agreed. I clicked his photograph with the pigeon. The pigeon was uneasy initially, it kept trying to break out free, but those hands were stiff around him and it couldn’t overpower them, so it adapted. His story is very much the same. This wasn’t something he chose. Nobody likes to leave home at ten to work in a far off place, but circumstances force us to do things for the ones we care about. His elder brother works here too. Both of them support their families and themselves with whatever meagre they earn and that isn’t something that evokes sympathy, it evokes respect.
Kids like them are working like this because people like you and me did not come up when they needed our hands the most. Now that they are settled, we do not have to root them out of that life and place them in the hands of some NGOs or other welfare agencies. They are learning to live their lives in the wild itself and they have survived it so far, they will survive it further. The best that we can do right now, is to support them from the outside. Help them get educated while they continue with their work. There’s no age limit to school. Agreed; but that doesn’t mean you make them quit everything and send them off to schools to play and live the childhood they’ve missed out on. They need education and the best that can be done is to deliver that to them in the way they’d appreciate.
He’ll still come tomorrow to my room, and I’ll teach him something new too. He’ll smile shyly first, then he’ll repeat it after me. It won’t take much time. He’s a quick learner.
