AS the streetvendor packs up his stuff from the roadside and walks home to an ill-tempered, exhausted wife and six children, all he wishes for is for no woes on his family’s lips in his tiny house in a shantytown.
He hums a Punjabi tune he heard on the radio, wipes off the sweat from his sunburned face, and stops to buy a balloon for his youngest son who studies in a small government school. If only there was enough money for a good, English, private school...among other things for his children who were destined to become exactly what he didn’t want them to be: like him.
He greets a few friends on the way, stops again to buy some cigarette and candy, shares views with the hawker on the country politics, weather, sewerage and mehngai, and walks on in the moist night air. His thin, wiry wife opens the door with a frown on her face, as usual, and starts off a tirade of complaints about the children, their eldest one running away from the mechanic’s shop where he works as an apprentice, the grocer refusing to allow any more credit and so on.
He ignores her completely and walks in, slaps one of the boys on the face as he catches him hiding a film magazine behind his back and starts shouting for the younger kids to come grab their candy. The wife brings him dinner and more complaints. He lies down on the charpoy, ignoring her and falling into a tired, well-deserved sleep almost immediately.
At the same time, the wife of a highly-successful chartered accountant lies in bed in a spacious room with heavy curtains and dim lights in a posh part of the same city. She has tears in her eyes, her hand on her migraine-throbbing head, her thoughts on her daughter’s sudden mysterious illness. She has only one child, born after years of wait and longing. The best of schools, a degree in fashion designing, countless friends, luxury and her recently-celebrated marriage to the handsome, wealthy son-of-the-multinational-president husband.
Where had they gone wrong? What had so suddenly taken its toll on her beautiful, statueque daughter whom she had raised with all her love and almost undivided attention despite her career as a school-chain owner. Her attacks of hysteria and long-term depression right after the wedding had harassed her young husband already. Now, lying asleep in the bedroom next door, she had shown no inclination to go back to her husband since the last three days. Her mother knew it was no use pushing her. The young man would drop her back the next day. Doctors said there was nothing wrong with her. Was she a case for the psychiatrist? She wondered about the appointment with the therapist the next day. What if someone found out? Her child wasn’t crazy!
She suddenly felt tired, alone. She wished her husband had taken off from work today. She had too, after all. Why was she always alone in her case? What good was that selfish workaholic anyway? It really was her father who’d helped him get his first lucrative job. She cried some more on her tragedy, then fell into a fitful sleep, only to wake up a little later by a horrible nightmare about her daughter committing suicide, just like their neighbours’ 22-year-old son last year.
Life isn’t easy for anyone, either they be the privileged haves or the deprived have-nots. Where did we go wrong in building the perfect world? Today, all this modernity seems to gnaw at our dreams and plans. Happiness, being a state of mind and not a commodity, was never as rare a treasure as it is today. The ‘happy man in rags’ myth just doesn’t exist anymore.
There are no free spirits anymore anywhere. Everyone has problems; everyone’s yearning, whining for more, or for something in particular. Wealth, love, peace of mind, health, friends, attention...? And it’s strange, really strange. The more we try to better our lives, the more we end up messing it further. Why aren’t the rich happy, the bewildered streetvendor would ask. He doesn’t see any reason why that should be so. Perhaps that’s the problem, that nobody sees why money should not be a solution to every problem. Values are not valued anymore.
If you know what is missing from your life, but not what to do about it or who to shoot for whatever went wrong, leave it to God and amuse yourself with His inexplicable sense of humour that we call irony in this world. Someday, even if it is too late, you will know all the reasons too; it’s human tradition now.
AS the streetvendor packs up his stuff from the roadside and walks home to an ill-tempered, exhausted wife and six children, all he wishes for is for no woes on his family’s lips in his tiny house in a shantytown.
