Keshav

By Phani Vasantarao

It is obviously a place of pilgrimage, but I can discern no people. There are more minarets than I can be bothered to count. The entire monument is white. I don’t know if it’s Mecca, Medina or someplace else. I don’t know if the poster is a simple expression of faith, or an attempt to inject some brightness into the dull room, a window into some escapist pious fantasy. Not much unlike a crummy bus with window-sized portraits of Aishwarya Rai or Rani Mukherjee. I wonder what it must feel like to be at the mosque in the poster. It must feel like Tirupati, I decide – clean, simple, and pious.

The rest of the room is walls painted a dull, industrial green, and bikes in various stages of repair and disrepair. A fellow in jeans and a baseball-style cap squats near a bike, holding some greased bits of metal in his hands. I walk over and tell him what I need fixed. He looks up at me and nods as I explain. He seems permanently glum, and has none of that usual feigned respect for the upper class. I tell him about the problem, and how I need someone to accompany me home to fix the bike there. He in turn instructs a scrawny kid squatting next to him. The boy waggles his head eagerly. I feel vaguely guilty about making the kid work for me, but tell myself I have no choice. We soon set off on the scooter.

I want to talk to the kid, but don’t know how to begin. I have in the past had conversations with taxi and auto drivers, with maids and drivers who worked for my family. One driver told me with great pride that he had passed the tenth standard. A maid taught me the names of vegetables in Kannada, which I don’t remember anymore. A taxi driver was most pleased to discover I spoke Telugu, and so we talked on into the dark night as he navigated the crawling traffic. I talked about my job and he talked about his. He’d seen the Tsunami at close quarters, he told me. “I was supposed to die that day,” he said. “My time was good, that’s all”. An auto driver conversed all by himself. “Apartment, software, apartment, software,” he grumbled at the traffic. “What did you expect?”

Mum yells some instructions at me as we arrive. I yell back my OK-I’ll-do-it and park the scooter, still wondering how to initiate the conversation. But that problem has been taken care of.

“You speak Telugu?” the kid asks as I walk into the shed where I’ve parked the bike. Mum had yelled at me in Telugu, I remember, and nod in affirmation.

“What’s your name?” I ask him.

“Keshav”

“How old?”

“Fourteen! I’ve passed the seventh standard”

I find that impossible to believe. The kid looks nine to me. I wonder if he has miscalculated his own age, or whether it is simply the case that poverty has stunted his growth. He talks some more. His squeaky voice makes his blurted Telugu hard to follow, but soon I am able to discern that he has recently moved to Bangalore from Andhra Pradesh. He used to go to school there, but has dropped out now because of a “family problem”. Keshav is wasted government expenditure, I tell myself. He is also the growing Indian economy.

We chatter for some more time and then fall silent. People tend to. Keshav is eager and energetic, and he knows this problem well. Soon, he has removed the wheel with the punctured tyre from the bike and we are on our way back to the repair shop, carrying the wheel with us. Keshav can already tell that I’m a reluctant driver. He prods me on here, asks me to slow down there. I trust his judgement more than my own.

We get back at the shop, and Keshav is soon busy with his work. I’ve done this before, and I know it will take time. So I stand around and stare. A gutter runs besides the shop, roughly perpendicular to meandering “main” road. It is covered with stone slabs for the most part, but its end is open to the sky, its stone walls embedded in a mish-mash of mud and garbage. The street is simultaneously busy and lazy, dull and entertaining.

There’s a “bakery” nearby. Men gather there to eat, drink coffee or tea, and chat. An old, greying fellow in a white shirt and lungi picks up the orange-coloured plastic water jug from the bakery. He tilts his head upwards, the jug held in one hand, and gulps thirstily. But he first ensures that there are a good six inches of air between the plastic and his lips. Dogs hang about, some asleep, some wagging their tails in the hope that someone might throw a scrap or two at them.

People-like-me come and go. The first is a fellow driving an Enfield. He has a bespectacled, feminine face. But he’s a biker, this fellow. Slim, well built, blue jeans, white T-Shirt, hair tied up into a tiny knot behind his skull. Dressed up right, he could pass for a priest at a temple. He might spend the night at a bar, a dhabha, a shopping mall, an air-conditioned restaurant, or at home. He will, I presume, be back in that other world he belongs to.

Slum youth walk by, dressed in Jeans. Jeans were once a status-symbol in India. Now everyone wears them. That explains advertising.

A kid walks up to me. A short crop of hair hugs his skull. He has a horrifying squint. In one hand he holds up the tiniest newspaper cone filled with unshelled peanuts. The other he uses to ask me for money. Almost instinctively, I turn him away. And then I wonder why I didn’t buy him some grub instead.

Next to the bakery is “Subash hotel”. It is smaller than the bakery. The cook works outside the eatery with – I think – a kerosene stove. Another fellow waits with boredom, elbow resting on a table, chin in hands. I wonder if business is bad. On the other side of the street a tall building overlooks some tiny shops and a minor shrine. It is one of those buildings which are too narrow and too tall. The sort you think is probably illegal. There is another one further down the road, narrow staircase leading up to floor-one-two-three-four. Below, pushcart vendors haggle with customers.

Another kid from the repair shop comes up to me. He seems somewhat older than Keshav. If Keshav is fourteen, this fellow cannot be younger than sixteen. The kid looks no older than twelve though. He tells me the inner tube needs replacement. Keshav joins him in explaining the costs. I tell them to do it. The (seemingly) older kid sets about changing the tube, while Keshav wanders off to take a piss.

A couple of tiny slum kids walk by me – a boy and a girl. There is very little hair on their heads. The boy wears a red shirt and is naked from the waist down. The girl wears a drab nightie which fits her just right. I didn’t think those existed.

People-like-me, number two. Skinny girl in knee-length pants, hair tied into a bushy ponytail, wearing a jacket or some such, skilfully zipping past pedestrians on her scooterette. The one-and-a-half lanes of the “main” road seem narrow, but experience has taught me that on these roads, people always make more space. Buses and autos squeeze past each other. Two wheelers pour in and out like vermin that simply cannot be exterminated. Air-conditioned cars, SUVs, small trucks, bicycles and pushcarts all jostle for space. Yet none of the numerous pedestrians is run over. Well, almost none.

I hear a tiny wail. A fellow on a moped seems to have hurt a small child on the road. Most people would not, but this fellow stops, seemingly half-confused and half-scared. Soon, a crowd has gathered. It is amazing how so many people can seem to materialise out of nowhere, how seeming Brownian motion can temporarily be given some order.

A fellow in a red jacket walks over to the driver and angrily asks him some questions. The interrogator has one hand held up in a near-fist, but with his thumb pointed toward himself. He jerks the hand back and forth. Here, that is how people ask questions when they are angry. That is what they do when seeking justifications.

The driver of the moped protests his innocence, pleading with the crowd. It seems to me that the people are going to beat him up. But the child is not really injured; only scared. The mopedwallah is soon let off. It’s dark now. Has been for some time. Subash hotel has seen some customers come, eat and leave. The cook is busy again.

People-like-me, number three. Middle-aged middle-class balding greying uncle with potbelly. He looks like he should have enough money for an air-conditioned car, but he picks up this old, really shitty bike. He tries very hard to get the engine running and fails. I consider helping him, but decide against it, since I don’t want to tell him my family history. He gives up and asks the fellows at the repair shop to help him. Keshav to the rescue. Keshav doesn’t simply kick the starter. He jumps up and down with his hands on the handlebars and one leg on the starter. Keshav is an energetic little monkey, but it doesn’t help.

Two young men dressed in Pizza Corner uniforms drive past on a scooter. The night shift, I suppose. I wonder if they find it exciting. Do they seek relief from the quasi-slum in the bright lighting and air-conditioning of their workplace? Or have they tired of it already, become disillusioned with this silly job and that silly food? What do they make of the people who come there to eat, spending on one meal what other would earn in a month? Do they hate them or simply consider them crazy? Or do they not work at the restaurant at all? Are they simply delivery boys?

Would it be an exaggeration to say that they spend some time in my world, while I spend some time in theirs? Perhaps. But then, what do I call this place, where I feel so out of place? I neither love it nor hate it. I do not feel particularly sorry for the people here. But of late, I have begun to find it strangely entertaining. Maybe I need a little bit of it, every now and then.

Keshav tells me he’s done. We drive back to my home, where he fixes the wheel to the bike. Hunger is gnawing at my insides, but Keshav doesn’t seem tired at all. He labours on under the dim light in the shed. I wonder if his life isn’t as bad as I think it is. I wonder if I might get used to it with time, if I ever needed to. Sure, I would miss shitting and pissing in relatively clean places, but what else? Work will occupy me all day. I will duly feel hungry and enjoy my food. Days will go by. I will sleep tired but peaceful. But I know I romanticise. I know I am addicted to a certain level of material comfort.

Job done, I drive Keshav back to his shop. He and the other kid argue for a bit and then tell me how much I owe them. I pay them and hope the money goes where it is supposed to go. We have been nice to each other, but we are not friends. Keshav and the other kid turn around wordlessly and get back to work. “Be good, Keshav,” I want to say. “Go to school,” I want to say. But I do not.

By Phani Vasantarao