Snippets from the past – I
An unusual night (or late evening)
Winter in Guwahati is not as bad as I have experienced in some other places where I have had the fortune/misfortune of staying. Guwahati is the biggest city in and houses the capital of, my native state Assam, a state that belongs to ‘north-east’ India although technically it lies far east in the map of India. It’s a pretty big city though not certainly as big as other metropolitans in India like Delhi or Mumbai. Encased by valleys and hills all around, it is, or rather was beautiful, the ‘was’ replacing ‘is’ due to increasing man-induced disorder and dirt in the city which is so poorly overlooked by the administration. Guwahati serves as the gateway to the entire region of north-east India which is so isolated from the mainstream India, both geographically and otherwise. So although connectivity in various other regions of north-east India has been bettered to some extent over the years, yet Guwahati still serves as the common place where any person from anywhere in north-east India would arrive to journey to anywhere rest of India, and at the same time, people coming from anywhere else in India to north-east, would usually first stop at Guwahati, either by flight or by passenger train. Needless to say, it is pretty crowded.
It was an early January night in Guwahati, at least five to six years back. I cannot recall the precise year. I was an engineering student then, at Pilani, Rajasthan, which lies about 2500 kilometers from my home at Golaghat, a small town which lies a few hundreds of kilometers east of Guwahati. Pilani lies to the west of India, and as such, at the beginning of each semester, I traveled there taking the most obvious route by train, that is, travel from Guwahati to New Delhi by the relatively faster and more comfortable (thus somewhat expensive) train - Rajdhani Express, and then take a bus or a hired taxi from Delhi to Pilani along with a few other folks from north-east India who studied with me. The Rajdhani Express leaves Guwahati at 6:00 am sharp every morning, and I had never seen it delay by even one minute in the entire four years that I had journeyed in it. The first week of January is one of the two times when I had to depart to Pilani as the second semester of every engineering-year would kick off then, the other being at the start of the first semester which would be in late August. To catch the train at 6 am, I used to arrive in Guwhati from Golaghat the night before, with my dad. He and I rode in a bus starting from Golaghat in the morning, which took some eight hours to reach Guwahati. We usually or almost always in such a situation, booked a hotel for one night, for the following morning I would depart in the train and my dad would catch a bus and go back home after seeing me off.
It was one of those early January nights or late evening around 8 pm to be precise when I was walking with my dad on the footpaths of the densely packed locality of Guwahati called Paltan Bazaar, which housed the railway station of the city. We booked a hotel close to that area so that we had to walk minimum the next morning to catch my train. The idea of our walk that late evening was primarily to have dinner in one of the many restaurants there, although we were walking randomly on various alleys and streets to see what the road-side vendors were selling. It is worthwhile to mention that in paltan Bazaar locality, you would find uncountable road-side vendors selling ordinary stuffs at cheaper rates, starting from wrist watches and electronic goods to clothes, shoes and anything you would look for. It’s a busy, bustling, packed and chaotic area.
The night was getting colder gradually and the fog was starting to descend in the atmosphere. My dad and I were planning to have dinner soon so that we could return to our hotel before it got colder. So we started walking towards one the many, crowded Punjabi dhaba-type restaurants nearby with my tongue starting to water at the very thought of those extremely palatable Chicken Tandoori dishes. Abruptly, a very young girl caught my attention as I just walked past her on the footpath. She was one of the few ‘extremely poor people’, also called ‘beggars’, who were sitting over thin worn-out mattresses in that vicinity on the footpath where I had just walked by. The others close by her side were fairly old or middle-aged persons, male and female, who I thought, were definitely capable of working a few hours a day to earn some money but probably too lazy to do so, their laziness probably habituated by the easy money they could earn by sitting with an empty bowl and an impoverished face every day in that busy locality of Guwahati. This ‘little’ girl, who would probably then be around ten years old, sitting on a thin piece of mattress, with an expression that I cannot describe in words, with a torn, thin shawl around her tiny body, riveted my feet with an unknown power, and I did not or rather could not walk further, at least for the next two minutes when my dad had walked quite a little distance past me. When he called me looking back after two minutes asking if I faced any problem, my transient hypnotic state was marred. Within those two minutes that my eyes were fixed at that tiny little girl, I tried to observe and hear what she was doing/saying. As I wrote earlier, the night was starting to get cold, and fog began descending, with the density of people around starting to drop, as they started rushing to go back home. The girl was begging for some money, some food I guess, with her tiny, soft and delicate palms holding and shaking a worn-out steel bowl which was too big for her small hands. Her hair, falling just below her neck, were dry and greyish, probably due to the dust accumulating every day on her head as she sat there amid the crowd. I tried to understand if she hadn’t been feeling cold, and wondered that she might be hungry. For a few seconds, I tried imagining myself at her place. “I should then immediately get inside my blanket on my bed back home”, I thought. But she probably did not have a warm blanket over a soft bed waiting for her that night, I thought. Her face emitted a doleful, pensive and conscience-piercing expression, which I knew, would haunt me rest of my life. In those two minutes, the sea of questions, feelings and emotions flooded my mind in such a force that I didn’t know if I should give her a rupee or get her some food. I was simply hypnotized and stood there still until my dad’s voice made me drag my feet along leaving that tiny girl behind.
Needless to comment, I could not enjoy my dinner that night although my dad was expecting me to have a nice and warm supper with him at one of those tempting dhaba-type restaurants. My mind was blank, or rather, was filled with questions and doubts and I found no answers, no solutions. May be this was how life’s supposed to go along. I, obviously, could not finish my dinner and told my dad I wasn’t hungry so that he wouldn’t be concerned if I was having any stomach upset on the verge of having a long journey since I usually finish my meal on my plate. Like a hallucinating person, I started walking back to our hotel after we finished dinner. It was getting colder still, with visibility decreasing considerably owing to the fog. Suddenly, as I walked past the same spot where that tiny girl was sitting, I noticed a woman, probably the age of my mom, stopping by that spot. Curious, I halted my steps, and bent closer to see that the tiny little girl was still there, but this time lying on her back with her legs folded instead of sitting, on her thin mattress with her tiny worn-out shawl covering her body except for her face. Did that shawl provide her any warmth against the increasing intensity of cold descending that night? Oh ! I saw her eyes were shut ! The poor girl fell asleep, probably tired, exhausted, hungry and feeling cold. Her sleeping face is till date, one of the very few things that have touched my heart with the highest magnitude of emotional force. What was the woman beside her, doing then? I saw, that this woman, who was well-attired and therefore probably at least a middle-class person, was bending down on her knees near the tiny, sleeping girl, and bending her back even forward, was trying to wake the little girl up, shaking her tiny body gently with her hands, and speaking aloud precisely the following sentence in Assamese (I remember the exact words she uttered), which rings so sharp and clear on my ears even now: “Oi suwali uth… ei biscuit packet khai lo hoon..khai lo” [which literally translates into “hey girl, wake up… eat this packet of biscuits…take it..eat it”]. I remember, very sharply, the packet of ‘Good Day’ biscuits, which this lady was offering to that girl. As the lady tried waking her up, the girl’s sleeping face, displayed a mild irritation as her sleep was being disturbed. The sight of this woman trying to wake the hunger and poverty-driven tiny girl to feed her a packet of biscuits that night, is a sight too powerful and intense to be described by anyone, in any language and in any words. One had to be there to feel what I felt. Something inside my heart, did not allow me to stand and watch this episode any longer there. I rushed forward to catch the pace of my dad. The next morning, I departed to Pilani as expected.
It was an unusual night, a night that will always be a part of my existence.
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