It was a gusty Saturday morning. A couple of minutes were pending for the next local to arrive at the platform. The jet black minute hand of the white clock hanging from the ceiling hit twelve. It was ten.
I made my way inside the train pushing aside the other women. To my bad luck, I had to fit myself into this namesake of a place between a fat lady and the door. As the swarm kept jumping inside, through the saris and the dupattas a little boy emerged, clumsily suppressing a sigh of relief. He glanced around, and in less than a fraction of a second, carried his petite torso towards the doorway.
He wasn’t much of what you would visualize a child-beggar to be. He had a dark round face, and deep jet-black eyes. He wore slightly dirty black pants and surprisingly, they weren’t torn at all. Complimenting it was an oversized dirty brown shirt with sleeves tidily folded till his elbows. The black belt of the watch strapped onto his left hand was completely missing after its mid-length, but at the end of the day, the dial flaunted digital timing. I couldn’t help but let this 12-13year old steal my curiosity. He positioned himself cautiously with his hand circled around the pole by the door, blocking a skimpy path of breeze that in retaliation unsettled his short black hair.
“Do you go to school?” I asked in Hindi. There was a baby girl crying in the arms of her young mother, college girls who took the liberty to confer personal ratings to senior boys who were oh-so-hot, a cluster of office going aunties discussing their children, two grandmas chatting about somebody else’s daughter-in-law, all increasing the sound decibels to annoying levels, and then there was this little boy, enveloped in a world of quiet.
“No,” he reverted back, breaking the spell of silence.
“Why don’t you join a municipality school?”
“Mun...munay...what?”
“Municipality, uh, the government school. You can’t clean train floors all your life.”
“I have no money to pay.”
“Government schools are free. Where do you live? Perhaps, you’d let me help you.”
“Vaapi.”
“Vaapi, Gujarat?! And whatever are you doing here in Mumbai?”
“No work back home.”
“Where are you headed to now?”
“CST station. To take the train home.”
“To Vaapi?! So, you travel back and forth, well, daily?”
“Yes.”
Not a word more, not a word less. My attention lay transfixed, while this wonder of a kiddo was exclusively occupied observing the inanimate assortment of objects flying past us as the train gathered more speed and raced ahead.
“Where do you parents live?”
“They’re dead.”
“I’m sorry. Listen, why don’t you find yourself a school? You can study hard and get yourself a decent job. What you’re doing isn’t, well, buddy that’s not what kids do.”
“I can’t afford a uniform. I’m a beggar.”
I took in a deep breath and whispered a prayer into the spill of sorrow. He began to open up.
“I’ve studied till fourth grade. Then Amma-Baba died, and bhai took care of me. He even got me re-enrolled at a school in Gujarat…”
“Then why don’t you attend it, mister?”
“Before my first day at school, he left. Bhai never came back.”
“Oh. Do you know what happened?”
“Never heard from him, never saw him.”
A flock of fanatic aunties hopped in as the train made a screeching halt at the next terminus. A few fisherwomen ran to our side, took off their tattered chappals and sat on them. I looked at my wallet.
“Le lo. Here.”
“No,” he nodded his head side to side.
“Come on now, take it.”
I held his tiny hand, placed the rolled up twenty rupees and closed his fist.
“Don’t spend it at one shot. And preferably use it to eat, alright?”
As the journey ended and the station appeared out of the nothingness of the stretch of railway tracks, the ladies began to push and pull to disembark. The boy jumped off while the train was still threading through its final seconds of slow momentum. When I got off, I saw him standing right in front of me. He waved.
He hadn’t seen notes worth twenty bucks together in many years. He raced past a collection of ideas. He placed the fortune safely in his pocket. As he walked, he felt good. It wasn’t loose change, the money wasn’t clattering.
The little boy looked up at the vast light blue colored sky, and smiled.
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