An Uninteresting Story

It will not be very interesting for many to read this column of mine. I have not been invoked by muses to disgorge anything worthy for a week or so, though I thought of many things as i spent the whole week reading assorted books. As I read them, I was often assailed by momentary spur to post comments on them on my blog. Once I had finished them I felt uninspired to come out aught. However, a thing of great odd and ends happened yesterday when i was travelling on a bus back home from work. It is my usual itinerary to and from Sivagangai and my work place, where i meet a lot of personalities and am fed with myriad themes to ponder over.

As i got into the bus, i found a gypsy girl of less than ten years old sitting abreast in the seat of the conductor, with the driver. In the parts where i live, the seat meant for conductors is usually left for the passengers' use with a non-chalant attitude. A traveller from away may even be awestruck to find the passenger arguing with the conductor for the acquisition of the seat. Not to digress further. I did not get any interest in the girl as such personalities are common everywhere. More over, it was very hot, as it was thirty minutes past three in the afternoon. I did try to bring in some interest to my vision by looking through the window on people who still managed to come out of their houses in the hot weather and were moving helter-skelter, probably due to the hot strips of rays, perspiring profusely and gasping and chasing out to small strands of shades.

My eyes had been invited to see the girl as she, from thin air, produced some eatable stuff in her plate. It looked to me like two pieces of fried fish initially, but a closer examination gave that they were two 'bajjis'. She was eating them with fine relish. The driver kick-started a conversation with the girl and was putting questions to her. Her dialect and rending voice drew me to her and my curiosity grew out of bounds to talk to her. She told the driver that she was a regular in catching the three-thirty bus after her vivacious stint at the central bus bay for four hours. She lives in a colony meant for 'Narikuruvas' some twelve kilometres East of the city of Madurai, through which the bus is plying.

Her usual work here is that she catches the ten o'clock bus to reach the central bus bay, with only fifty rupees. She buys pencils for that money. Then she ventures out into selling them by catching hold of ordinary public and tourists, who frequent the place as the city happens to be an historic one, with a profit of only rupees one for each pencil. She manages to make twenty to thirty per day, it depends on the bus she uses to ply from her place, as some of the buses charge exorbitant fare. She further divulged that she was from Andhra and had come on vacation. Her regular work here, in her 'Chithi's' (Mother's younger sister) is to get provisions for the house in the morning, preparing food for breakfast and packing her own breakfast and departing for her stint.


From her small 'knapsack', she produced a water bottle, to wash her hand as she was eating. All these things provoked me to personally venture to know more about her. She managed herself wonderfully well all alone in a strange place not even knowing to read and write Tamil. Though she mis-pronounced a stop, given as reply to the driver's probe to know her intelligence and recce, she was quite a shrewd girl. Her parents are employed in 'Guntur' - a town in Andhra Pradesh, India, as collectors of 'Honey' or that was what i made out from her reply. She would go back and join them. She is studying in a school in Andhra. She said that her parents had four more kids to look after. She has proven herself a master in exploiting trade-skill as she was letting out some of her selling strategies. Here is a girl who is very much alone and has decided with all humility and happiness to shoulder the burden of the family and goes about it with such ease that it will put all pampered children, sons and daughters to great shame. I got off the bus at my bus stop, to catch a bus to my native town, having learnt much philosophy from her rather than my exposition to many a book.