Kolkata - the City of Joy

I wanted to name this story 'the mother and the son'. But then someone had described them much better than me years before even I was born and he named his book 'The City of Joy'. So this is a dedication to that foreigner who made a rickshaw puller and this city immortal in his story forever.
 Lately it had been drizzling quiet a lot in Kolkata. I wanted to go shopping for something and my favorite destination is Esplanade.

This time though it was a little different.  It rained in the evening, so less people on the streets and more traffic on the road.

Most of the hawkers had shut down after the heavy shower, poodles of water in the ‘brand new holes’ in the middle of almost every road. I was a little disappointed seeing so much less crowd, though relieved at the same time because we could walk faster and smoother amidst a comparatively less crowded new market place.

What caught my eye was a woman sitting in front of an underground mall. Her hair looked like almost that of a mad woman. I almost felt bad for her until in a minute or so a boy aged between 10-11 years of age joined her.

Her eyes lightened up suddenly. The look of a mad woman who seemed to have lost everything in the world suddenly went away. I realized that boy was her son.

They were beggars. The system that works almost everywhere in India is similar to this, except that we never see the happy endings. Most of us see one side of the scenario.

We either see the children holding their siblings asking begging for money at every possible traffic signal, or we see women who look deserted and ask for food or money from every passerby sitting in front of a mall or footpaths.
This story of the mother beggar and son duo might not be of a family deserted by a rickshaw wala anymore, but nonetheless it’s someone who married that woman somewhere in a remote village in India with hopes similar.

When she got married she must have been a teenager. Child marriage is still rampant in every remote nook and corner of the ‘covered’ Indian villages. I kept wondering while coming back what her life must have been from a bride to a mother who begs along with her son in separate places.

I found one similarity between them and us.  *MOMENTS*

She was not born in the same ‘financial’ status as me. But my mom is a housewife, cooks every single day and waits for my father and me to return from work.

When we return, in spite of being tired we have our small little ‘everyday’ stories to share. Same for working mothers too.
The boy was telling one such story while she was enquiring about how much he must have managed to beg and ‘earn’ that day. Engrossed they were in their own world.

For those 5 minutes I did not feel I was watching regular beggars. I felt a mother and son talking to each other, like mom and me having our gup shups.  I saw a child being brought up in a similar way like me, where both of us come back and tell stories to our mothers. I saw a moment of happiness in the life of the beggars.

The difference?

He doesn’t come back from school and shares his stories with her. He tells her how a man shouted at him when he was begging at the signal that day. He asks her when can he have the 40 bucks chicken sandwich that he sees every day being eaten by hundreds of people right in front of the place where his mother sits.

Ending?

I came back long before they left. But I guess in some temporary shackle called ‘home’, the mother cooks daal chaawal for her son. He is her strength and she is his reason of existence. That is how life works, for EVERYBODY. The cycle is same for us all.

Below are the blurred pictures that I could manage feigning clicking my guy to just capture their moment in my memories forever too.

XOXO

Poulami