Daryaganj

I was ambling aimlessly through nameless streets or rather streets, the names of which I was certain then I wouldn’t recollect. Around me- stretched and pulled- the evermore reality of a state, in a constant promise of transition, rumbled and tumbled down onto the narrow streets that crashed into each other chaotically; leaving behind a dusty haze in which senile colonies slumbered relentlessly, their skin thick, reinforced in stolid concrete- plastered without regret, over and over again. Big signboards, some glowing faintly, needlessly under the spiteful sun, remnants and perhaps even reminders of attempts in vicious human enterprise, hung and yawned aimlessly over the ignorant eddy of petty endeavours that bounced off their soiled banks- the many rough corners, incidental porches and ruined pockets of deceased grey and red buildings. In blasé harmony, both worlds orbited around their common sun.

Ambling...but there I was, battered and churned by rusting public transport, brothered and then mothered by churlish autowallahs, hurled under the sun and pushed further by a faceless desire- the momentum of a thousand years and ten thousand bodies pressing hard ,lost in their own fantastic pasts, instantly overwhelming the last vestiges of my own impolite and supposedly much educated inertia- until finally, I was only struggling to consider myself as ambling when the truth in fact rested outside my body like a hardboiled egg, forcing my head toward the dangerously flaying scaffoldings along the numerous floors above me, making my legs fall under an anaesthetised, well operated rhythm- the unquestionable parade of a million dull existentialist mysteries.

Books, a hundred for each of those ill-educated people, lay wasting along what must’ve once been a footpath. Most were in English, so that when I found the opportunity to look down I would find myself unconsciously avoiding trampling over Isaac Asimov and Umberto Eco, even when many a cheap Rexene shoe landed on them soundlessly; either way, the wardens of this scattered knowledge rarely frowned. Books were all along this narrow river of strange, disconnected and warped desires, stacked along those grey and red buildings, as lifeless and worthless as them till some strangely foreign face picked up one with stranger, suppressed excitement; the age old prudence of a hairline bargain dawning upon his person suddenly. Until then, to me, and even beyond perhaps, to the swaying bevy, they were mere embankments, disallowing many unabsorbed folks to draw for themselves a more convenient path to wherever it was they were intending to get. By the looks of it, they all seemed strangely misplaced, and yet at ease with it. Perhaps bestowed by the inheritance of ignorant comfort, so common to the peoples of a land forever in transition, moving towards an imitative understanding, I say.

Families, many dressed in uncomfortably large dresses, both in terms of their sheer size and also how vividly they shone under the piercing sun so that they seemed like glass people, stood, sat and hunched in groups and according to height so that they could share the joy of feasting on simmering jalebis and then cloud under a foamy lassi. This and then right beside it, naked ragdolls and bellowing urchins screamed in illiterate harmony, sounding their hunger and plight as it failed to echo off the lifeless parade and everything surrounding it. Their eyes roving like soft, indulgent secrets in the mind of a messenger unaware of the land beneath his feet. What was their pursuit? And what was even the point of such questioning? Surely, they didn’t, they couldn’t concern themselves with it. Surely, to their minds they were not children of the emerging country, as perhaps they were to me- prospective heirs of a societal reverie, the inheritors of its belief at least; misplaced and confounded by that very culture’s faceless deception. Surely, beyond their soiled vests and soot laden torso, they’d never seek to steal much educated emotion- of chronic frustration, of polity, of unencumbered desire, of revelation, of mistrust, of feisty patriotism, of broken resolve and of rights. Surely then, they were fixations of the inopportune; animals existing in their own psychic parody- untouched by the human hand, unseen by the enlightened eye and unfelt by the objective. And as hundreds of them yelped, most lost behind the mosaic silks of hefty women and intricate tapestries of the reasonable middle class, no one even threw them a bone, perhaps ashamed; perhaps hungry.

Nearby, combs, dresses, knives, frying pans, screws, wall hangings, bulb nets and every domestic invention there ever was, that is, up till a certain contemporary epoch that passed by a few decades ago, was being advertised and sold randomly. Soot covered waifs grabbed at them periodically and attempted to make a desperate escape, the unfortunate yet certain eventuality of beatings never overwhelming the vacuum inside. Beside one such urchin caught midway, with bottled water and despairing thirst, being beaten and reasoned upon simultaneously; shafts of water, yes, real water, traipsed and settled unsuspectingly here and there, around the pool of interested vendors. And as it came running down the mossy walls, falling from nowhere into the copious flow of sweat laden vigour, replete with cries, laughter, silence, survival, resilience, ignorance, trickery and chastity, someone lamented that the urchin drink from the plentiful collecting in rusting canisters nearby. But not always was it collected in these canisters; there was a short supply of those too. Sometimes a pool would form along the slight drains and indents between the road and the doubtable footpath so that books, those which were most shunned amongst the shunned, floated briefly before sinking for the day, unnoticed. I say so because many times when I revisited these footfall vendors I would find these books again, their lifeless, drowned soul rescued by the keen urchins who the owner paid meagrely for reconnaissance.

Poverty and illiteracy had perhaps circumcised the democratic ambitions of this class of proletariat. All along this tapering causeway, at the end of which there was little objective light, someone had erected a fortress. Someone had tamed this passel long ago, perhaps their ancestors, so that they were this way. Not that it irritated me that this fortification, here erected upon pages of knowledge- walls of multicoloured paperback editions gleaming stupidly toward an uninterested frenzy, allowed its peoples to dwell happily in their relative ignorance. But so inopportune it had rendered an otherwise obvious lot of opportunistic people that even though they’d got their math and economics for the month figured, even though they knew their diets and their indulgences, even though they believed their Gods and roamed their streets, they accepted so innately the dominance of the corrupt, depraved and licentious. So easily they accepted that injustice reigned with an iron whip; injustice, a moral judgment that they created defined by themselves.

So much so, that almost everyone had carved out their own island of omission, some forever building upon their inheritance, the rest lost in an interminable boat ride to the next sanctuary. Behind the heartening languorous faces, the forever smiling and enduring country folk who had accepted their political fate as being one part a divine order and the other an equally incontestable inheritance, there brooded bloodied survivalists who had been taught over generations to think little of one another and think only of a distant, never realising preservation of what was to be their legacy. To reconsider their neighbours, their religion, their doctrines, their wealth, their envy and their power was the established thumb rule of political thought. Political will and power itself dissolved in the sheer quantity of either the mal-educated or the illiterate- the well guised handicap of the world’s largest democracy. So that all that remained after each election was this narrow human flow, beyond which one couldn’t see or perceive once the plunge was taken. And which never ceased to flood and drown her people and her animals. For all this, knowledge stood again, firm on the edges, rendered farfetched, foreign and useless to both- the patient-like, disinterested, consummate consumer of social medicine and the smiling urchin who continues to this day to pick up its tattered substance, unknowingly reinforcing his estranged past somewhere on streets I am certain now I can’t quite recollect the names of.