Half a Rupee: Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

down.
    ‘Arre sala … between two buildings shouldn’t there at least be enough room for two handcarts to pass? Theway these buildings have mushroomed, people going from this end cannot even walk past someone coming from the other.’
    ‘What you talking, my man Methu? Stop exaggerating. Why two men … two police jeeps can pass each other … you can measure it any time.’
    ‘Cut it out man, just cut it out … keep your hand on your heart … yes … now tell me, can you put two charpoys in here—gather in a few friends for a round of cards? Can you? Tell me!’
    ‘Now, now, come on … the alleyways of Bombay are not meant for charpoys, my friend!’
    Come to think of it, the contours of the land around me had changed. There was a time when the bay would flush in just a little water and the land would become wet and muddy like a marsh, half the year round. And for the other half, the sun would scorch the mud and the wind would cover everything with fakes of sun-dried mud. The mud and the dust nurtured everything: a multitude of half-naked children and a horde of mangy, scrawny mongrels—and all of Jaani’s cockerels and hens. The kids would strap strings around the pups and drag them around all day long in the mud and the dust. When you saw a mutt with a long neck you could be sure where it had grown up.
    But now on this stump of land, the government had built three-storeyed buildings, with twenty-four fats on every floor. In every fat there was a single room, a kitchenette around which skeins of fumes wound themselves like balls of yarns, and a lone tap in thesemblance of a bathroom; the toilets were communal—two on every floor. There was no need to run with the water spilling out of your tin can into the open any more, but the queues still formed. The only difference was the shape of the queues—they used to form in straight lines earlier, now they snaked along the staircases.
    When they began constructing these buildings, they dragged out all the shanties and dumped them in the far corner of the ground, just like the way Gaffar piles his empty wicker baskets in the bazaar. In Gaffar’s pile, a few rotten vegetables would still remain—unwanted, unsaleable. And in this pile, rotting children and their unwanted parents howled and yowled their days away, scavenging a life under a scorching sun, burrowing through life like bugs, sponging up the sun and the dew and whatever else the sky would think of hurling at them, into their bones. These concrete walls gathered no moss. The shanties used to be quite green, though.
    There used to be a little patch of open ground right in front of our house where Santosh had planted a few seeds of bitter gourd. When the saplings sprouted leaves and began to send out rootlets, she propped them up with a lattice of bamboo splinters and soon the creepers leapt across the trellis and covered it with vines of tender green. A beautiful green wall now separated Santosh’s hut from the next. But a wall of vines was only a wall of vines. It failed to stave off a neighbour’s envy or her greed—miserably so when temptation sprouted in the form of pods of bitter gourd that sat enticingly just an arm’s reach away. The moment the pods bloomed, outwould come the neighbour swinging her bucket to wash clothes by the green trellis. And when eyes wouldn’t be watching, her hand would shoot out and pluck the pods and conceal them under the mound of washed clothes in the bucket. She would fry the bitter gourds with some potatoes and a toss of red chillies. With the chillies you couldn’t even smell the bitter gourd cooking. How would Santosh ever find out?
    But all the same, she had become suspicious. That’s why when Rajjab Ali’s garage was pulled down by the municipality, Santosh’s husband got hold of a thin sheet of aluminium and put it behind the bamboo laths in such a way that it totally hid the bitter gourd vines. That’s how occasionally the smell of bitter gourds cooking