• PAGE ONE
• INDEX
• HOME

Transient encounters of the peculiar kind

Anna Peter

HE asked for a few peanuts and exchanged his life story during the short trip between VT and Byculla stations. This street urchin had three goals -- never to do anything that would disappoint his dead mother, to have a bath everyday, and be a dignified p erson. I did believe him -- and he didn't ask me for money. I will always remember him.

And the friend who spent her whole life cheerfully raising her siblings, seven of them. She came to Mumbai soon after school, worked as a typist, sent money home and took a degree in English literature. She refused marriage for many years because no lif e partner would understand the awesome responsibilities weighing on her tiny frame.

But her (future) husband repeatedly pursued her. After marriage, they decided to settle down in her town in Karnataka -- but she returned to Mumbai a few years later. She says without bitterness, ``My company went out of business and I was laid off work for about two years. Then my husband's business began to crumble and I sold off my jewellery to keep creditors at bay. I've come back to work and help pay off what we owed.''

The last to go was her mangalsutra -- the story came out when I asked her about the black beads around her neck. They were good quality crystal, she said, and she wore them because the beads warded off evil. She chose to stay in a hostel that allowed he r to keep late hours so that she could take typing orders apart from her full-time job.

In the evenings we discussed everything -- about men who couldn't keep their hands to themselves or their eyes and tongues from rolling, or the cold-hearted hostel warden who fed spoilt fish and stale food to the girls and abused them for trying to throw the scraps away.

This `woman of the cloth' aimed a steady stream of invective and foul language at us. My friend returned home every night at 11 pm and spoke of the meanness of people who wanted work but were unwilling to pay. She put them all in their places and made th em cough up.

She's fifty-five, has become computer-literate and does typing work at home now. She has sent her daughter to medical school and her son is now in college. Her greatest gift is a loving husband and good children. She has also bought herself a gold mangal sutra.

And then there was the friend whose father was an alcoholic, who worked in the Gulf but never had a penny left over. When she was a baby, he would go to the medical store and return the baby food his wife had just bought and drank the money away. Because they were always hard up, they lived miserably in a one-roomed cottage with her resentful mother.

He beat her mercilessly, and then begged her tearfully never to leave him. When he finally returned, he was taken ill and diagnosed with cancer. He died very painfully. My friend never hid this bit of information, ``Everyone knows, I am not ashamed.'' He r mother grieved over him, but said that she finally felt peace.

I have met this woman, and have never heard her complain about a thing in the world. She was crazy about Jackie O -- and actually managed to collect an album full of original photographs of the First Lady.

This fifty-something and almost penniless lady married off her son and decided that she had to trot the globe. She managed to get a visa to the US and got a job baby-sitting. I still don't know the nitty-gritty of that feat, but I do know that she began working as a live-in baby-sitter for an Indian couple who took away her passport and kept her working there virtually a slave.

Finally, she made her way to the Indian consulate and huddled there until she got her ``freedom.'' She returned to India and went back again. Now she has a different job and is happy, travelling the US any chance she gets.

Pretty faces open doors, but if you are alone or vulnerable you can only curse your fate. My friend's father died young. She had just finished her nursing degree and landed a job. Often she would return to the hostel tense and frightened.

She was working in a big hospital in Mumbai and a well-known doctor was making sexual advances towards her. After months of trying to avoid him, she was shifted to another department.

An act of Providence, perhaps. Why didn't she report it? Would anyone have believed her? She had a mother to support and two young siblings to put through school and college. She was also trying to pass her nursing exams in the US, to finally get a job t here and live with her aunt and family. The cookie crumbled midway. On a visit to India, her uncle tried to molest her. She was saved only because her young cousin abruptly entered the bathroom.

Another friend told me of how, in a crowded home, with relatives gathered for a wedding celebration, a grown-up cousin tried to fondle her while she lay asleep with her grandmother. Years later, when he died in a car crash, my friend felt no remorse. She said: ``No one would understand what I felt.''

And the woman my friend and I met while leaning out of a crowded Mumbai local. She was dressed neatly and having a good laugh with her friends. My friend struck up a conversation with her. She had run away from home to marry the man who later abandoned h er. Feeling soiled and unable to face her family or village, she stayed on in Mumbai and became a prostitute. When the tears spilled over, we fell silent.

And the dwarf who travelled in the ladies compartment with me when I was in my last year of college. I was leaning out of the train when he called out to me to leave the compartment. When he realised that he had mistaken me for a man, he was profuse in h is apologies.

He told me his name and that he had landed a two-line part in a Hindi TV serial. He begged me to watch the serial and watch out for him. I got off at Grant Road and wished him luck. Unfortunately, I couldn't remember the serial's name and felt I had let him down.

I related the incident to a friend and was hugged, laughed at and told that ``only you would meet such characters.'' After ten years of living on my own, I've become a cynic. I can empathise with every one of those stories. Maybe that is why they opened up to me.