Today Lakshmi slept well, a contented smile adorned her lips, and happiness bounced around in her heart tonight. After all it was not every day that one got a chance to make a difference to somebody’s life.
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Lakshmi’s parents had been a part of the initial influx of Tamilians from Madras who had made their way to Mumbai in the 1960s when the city offered a plethora of opportunities for people willing to work in the textile mills. While work was tough, her Appa ensured that Amma and Lakshmi did not suffer from the want of food or decent clothing. However, all that changed in 1981 when a majority of the textile mills were shut down following a trade union strike and unfortunately Appa was killed in the violent protests between the union members and the policemen. Despite the fact that he had spent around two decades of loyal service to the mills, he ended up as being ‘collateral damage’ in the political machinations of the union leaders and the mill owners. Amma didn’t live for too long after Appa’s demise and this left Lakshmi with no option but to resort to begging for a living, courtesy her inability to study any further than the third standard.
For more than three decades now she had successfully managed to evade the long arm of the law and also the lecherous intentions of more than one pimp who tried luring her into the flesh business. While she realized that begging was not a honorable way to live, her Appa and Amma had brought her up with values that given the other options available to her at that point, she chose the most honorable one.
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That day began just like any other day for her. Starting off with her begging rounds on the traffic signal immediately outside the entrance of VT (that’s what she had been told was the name of the railway station where she had spent almost all her life) at around 8 AM in the morning, she had settled down for a quick lunch comprising of some old curd rice and a couple of pooris, courtesy a generous couple who didn’t want to waste their food and handed it to her when she happened to pass by them on the platform.
After the relatively sumptuous lunch, she sat down at her usual perch on the ramshackle bench at the beginning of Platform 12 and was leaning back on the pillar near the bench when she first saw the three kids. At first, she dismissed them as part of the regular gang of urchins that frequented the station, carefully keeping out of view of the policemen on their beats. After all, this was Mumbai, where everybody, young and old came to pursue their dreams of a better life.
As she kept watching their movements for around five odd minutes she quickly realized that these kids were not like the other urchins that regularly made their rounds here. They were a little more hesitant, tentative when they approached people and were also perturbed and disappointed when the people they approached rebuked or scolded them. They didn’t have the practiced detachment that all beggars had in their approach to people, it was almost like they took the people scolding them very seriously.
As they came closer to where she was sitting, she beckoned the boy and asked him who they were. And when the boy narrated his story, she clearly understood that her initial hunch about them not being ‘professional beggars’ was right.
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The boy and his two sisters had been on the run for more than three days now and were quite desperate to get back home. Their story involved them being brought to the city by a ‘family friend’ who then had sold them to a rich person that ‘lived by the sea’. [Read the rest of the children’s story here]
They had somehow managed to give this rich man the slip and were now trying to get on a train that took them to Adilabad where their village was situated. All that they knew of their village was what the boy’s geography teacher had taught him in seventh standard, that it was situated on the north-western tip of Andhra Pradesh and that it took a 12 hr overnight journey by train from Adilabad to the big city, Mumbai.
Hearing their story and moved by their plight, Lakshmi asked the boy and his sisters to wait near the bench for five minutes. She then went to her one room hutment in the chawl outside the Southern entrance of VT, carefully extracted her aluminum dabba in which she had stored the savings of her life, around three thousand rupees. She then pulled out one thousand rupees from the box and put the rest of the money back in the box and the box in its hiding place again.
She then came to Platform 12, asked the boy and his sisters to accompany him to the ticket counter and bought them three tickets on that evening’s Mumbai-Nagpur Nandigram Express which left Mumbai at 4.30 in the evening and reached Adilabad at 9.30 the next morning. She then bought them three packets of food to be eaten later that night and waited with the kids till they boarded the train.
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Later that night when Lakshmi was almost done with her quota of begging for the day, she took a break and was sitting on her usual place on Platform 12 when her thoughts were taken back to the three kids and their plight. Given that it had been a day when she had to run around more in the evening as she had lost almost the entire afternoon when she spent it with the kids, she dozed off on the bench itself. And unknown to her, a broad smile adorned her lips. Maybe the genuine goodness of her heart and her kindness displayed itself to the world through this smile. She didn’t know, she had just followed her heart that day.
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This post has been written for the 1 Hundred Linky picture prompt.