“Sir, It is important that I work every day , for I have to feed a family of 6, else we will all starve to death!” , with closed hands these words were echoed by a man who does a very menial job in his – ‘Menial’ as he is a garbage collector and goes home to home with his conspicuous white sack on his shoulder.
He comes dot by 9 a.m. with a
flurry of street vendors who flock our block – some selling vegetables, some
coconut while others are busy picking up scrap… the morning saga for most of
Delhi colonies remains the same… here I deliberately skipped mentioning our
block watchman – who is always neatly attired and boasts of his physicality and
shuns wearing a mask as he boastfully tells “ Sir – I cannot wear the mask for
long, it gives me suffocating feeling!”
Coming back to why I am writing this , ‘Sanjay’ comes everyday with his gassy smile on his face whilst he knocks at the doorbell and asks for previous day’s garbage! He has been doing this work since a decade and has had a few medallion up his sleeve – that is what he tells me when I asked “ Till when you want to do this work? Don’t you want to set yourself in something more respectable? He chuckles and says “ Sir, through this work, I have bought a small janta flat back in my hometown and here in Delhi, I have bought a small jhuggi (Shanty) for my family – more so his eyes sprinkle when he shows me his cycle-rickshaw that he recently purchase through is hard work. These are the possibilities which make him cling to this work, though he certainly does not want his two sons to dive into this ‘Profession’ and is making them study in a semi-public school.
I asked him “Are you not scared
of this pandemic – his practical answer made me keep quite and venture into a thought-provoking
mode – “Bhaiya, we all will die If I wont step out and start working. We have
negligible savings and I have to send money back home to my ailing father!” He
had a clear-cut thought in his mind, come what may, he has to stay safe as well
but he has to work daily to cater to his family requirements. There are a
zillion Sanjay’s in the streets today , wanting work, having their own perils
of life, struggling to make ends meet, sleeping under the open sky, going
hungry and what not – life certainly has not been kind to them – they need a
little helping hand to bolster their self-esteem- I thought!
Today, in these uncertain times,
when you never know what can happen to you our your family, the fragility of
life is inevitable and have made many of us in depressive state – never in our
near past we have been a witness to the payback and atrocities of nature on
humankind. All we can do in our limited spere is to provide a helping hand and
words of comfort and optimism to the deprived, for they need this at this
juncture of life – They are ready to fight for their existence – as my mind
precariously thinks about Sanjay at this wee hour of the day with all the
silence of the world around me – I hope and silently pray for him to be hale
and hearty and may I see him tomorrow with the same smile and enthusiasm with
which he rings the bell and speaks his keystone words “ Kuda Hai ! ( Do you
have Garbage?….) till then …Look out for your
own Sanjay's… !
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