The Imperfection

The marketplace was crammed with wares. New shinning steel utensils, latest cookware, gas stoves, dish stands and many more festooned the steel shops. The flower vendor had an unusual order of sacks of marigold flowers; there were pale yellow marigold with smaller florets and finer petals. The orange ones were the poor man’ delight which was low priced. The shop keepers had a tough time overseeing the sales and the orderliness of their shops. The shops had to be cleaned and the pictures of Gods also needed the obligatory gleam after all it was to summon the goddess of wealth. Yes, it was all groundwork for the laxmi pooja, the goddess of wealth and prosperity. Few were getting their houses painted, yet others were emptying the junk away from their homes. Every one seemed busy and eventful abruptly with an evocative seriousness which a marathon runner faces when he stands ready to out beat all to prove a do or die situation. Aroma of goodies was wafting out of kitchens. Chakli, chudha, ladoo and many more savouries were cooked choice fully.  Away from the buildings in the shacks and shanties tired mothers were returning back home. Their little children came, running and tearing the streets to reach them. There were girls and boys who could be no more than five to six years of age. Two babies were being lugged by their elder sisters. It was Diwali, the festival of lights, fervour and delicacies. They felt the pangs of hunger as they saw their mothers. Their mothers were not maids working in the houses of rich men who would give away stale food on the name of charity to cleanse their sins. They were the daily wage labourers who were over exerted with the on coming festival.  Mothers hushed the children and cajoled them to play for a while more while they started their kerosene pump stoves in haste to cook for their little children.

The children gaped into the park of the new residency where their role models, the affluent kids wearing expensive clothes carrying playthings and crackers dawdled around. They forgot their hunger for a while and gazed at them. They vied these kids for their prosperous life. They wanted to be akin to those rich kids whom they had been watching for days together. After a while when the kids stopped playing, the gang of kids from the shanties ran to the place where the rich kids had burnt crackers, they stooped down and picked the partially burnt crackers, dusted it and pocketed it. They tried to walk like them in the used slippers thrown by those rich children. Still later after a dinner of sparsely cooked vegetables and rice, these underprivileged kids had a game of mimicking  the rich children when they tried wearing the clothes given away in charity and the boys toyed rolling a round pipe on PVC pipes making it their future rolls Royce. The irony was they impersonated the hypocrisy, the pretence very easily just as the rich who mimic their sincerity in the name of God dreading that the wealth earned might be lost in the wrath of the Goddess of Wealth. Wish they could mimic the uprightness and respectability of simplicity and humility instead of the façade. Wish the rich kids could role model the significance of education for these children rather than deceit. The imperfection lies with the pretentious elders who have marketed falsehood.

Dedicated to my friends Vimala and Durga who have initiated their first step in societal transformation