In your face but out of your brain

God has many incarnations, human nature has many faces. So does poverty. Poverty which might be one’s companion day in and day out, poverty which might be a fleeting visual from a speeding four wheeler (even a two wheeler suffices), or even as one walks past the poverty stricken, occasionally mulling about their squalid existence.

An inebriated soul might find a reason or two to sympathize with the plight of the poor, so does a fistful of noble souls. I was neither of the two.

My streaks of poverty were confined to a wallet deserted by all but a single hundred rupee note, with seven days left for the month of my plight to get over. ‘Month of my plight’ needs clarification: mother was infallibly benevolent in such times of financial crisis. The aforementioned draught had hit me not more than thrice till then, because benevolence was not always affordable for maa (that is what I call mother).

Not that I was unmoved by the poverty around. But its scope was limited to fleeting thoughts, as mentioned earlier, which added to my melancholy, after spells of lambasting by mother after exam results were declared.

Durga puja is one festival where West Bengal is lit up, lamps illuminating the streets flooded with people dressed in their best attires. Every Bengali assumes the mantle of a prodigal, every prodigal philanders money to live up to their expectations. Bassanio’s (courtesy: Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare) impact on me was prominent, as I took great pleasure in splurging my pocket money whenever I could afford to.

That an early morning stroll in a drunken stupor, on one serene dawn during the festival, would make ‘spendthrift’ an obscenity to me, was beyond my comprehension.

As opined earlier, poverty has many faces. The face which introduced me to the plight of a poor, a homeless one at that, was that of a girl, asleep on the bare floor of a pavement, curled up in one corner of a pavement, presumably with her family. The girl in her teens did not have a face pretty enough to evoke sympathy, nor was she in any significant trouble (poverty in the form of hair, unwashed for days, clothes tainted with dirt which would now refuse to go even after a hot water wash, bare feet, etc are a common sight, not soul stirring anymore by the monotony of the its occurrence in a city inhabited by large number of pavement dwellers).

She was in a sound sleep. It might be out of the delight of enjoying a stomach full dinner after a while, or of tired bones exhausted after a day’s toil at work place. She was sleeping in serenity, oblivious of a white tinge on her forehead. A curious and close look revealed that the tint was feces of any bird, presumably crow, going by their prevalence in the city’s sky.

Until then, the misery in poverty was an unexplored territory to me. An unknown face, serenely asleep, was the least expected path to it. How miserable a life could be, one which has compromised the onuses of sleeping beneath the sky, without a roof in between, for the sake of a sound sleep. The miseries of the homeless, which, till then, had been confined to literature, were glaring straight at me.

I pitied her helplessness, pitying myself at the same time. Reality, at times, becomes too real to bear. Poverty had never been so real to me. No woman begging with a rickety child in her arms, no urchin running errands in a traffic signal, selling their petty merchandise, no child scouting through the contents of a road side waste bin for a morsel of food, had unsettled me the way a tinge on the fore head of a sleeping girl did. The miseries began to make more sense than what I had deduced from literature themed around poverty.

Misery became synonymous with poverty. I loathed Bassanio. I was wary of prodigals and spend thrifts. Money was no longer a commodity, but an asset. Poverty was no longer a thought provoking subject for a heart wrenching poetry, but a harsh reality staring straight into my eyes.

I wished to wipe the disturbing tinge off her forehead, but didn’t. I wished to place a hundred rupee note beside her head before walking past (the latter wish being inspired by noble philanthropists I had encountered in literature or even a benevolent hero of a Hindi cinema, whose prudence and benevolence draws applauds, in the form of whistles, from the audience). I refrained from fulfilling either of my two wishes because none would be worthy of acknowledging the misery in poverty.