Brighter than a thousand suns

As the day broke on rain-moistened streets trying to fight off the cobwebs of sleep after last night's bash, in one quaint corner of Bangalore a family of pavement-dwellers had already begun their chores for the day. The flap of tarpaulin that indicated the gate of their hutment was now folded up and one could see a couple of women fussing over a darkened and grimy aluminium pot placed on a worn-down kerosene stove. There was some kind of brownish liquid boiling in it effusing a smell one wouldn't exactly find in consonance with the pristine ozone-rich morning air. Monstrous polluters of the air had not begun their day yet.

Further inside the shanty, if one could make out their dark faces, one could find two girls, one teenaged and the other one probably just about ten and a little boy who would look like he was hardly five. However, these estimates could be grossly off the mark because our notions of change of physical appearance of human beings with age are mostly based on people who have had a healthy growth regime. Identical conclusions might not hold true for our observations of malnourished people whom most of us would rather consider a sub-human species. The younger girl was sitting cross-legged patiently allowing her elder sister to sift through her shrivelled hair to find traces of live lice. And as the elder sister kept on finding instances of live Pediculus humanus capitis, she was looking visibly pleased with her lips slightly open to expose her extremely white teeth clenched together revealing a grin of achievement. Had some marketing executive of Colgate or Pepsodent been around, he would have wasted no time in asking her for an endorsement.

The little boy was just waking up. Being the youngest one in the family and his parents' only male successor he had the luxury to wake up after the sun did. He did not have to suffer the ignominy of being the victim of a lice-hunt in full view of the public. He was the subject of so many dreams that his parents had and even so many fights his father would have with his mother when he came home at a late hour smelling of cheap booze. This unfortunate father was painfully devoid of the class that kept hundreds of his fellow citizens remain perfectly sober after a rocking evening in the pub capital of India. This little boy, blissfully asleep by that time, would never grow up to learn that his parents dreamt that he would once be the occupant of the office a few feet across the street where this big man came in his Toyota Qualis everyday except Sunday. Politically speaking, the humbler your alleged origins were, the higher you rose in the echelons of power.

Squinting at the daylight the little boy came to his mother but the other woman, probably an aunt or possibly just another fellow vagabond, consanguinary only in their destitution, pulled the boy and seated him in her lap. The boy definitely did not look quite pleased at the turn of events and his aunt (we'll call her such for the sake of clarity) noticing that handed him a dirty yellow ball which made his face immediately light up in a smile. It was one of those hard felt balls which children used to play cricket in the small park nearby. One prolific batsman might have hit a six hard enough to make this ball vanish inside the gutter bordering the tarpaulin hutment. The boys had probably given up after a futile search of their ball in more respectable places and continued their game with a new ball, the bowler probably happy that he was able to spin it better than the old one. Fortunately for this family, a gutter that was quite dry was a familiar place to find this round object. When the elder sister had found this object nestled amongst the less useful debris in the pit bordering their home, she hadn't wasted a moment in retrieving it, quite aware that this would be no mean gift for her brother. She could not be more correct. Ever since the little boy laid his pockmarked hands on the ball, he displayed an amount of energy and enthusiasm rivalled only by the taller, stronger and sharper kids who drank Horlicks everyday. Today was no exception.

He flung the ball as high up in the air as his little hands could manage and stretched out his hands to catch it on its return journey. He failed and the ball fell on the paved road and settled on the edge of the kerb after a few bounces. This failure actually boosted his enthusiasm. He collected the ball from its resting place and tried a few more flings, occasionally succeeding in catching it in his palms. And when he did so, his joy knew no bounds and he let out an unintelligible shriek of ecstasy. This time, however, when the ball was on its earthward journey, it swerved from its path a bit and began to fall towards the middle of the road. A Tata Safari was rushing down. The little boy, unmindful of that, rushed to the middle of the road to claim his ball before it hit the ground. Suddenly, as if from nowhere, the elder sister appeared and snatched her little brother away from the road, her face blank with mortal fear. Both of them tumbled onto the tarpaulin and the impact untied the knots that held it in place. At the same time, the ball hit the lowermost edge of the bumper and was directed by the impact right below the car. The boy gave out a shriek of horror, as if his baby had been crushed to death under the wheels of the car. A few metres ahead, the car screeched to a stop. The ball came rolling out from beneath the rear end of the car. It was still alive.

It caught the attention of the little boy. Although the sun was very bright above, if you would have looked at the face of this boy now, you would have surely agreed with me that his face was brighter than a thousand suns.