LES MISERABLES
Vengrai Parthasarathy
The Matunga Railway station in Bombay, India was seething with people. Shankar hop-scotched his way through the thicket of passengers, visitors, hawkers and idlers. As the train was about to leave, a beggar maid with a woebegone aspect made her way into the compartment and stood in a corner, impervious to the annoyed stares of the passengers. Time, and pain and the struggle for survival had scourged her -from crown to toe. Her tattered clothes of a by-gone age were just enough to camouflage her modesty and proclaimed this miserable being like a livery.
A little girl held on to her hand . After the train started moving and everyone had settled down, a middle-aged man in kurta asked her with acerbity to move away. “These beggars are a pesky nuisance”, he muttered loudly and berated the Railways for allowing them to travel in the train. As if in agreement some others nodded their heads
“Sir”, she said in a low-key voice,” we live a day at a time on the crumbs that you throw away. Have pity sir, please. Permit this little girl of mine to sing a couple of songs”. The unbidden recital began. The girl had a good voice though she went off-key here and there. The mousey child must have been hardly nine or ten years old and was blind. With a pair of crudely contrived castanets in her hand she sang a couple of old time ditties and snatches from film hits. She was a kind of diversion but the cynic in kurta kept on making barbed comments and showed utter disgust. The girl went round stretching a beaten up tin in which people dropped some coins. The fact that she was blind induced a couple of them, including the student, to give currency notes too. The train moved on.
Suddenly, a lady in the compartment wailed that her hand-bag was missing. “Look out for the beggar maid “, said the kurta man without a second thought.
The beggar maid started cringing out of fear.. “No, no”, expostulated a scrupulous college student sitting next to him.” she did not go anywhere near that lady. Moreover the girl is blind..let us be fair.. The hand bag must be somewhere here”, he said. It turned out to be a tempest in a tea-pot, because the handbag was under one of the seats. A seminar’ was held on how it got there. Anyway the woman escaped being pilloried. How rashly we judge the poor, observed the student glancing at the Kurta-man .
Time glided away easily, with hawkers coming and going. At the destination, Shankar alighted along with others with the beggar maid and the girl ahead of him. The ticket collector turned a Nelson’s eye and pretended not to notice the beggar maid whom he allowed to pass. The privileged ticket-less’, thought Shankar.
He started wondering. Life is not fair. Not for the poor. Who knows what her problems were, where she lived. how she survived, had she a family, where are they, where is the husband God knows. Is there a God ? Why has He made these wretched souls to suffer like this?
At a tea-stall outside the station, the woman bought two buns and bananas (perhaps the only meal of the day for them) one each of which she gave to her daughter running her finger through her hair with maternal tenderness..
The two wisps of life kept walking and, on their way out in the pavement, paused near a boy who was appealing for alms with clock-like monotony in a sing-song voice.. People just scurried past him. No one stopped, but the beggar maid did. She took out the second bun that she had bought for herself and thrust it into the hands of the boy.. He was blind too. To Sharma, it seemed as if a veil had been whisked aside on the short and simple annals of the poor’. They are not poor.They have hearts of gold. They have more humaneness than the richest in the land.
They, the so-called.wretched miserable ones–whom the French say,LES MISERABLES.