Opinion Beedis, byways and a spoonful of chhole-chawal in Muzaffarnagar

Frankly, I recalled Krishna’s name only with some effort. But as soon as the name came to me, there came with it a flurry of images and a clutch of choppy incidents too. I didn’t call Krishna Krishna, I called him Bhaisaab. Everyone in the rickshaw — there could be up to 12 kids in one — did. Bhaisaab had grey hair, a grey beard, and dark sunburnt skin. He was in his fifties during the eight years that he ferried me on the town’s streets. I am, of course, estimating his age; as a child, I don’t think I ever attempted to guess it.

Bhaisaab smoked beedis. Sometimes, at the end of school, while waiting in the grounds for other kids to spill out of the buildings and reach the rickshaw, he would show me a trick with the beedi. He would manoeuvre his lips such that the lit thing would change direction completely and enter his mouth, which he would shut after a brief display of how the beedi had rested on his tongue. He would then open and close his lips like a fish, or like someone who had put a hot thing in their mouth (duh!); and then, after a few seconds, after he was sure of my awe, Bhaisaab would take the beedi out of his mouth with another practised motion of his cheeks and his lips, and suddenly the beedi would be back in its natural position again, its lit part facing me and giving off a thread of smoke. I was never tired of this little spectacle.

Sometime during my last two rickshaw-years, Bhaisaab started to make a brief stop during our afternoon return journey, to have a little snack of chhole-chawal from one of the many stalls in front of the RTO office. There would be three kids, including me, in the rickshaw at that time, all headed to the same residential colony, and perhaps the stop was Bhaisaab taking it easy, aware that 10 extra minutes wouldn’t matter to us or our families. On a few occasions, we kids bought the snack for ourselves too. I don’t know what they put into it, but it was, I still remember, delicious in an other-worldly way. We kids would not always have the money to buy it, of course. One day, Bhaisaab saw us salivating while he was enjoying the snack and offered it to us from his leaf-bowl. The other two kids made faces, but I couldn’t stop myself and took a couple of spoonfuls from the side of the leaf-bowl that I thought Bhaisaab hadn’t touched with his spoon.

The faces that the two kids made, and the extra care I took to eat what Bhaisaab’s spoon hadn’t touched — it is only now, after an act of remembering the details, that I realise how these were manifestations of a malaise internalised as virtue. Nobody was actively training me to observe caste, but its notions of pure and impure were already embedded and jostling with a child’s greed. Here was a man who made a hard living, eating his hurried lunch and being cautiously generous; and there we were, three kids who didn’t know caste but were practicing it to different degrees. On the remainder of our journey, the two kids threatened me with telling my mother that I was eating from the same bowl as Bhaisaab. I was, I admit, terrified by the idea.

Krishna never again stopped for the snack. I don’t know what transpired to cause this change, but to my novelist’s brain today, the possibility that he himself realised his “trespass” is the more tragic one, the one that I hope didn’t happen in reality.

A year after I graduated from his rickshaw to riding a cycle of my own, I heard that he had died of a heart attack. I remember trying to feel something, but I don’t recall being successful.

Solanki is the author, most recently, of Manjhi’s Mayhem