BA: However, I did form one relationship during my visit that broke the frustratingly tight boundaries of merchant-customer, white-brown, rich-poor.
In Goa, I sat on a patch of rocks overlooking the Arabian Sea. I noticed a man walking toward me along the beach with a canvas bag hanging off his shoulder. After two weeks in India, I had become a bit cynical — I just wanted the man to not bother me with a sales pitch.
When he arrived, he carefully put down his bag and asked if he could show me some things he had to sell. I assented, appreciating his mild-mannered, calm approach.
He sat down beside me and took out wadded newspaper from the bag. As he unravelled the paper, small carved stone statues emerged. Sitting on the rocks before me where the figures from The Mahabharta, The Ramayana, and the Vedas.
"There's Krishna. That's Hanuman," I said. He looked at me in the eyes, differently than all the other people who had rushed up to me over the weeks to sell me something. He smiled and excitedly unwrapped other statues, happy to show me Rama and Sita and Shiva.
We kindly began to haggle over the prices, without the usual theatrics of exaggeration and protestations.
There was a figurine I wanted, and he haltingly tried to tell me that he could come back with it later.
"Kal?" I offered, suggesting tomorrow as a good time to come back.
"You know Hindi?" he asked. I admitted I only knew a little, that I was trying to learn.
He wrapped up his statues and picked up my "Teach Yourself Hindi" book.
"Say this," he tested me. I read the devanagari with difficulty, but managed to spit it out.
We then exchanged names in Hindi. His was unintelligible to my ears, so he told me letter by letter and had me translate the sounds into devanagari script.
"Dagdu" was his first name, and I was tickled a little when I realized the pronunciation was exactly like the English "dog doo." After getting his name, he taught me other words, inspecting my writing of them. I taught him a few English words when he saw a word in my Hindi book that he did not know in English (he could not read or write English).
After we both got tired of the language lessons, we sat silently looking at the calm sea in front of us. Dagdu broke the silence, pointing out with his finger: "This is for free."
There was beauty all around me, and I was sharing it with an unexpected friend. This was the non-pecuniary sensibility I desperately wanted to find.
RG: Good for you. Even better for Dagdu. I have had a lot of such encounters. Once, I was drunk to the gills one night, and barely caught the train back to my dwellings, shared by four others in one room. I was standing on the wide doorway, leaning against the pole, enjoying the wind. The journey took me two hours everyday, one way. I was angry, pissed and completely on the edge of insanity.
I saw a kulfi (ice cream) vendor and bought a large one. In front of me
was another drunk man, unkempt, shabby and in torn clothes. Our eyes met —
he was obviously hungry for at least a couple of days.
Somehow, in a moment of unspoken sympathy, as in the enemy's enemy is a friend (the world being the enemy), I felt close to him. I knew I wouldn't eat this kulfi, so I offered it.
He hesitated but took it, snapped one bite from the stick and offered it
back to me. I was afraid of germs (being at heart a snob) and told him to
eat it all. This was the first time we had said a word. I asked him that if he didn't have money to eat, where did he get the money to drink? He said that he met a lot of people like me.
Then he wanted money. I didn't have it, not a single rupee. I was traveling
without a ticket, having saved a fiver for some cigarettes, which went into
the kulfi investment. He told me to fuck off.
Sometimes I feel that he was right. I felt close to him for a selfish reason, to feel more earthy, different from the cruel world, compassionate, more worthy of life than the people I despised. I sensed vainglory in my kindness. Again, maybe I was too lonely in the crowd.
