Riches to rags

In da house

For the past week, I’ve been crossing the subway of the fleet street, where all the newspaper offices are, to the other side where you get this amazing Neembu Shikanji Soda. They have their own concoction and have a big pamphlet about the benefits of the drink. Anyways, on that side of the road, in the afternoon, sits this kabadiwalla who keeps scribbling on paper. His clothes, his gunny bag, the paper he writes on are all in tatters. He keeps scribbling on paper in with a red pen in English, in a very small handwriting, and I try to peek in, and he stares back. One day I gathered the courage to ask what he was writing. All English went in thin air and he launched a volley of hardcore Haryanvi abuses.

I wonder what his story is. The last time I bumped into an English-speaking beggar was quite an intriguing experience. We had carried a story in the paper too. His name is nothing other then Dyer, speaks impeccable English, is an Anglo-Indian who had even served in the army. Linked to the word “Dyer”, I had come across this dyers’ shop in Calcutta, the window of which says: I live to dye, I dye to live, the more I dye, the more I live.

Another such riches to rags person is this lady who roams around in the Janpath market and asks in accented English for money. She tells you that the queen’s reign will come back one day, and she is collecting money to go see the queen. That’s where I learnt that she had written that poem: Where you been? To London to see the queen.

At Ganga dhaba in JNU, you’ll come across this old man, Vidrohi ji, who thinks one day there’ll be a red flag on the red fort. He sings revolutionary songs all night, and lives hand-to-mouth. He was a PhD student in the university.

Fact more often than not is more fictitious than fiction.