Fiction on Road

There is so much fiction written that now it seems as if there’s a copy of a fictional character walking on streets. It feels like one of those practical jokes where no one is living a real life, but playing some character from an obscurely written book.

I was walking by and this guy came up to me (like really close) and started showing us something kept in a long and sleek rectangular cardboard packet (people are always selling you something if you are on road in India). For some reason, I couldn’t take my eyes of his hands fidgeting with the packet. I kept looking at the man and his sleek rectangular boxes, which probably gave him the idea that I was interested in buying whatever it was that he wanted to sell. And so he came running up to me and started talking:

“Buy it madam! It is very good! Only for 10 rupees! It’s going to make your room look extremely beautiful.”

I got curious, “What could possibly make my room look beautiful?” My room is basically a dirty trash bag full of nonsensical books on computer science, Hinduism, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, Shakespeare, and several poetry books (from the times when I thought I could write poetry); the room is an architectural equivalent of a battleground where every new idea has been left severely slaughtered after I lost interest in it.

As I pictured my room standing right in the middle of the road, the man took out some white sheets out of one of the boxes and there they were- on those white sheets, barely visible in the sun light- the radium stick-on stars. My eyes lost interest, but my ears were still walking with him, as he was with me.

“Madam! They are really beautiful,” he cried. “You have no idea how beautiful it looks at night when these stars shine on your room’s ceiling… glittery, radium stars madam… only for 10 rupees a packet! They are in all shapes- moon, stars, suns, comets. You will see the entire sky at night. They also recharge in daylight.”

I froze for a moment, visualized the radium stars on the ceiling of my room- shining upon bodies of old poems lying mutilated by messy ink lines, faded paintings done half way, unfinished sketches with dry ravines of previous attempts underneath them- and remembered my half accomplished love for Astrophysics. No- I thought. The stars are too dim to light up my pig-bin.

I kept walking, he kept following me, and that’s when it hit me: it wasn’t just a sales pitch; it was someone trying to get money to eat that night- maybe feed a couple of kids at home.

Suddenly, that small road became so big: not in its length, but in its prospect. So many lives living on it- thriving on it- like a colony of fungi, holding onto a small crumb of bread. I came home that day wondering what would happen to that man. I imagined his kids coming back from one of those governmental program schools where kids are given a loaf of bread with milk- just enough for 2 people; and, his wife coming back from a day-long drudgery of mopping floors. And at night, when all of them would sit together- the children will bring the milk and bread, the wife will bring some left-over food from the house that she works at, and he would bring a bunch of stars. And those stars would certainly not be enough to light up that dingy, lifeless home.

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