By Raunak Singh
Authors have warned us, from across eras, of modernity and its flaws in a generally ominous tone. A city with its millions, dispersed across dozens of square miles, each too busy salvaging a situation rather than reveling in the moment. Being my age, I wasn’t granted the opportunity to live in a world otherwise, and read about theirs as they wrote about ours. But for all their premonitions, I wish they could visit… We’re a world of worlds.
Not too long ago, while I was being a typical city boy, standing by my car, coffee in one hand, and a magnificently dexterous thumb pushing eighteen buttons a second on a phone from the thirty-fifth century, a boy of no more than ten or eleven came strolling to my side, aimlessly… or so it seemed. It was a residential area, and I was simply waiting for a friend of mine. So when, from the corner of my eye, I noticed this young boy staring at me, I felt compelled to return his gaze. Only I fell terribly short of the sheer gravity that emanated from his eyes. And, within that singular moment, it dawned on me that his aimless wandering might have an unsurprising purpose. His tattered attire, and the lack of footwear altogether reflected regrettable misfortune. In the privacy of my own mind, I made a shameless assumption, and began to reach for my wallet. The movement was not as subtle as I’d have liked it to be, for the young boy asked almost immediately with the confidence of a statesmen making a rhetorical inquiry, “have I asked you for your money, bhaiya?”
From that point on, I had nowhere to go; I’d forgotten about my friend; let the coffee go cold, and the phone slide back into the pocket. I had to know more. “Achha, so what do you want then?” I asked with every ounce of sincerity I was capable of. The boy simply replied, “I want to ask you a few questions, if you have time.” The improbability of this situation was so entrancing that the next words rolled off my tongue as though I had been waiting for him to ask my permission, “Absolutely, what do you want to ask?”
I have submitted plenty of academic papers, which have been followed by a barrage of questions, each more unforgiving and tricky than the last. And yet, the uncomplicated nature of Akram’s curiosity seemed to startle yet fascinate me. He blurted out his name at some point all by himself; I was too engaged in his speech to bother asking if this half-sized anomaly had a name. He bombarded me, and how, with his queries, all in a matter of fifteen minutes. Within a span of fifteen minutes, he managed to drag out of me my father’s occupation, my formal education, my travels, my friends, my plans for the day. When you’re so immersed in the moment, you make one fatal error, which sooner than later becomes a jarring realization – where is this going? What IS the bigger picture, and have I missed it completely?
When that illuminating train hit me, I had to ask, “Why am I being interrogated so thoroughly, again?” To this he simply said, “I can’t read, so books won’t help me; I can’t speak English, so tourists won’t narrate their tales. You seem like someone who’s seen more than I have, so I took a chance. What does a boy like me have to lose anyways?” Right then, a small group of children about his age called out to him, and without another word, he darted across the heavy traffic on the two-lane street, and joined them in whatever ruckus they seemed to be making.
A boy like him. How many more do you think there are? Hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Do each of them think about the things he thinks of before life drags them into some inconsolable direction? We, here, love asking questions as much as we sometimes abhor answering them. Nevertheless, this boy seems to have discovered an unsophisticated truth about an otherwise sophisticated art – look again, keep looking, it’s bound to be here somewhere.
It was 9 January 2012, and I was standing close to Malviya Nagar’s main market at 5:50 PM. The time and date may not have been some watershed in my life that shifted the paradigm of my existence. But it’s seared itself onto my mind. This is a complicated city, with complicated people. And here’s a ten-year old relentlessly uncomplicating it. They were right: we are a city of millions; we are dispersed over dozens of square miles. And yet, we are beautiful in our imperfections, as we are in our perfections {yes, we do have a few}.
