STORY
Beggarly encounters
by Shahid Alam
photo AFP
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‘Don’t Nasir, don’t give him anything,’ I cautioned my friend Nasir Mohammad.
‘Why not? He’s an old man.’
‘You’re inviting trouble. Just see.’
By that time the wizened, half-bent old man had extended his skeleton hand through the open window on the driver’s, that is, Nasir’s, side, and my friend placed a two-taka note in it. The poor fellow, a vagrant, was properly grateful, and duly went on to the vehicle behind us.
Nasir and I were on our way one morning to visit his factory in Ghazipur, and we had come to a halt at the intersection near the Sundarban hotel. And beggars, old and young, male and female, deformed and healthy, would weave in and out of the stalled traffic.
Experience had taught me that giving alms to one would invariably draw the attention of the others. I tried to dissuade my altruistic friend. And then it happened. A woman in a dirt-encased sari, of an age anywhere between twenty and thirty, was shoving her hand through the driver’s side window.
‘Oh, here we go,’ went through my mind, and I was alternately silently cursing Nasir for being an absolute idiot and pleading with Providence to switch the signal light to green like yesterday. But the woman had begun her pleading. And promptly received Nasir’s refusal, accompanied by the appropriate wave of the hand.
‘But you gave him money.’
‘He’s an old man.’
‘I need money, too.’
‘You’re young. Why don’t you find some work?’
She withdrew her hand, stared for a while at my friend, and hurried away, but not before throwing these words at him:
‘If I had pulled up my sari and shown you something, you’d have given me the money!’
Mercifully the signal light changed to green, and we got going. None of us spoke, but the most unforgettable part was the dazed look on Nasir’s face and his shocked silence. You see, during all the years that I have known him since our university days, I had never seen my friend at a loss for words. Nasir was a Dhakaia, a kutti, with all the attributes associated with that group: ready wit, brilliant repartee skills, and refreshing sense of humour. Nasir speechless — that was a first, and I must admit to an inner satisfaction that my glib old friend was given a shock to his system!
At that same intersection, my curiosity has not yet ended about the mother-and-son begging duo. For a while I was not even sure of their relationship, until the boy once helplessly yelled out, ‘Maaaa!’ I had been accosted on innumerable occasions by the son with a begging tin in his hand, and the emaciated-looking mother following, with her gnarled right hand on his right shoulder both directing him and maintaining a physical bond between them. I suspected that he was partially blind, but I could be wrong. The boy, whose age I could not determine, fascinated me, and I had been seeing him at that intersection for the better part of a year.
You see, he looked like an overgrown human fetus, very robust-looking, although he was probably not healthy in a generally-understood sense, and was about five feet in height. But, there is no getting around it, and no other way to say it, but that he resembled a fetus. He would come up to each of the stationary vehicles and garble words of which a stentorian ‘Sir’ was the only one immediately recognizable. After a few days of listening closely, I could make out his next two words: ‘Ami onno’(I’m blind). And woe to the driver or passenger who declined to give alms after many insistent ‘ami onno’s! She or he would hear a few garbled words of disgust, of which a couple of unprintable curses could, with some difficulty, be deciphered.
One day he came up to the three-wheeler in front of mine all by himself (which led me to suspect that he was not totally blind), and routinely begged. ‘Sir, ami onno.’
The passenger, a young man, poked his head out and shouted for all in the vicinity to hear: ‘Tui gonno, jaa bhaag!’ (You stink; get lost).
He must have had several previous encounters with the boy, and simply could not take it anymore. The boy got lost without a word or sound of protest, passing my vehicle without stopping, and continuing. I did not bother looking back in his direction.
I got to see him one last time, the day before Shab-e-Barat, attired in a loose shirt to go on top of baggy trousers, with a golden-coloured round cap perched rather rakishly on his bald head, and with a tasbeeh of large cloudy-green beads clutched firmly in his right hand. Someone, probably the Fagin who controlled him, had done him up that way in the hope of arousing the sympathy of the people on the eve of a holy day. Since that day, however, as of this writing, I have not seen the boy or his mother.
This story was narrated by another old friend, Akbar. He stopped, dutifully obeying the red signal light, at the intersection on the Anjuman-e-Mofidul Islam road leading on towards Kakrail. An elderly mendicant approached him, and, as my friend later told me, against his better judgment, gave him a two-taka note. As the man turned away, the green light came on, and Akbar got ready to move forward. That is when he heard these words coming from some one in a cluster of vagrants standing to one side of the road:
‘This is the first time he’s given any alms.’
It does not take a whole lot of thinking for one to realize that the group members and their fellow-travelers kept a watchful eye on the alms-givers and the habitual decliners!
These are the three stories that I thought I would bring up, and the reader can make what he or she wants to make of them, that is, if he or she even wants to make anything of them. For me, the episodes were a revelation. They made me go back to my younger days, when supplicants for alms appeared to be, for want of a more appropriate term, ‘ashamed’ of life’s cruelty that they simply could not escape. Then, there were instances when the beggars would hurry away if not offered alms, giving the impression that they were relieved to have been refused, and, thereby, they were spared their pride and dignity as human beings, if only for an illusory moment! Now, I had encountered, and heard of, an aggressive breed of vagrants, maybe representing only a small fraction of the unfortunates, who demanded that they be compensated for their miserable existence. It is as if they accuse the more fortunate ones for their own sorry lot, and want them to make amends. The new variety or, some of them at least, have come a long way from the timid, self-effacing, sometimes almost apologetic supplicants of my childhood and early youth, to the often assertive, sometimes brash vagrants of today.
Shahid Alam is head, media and communication department, Independent University, Bangladesh
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