There are a few worlds we reside in, different realities when you enter one room or turn into a road. My work hours are spent in a world where I have a 6th floor view of lots of trees and smaller buildings, and a great big sky. Within that ecosystem I have the respect of a team I command and colleagues I confer with to create the solutions we were hired to.
To get to work, I have to take a rickshaw ride over broken roads, over puddles if there was rain, behind men who have separate realities themselves. Some have faces that show desperation, others a defiant arrogance. From the rickshaw I walk among other workers making their way to their workplaces sometimes stopping to have our suspicious and fishy 'law enforcers' search my bag to ensure the security of the masses. These men have their own realities, their own stories that shaped them.
This weekend I went to a garage for my car, on a street that I once crossed many times to get to work before. When driving into it this time, I was surprised that I was blocking incoming traffic. The two lane road was reduced to one by those massive dumpsters laid along haphazardly, and of course with a great amount of garbage lying outside them. Once I stopped at the garage, it was right opposite a couple of them, and the stench was unbearable, at least at first.
Since I had to be there, I got used to it, like the mechanics who work on that corner everyday. You can see the people passing by hold their noses and breath as they pass them. For someone who'd be there for a couple of hours, holding ones breath is not an option. There are a few buildings around there and from one came out one man with his child on his colorful bicycle with safety wheels. Poor kid is also used to this unholy surroundings, and has to have his play time in it.
This was another world, where there were other worlds in it. Soon after the Friday Jummah prayers were over, the roads were a little barren, and suddenly a few kids appeared. Each about 3.5' tall, they were still wearing
panjabis, suggesting they had been to the mosque a while ago. What they were doing there at the time, was another unholy thing. These puny human beings were mouthing each other off, with insults that involved their mothers. As one hurled one insult describing what he would do, the other came back with something more sinister. Those were the rules of the game I suppose, and for this surrounding it made no difference to its inhabitants, only to the alien who was visiting with his problems from another world.
Another excerpt from City of Joy:
[Voice of Musafir Prasad] 'I knew that to do my job properly, I needed a heart of stone like my boss. How else would I be able to claim the five- or six-rupee hiring fee from some poor sod whose carriage [rickshaw] hadn't budged from the spot. I knew that some days many of them would have to go without food to pay me. Poor fellows! How are you supposed to pull two clients and all their parcels or two fat women from one of the rich neighborhoods with nothing in our stomach? Every day pullers collapsed on the street. And each time some fellow couldn't get back on his feet, I had to look for a replacement. Thank God there was no shortage of candidates!
