stranger

He was drinking his tea when I reached there. There is this tea shop I haunted every day with my colleagues to get vadai or tea usually. With the onset of summer, I go there to drink buttermilk served cold. I don’t think any other set of women have come there, the shop being a small unclean one where people have to stand on the road to drink their tea served in glass tumblers which are a shade of brown from all the tea that has been poured into them every day.

Many customers who come there are auto drivers tired from driving all over the town wanting to take a break, painters having patches of paint all over their body, carpenters, building workers etc. who come to have an ounce of tea, a beedi and probably sit on the steps for a few minutes of respite before they resume their work.

This stranger, drinking tea, must have been one of them. He was wearing a white shirt with brown stripes and a brown pant. The shirt and the pant were covered completely in brown, the dust from the sand looking at which I assumed that he must be one among the construction workers.

He finished tea and stared at the vadais for a minute before hesitantly reaching out to take one. These vadais are very small and can definitely not be considered a snack to abate hunger. When he finished it, he reached into his shirt pocket to pay. Off late, being among people who earn a fat pay every month and do not think twice to spend at a restaurant to have a good meal, I had forgotten how it is to be without money and having to think twice about spending. So I was watching him keenly to see what he was doing. He dug into his pockets first without looking into the pocket, then looking at the pocket. After approximately a minute of doing this, he panicked. He took out what was in his bulging pocket. I saw that it consisted of some papers, some folded into four and definitely occupying a lot of space in that tiny pocket, then there was a mobile sort of thing (I say sort of because it didn’t look like a real mobile to me). He then took out papers from the left pocket of his pants. He dug some more into the shirt pocket again, took out some more papers and finally from the bottom of the now empty pocket he took out money, a crumpled, dirty Rs.20 orange note. He looked at it, unfolded it, placed it on his left palm and rubbed down its length with his right hand twice to iron it out and then gave it to the tea master.

When this was going on, I had this deep urge to just say, please do not suffer so much, I shall pay for you, but something stopped me. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that, didn’t offer him help. I just stood there staring at him till he walked away and turned a corner.