Page 143 - Musings 2021

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The Marble Metaphor
Divyanshu Varma
2020H1120284P

He sat there, on his old and cracked plastic chair, looking for some inspiration. He took in the
sounds — cawing of the crows, the sweet melody of the mynas, the joyful laughing of
children playing in the break of summer — he took it all in. Then he put some ink in his pen
from the ink-pot — he still used an old fountain pen. He put his pen to a piece of scrap paper,
but still nothing coherent could be construed from the flurry of thoughts going around in his
head.

Rustom lived in a remote village on the outskirts of Jhansi, of the fame of Queen of Jhansi
and her equally brave horse Baadal. The village had seen some development due to the influx
of tourists’ en-route to the Fort of Jhansi, but other than that, had been neglected by the
government. There was a primary school, but few attended classes — partly owing to lack of
funds — but largely because it was tradition that boys help their fathers till their land, and
daughters would help their mothers in domestic work.

He had attended school for a few years, and then almost as if by tradition, he dropped out to
support his family. The reality couldn’t be more different — his family had run out of money.
His mother had sacrificed everything to put her son in school — except their tea stall.

Rustom could speak Basic English, a skill he had acquired while taking orders from foreign
tourists who would stop for a refreshing cup of “cutting chai” at the only tea stall in the tiny
hamlet, run by Rustom himself.
He had only his mother to support, who lived with his aunt, in another village close by. His
father had died before he was born. He had no siblings, but he did have cousins, and he
would often remember the old days, when they would play Kabaddi or Gilli Danda on those
long summer evenings. Life was simple.

His only source of income was the tea stall — he owned no land, and no house. There was a
small room next to the plethora of stained plastic chairs — they had been in service for so
long it almost seemed the chairs could break anytime. The room was used as a resting place
for the tourists, and there was a charpoy — a bed woven with interleaved jute meshes on
wooden legs — on which foreign tourists would often sit down and look at in amazement, as
if feeling the roughness of jute fibre for the first time. The mud-clay kutcha walls would
provide for a cool room even in the harshest of summers.

One late summer evening, when the sun had almost set, a car came by, and stopped right next
to the tea stall. It looked like a fairly expensive car. The chauffeur stepped out and held the
door open for an old man, with dark glasses and a walking stick. The old man then said
something to his chauffeur, and proceeded on his own.

“One kulhad of tea, please. No sugar.”

“Yes, sir, surely,” said Rustom, as he looked up, to the man wearing dark glasses and standing
by the support of a walking stick.

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