The Old Man

The old man thought he was old. Too old for this shit. But, hey, what can you do eh? Life and all that. He decided to wait a moment, though. He deserved it too. He looked down at his hand, as if trying to decipher his kismet. All caked with mud it was. And the lines! Well, mostly they were cuts and dead skin, but he did have deep lines on his hand. His hands had been deeply lined ever since he was a kid. A fortune teller once told him he would be big and famous some day. What a waste of ten rupees that was eh?

He looked around. There were quite a few characters there today. The car nearest him, the black one, had a young lad in it. The car was too big for him to ride alone, but he didn’t seem to be complaining about it. He was rocking to a beat from the radio. Or maybe it was the tape recorder playing. He had seen tape recorders play! Sometimes they shook the very ground you walked on.

The car just behind the young fellow’s was a white thing. A little white thing. In it were a man and a woman and two kids. They looked like a family. Well there’s kismet for you eh? Four people in a little car and a single person in a big car. Just goes on to show you, he thought. The man and the woman looked to be in a heated argument though. The woman was telling the man he should have paid the bill on time, that way they would have avoided the extra fine. The man was telling the woman – presumably his wife – that he was busy at the office and she should have paid the bill instead. The two kids in the back seemed to be deep in conversation with their windows. Oh, how the old man knew about conversations with inanimate objects! Whenever Baba would come home angry from work, and beat Amma up, he would always go into his little corner on the roof and have conversation with the walls and the three legged chair. They were his only real friends for quite a few years. Many more years than necessary, he grunted.

There was a rickshaw beside the little white car. In it were two ladies. Or rather, a girl and an older woman. The woman looked resolute, staring straight ahead, eyes fixed on the red light. The girl was looking at him. At him! Why was she looking at him? Perhaps, she wanted him to tell the older woman the light only changes when it does and not a second before? Or maybe he reminded the girl of somebody. People told him he had one of those faces. Yes, he had paid the price of that. It was a dark night and he was coming to his house. The electricity of the entire locality had been cut; another effort of the government to root out the “enroachers”. There were four of them, four men. They had jumped him from behind, thought he was someone else. One of them had a meat cleaver. That one cost him his job at the tanning factory. Nobody wants some cripple working for them.

But he had accepted the fact now; he had to. Kismet right? You have to be born at the right place and at the right time. And speaking of time, it was time to get to work. The old man hefted himself up using his hand and began walking toward the rickshaw. Maybe the girl wanted to give him money. Maybe she was sympathetic. He walked toward the rickshaw; all the time keeping his eyes on the girl and making sure she saw the stub of his left arm. He came near and she held out a ten rupee note for him to take. He took it and muttered a half-hearted “Allah…” and went to the other cars. No time for idle thinking now. There was money to be made here.