The Trailing Edge

Things are changing in India, and rapidly. It’s like getting on a highway with ever increasing speeds and stakes where you have to go as fast as the car in front. What will happen to the slower traffic that cannot keep pace?

In the local trains, when I am back home, I like to do business with the women that sell knick knacks. That’s my measly lame way of connecting with my past while travelling in the trains while entertaining myself. I tell myself I am injecting cash into the lower reaches of the Indian economy, so I am a pretty busy shopper if I have a seat in the train.
Last visit, I was in a Borivli slow local on my way home from Bombay Central after a very long arduous tryst with the visa office, another place, the boom has done nothing to improve. Perhaps the opposite. As usual, after I found a seat I smiled invitingly at a young woman selling hair clips. She was very nice looking, with very pretty light eyes, maybe recently married, because she had a lot of jewelry on. She returned my coquettish smile with a very pleasant cheery grin, a lot of very white teeth in her dark face emphasizing it. I looked admiringly at her jewelry that seemed in sharp contrast with her circumstance as she lowered her boxes for me to peek into.

Her father perhaps had saved a long time to get his daughter married well. Perhaps a village probably in the north, guessing by her looks. She and her husband had probably come to Bombay looking for opportunity. Of course, there could have been a myriad of parallel realities and explanations. But her cheerfulness made the cynic in me think she was either new here or she was a very special uplifting cheery soul in sharp contrast to most other faces in that compartment so late in the day. The same thing my middle class father did for his children over his life time, this girls father probably did for her. Probably it was as big a hunt for an alliance and he had married her off to the most eligible boy hoping for a better life for her, which was selling hair clips for 5 rupees in the train. If she sold 20 of these, she would make as much as I had paid for a cold coffee and sandwich outside the station. Plus she had to pay the price of the goods which probably was a good chunk! She pointed to a row of clips in the corner and informed me, “yeh acche quality ka hai, bahut tikega”(This is of good quality, will last a long time). I looked in my purse to check I wasn’t wasting her time and sheepishly told her I didn’t have change for 500 rs. She frowned for a minute touching her money bag but didn’t open it since she knew she didn’t have the amount. Then smiled again, handed me her other 2 boxes seeming to trust me completely and strolled to the other end of the compartment to ask another customer sifting through her ware whether she had change. She came back in a minute with the change and handing it to me with a triumphant version of her now trademark grin, said in Hindi, “ Ab jitna Jee Chaahe le lena” (Now buy as much as your heart desires) and so sanctioned my happiness! She looked completely honest, and happy. Yet how much time she had to spend making an amount that was mere change to most of us in that compartment.

She and me would step out of the compartment and be consumers in the same city with our vastly different means. With the current boom, and skyrocketing prices and salaries to match, how would this girl cope? I worried and frowned about this but this didn’t seem to bother her… at least, not yet! It seems like there is a fabric in Indian society that has survived till today at least in the towns and villages. Our way of life. A father earns for his family, the wife magically makes do within the small means, they save up for their duties as parents to get their daughters married and then the daughter starts the same cycle all over again with her husband for her children. The rich and the poor do the same duties with their vastly different means and the two worlds co exist in parallel with minimal intersection.

But a city of traders and business first like Bombay has the tendency to expose the contrast starkly. Wouldn’t the inequities here grate at her? If I saw her again, in 5 years, would her face be lined with care or would the sunny disposition survive? How would she feed the kids she was doubtless going to have? Would they join the bands of beggar kids in the trains or would she have found some way to better her lot?

I picked 3 clips and handed her a 20 wondering if that was too few I had taken ready to tell her to keep the change. But she handed me a 5re note back. There was no disappointment at the size of the transaction, the same brilliant smile playing on her face in thanks to her customer. She was doing business, not begging. I hoped as I watched her that I was the pessimist and she knew or understood something I didn’t about handling this city and world. The current boom is pushing people against the wall. Do we have enough in our fabric to prevent a corruption of our souls? Or is that asking the trailing edge to be superhuman.