Hope

The train pulled out of the station just as she tumbled onto the platform. Resignedly she started weaving her way through to the ladies' spot. The next train would be a ten-minute-wait away.

This happened to her with alarming regularity. She attributed it to a well-oiled failure to plan well. She knew how long it would take for her to reach this blasted station from her office. She also knew what time the train was scheduled to arrive and miraculously, it always did arrive at that time. Admittedly mathematics wasn't her strongest suit, but nobody could deny that a simple calculation would reveal to her the time after which lingering around in office wasn't advisable, train-wise.

It is widely acknowledged by experts that doing the same thing repeatedly while expecting different results, amounts to insanity.

She definitely didn't consider herself insane. A failure at planning, yes. Oh, to heck with it, just a failure would suffice.

She got to the ladies' section and looked around for some space to sit. The area seemed well-packed with women of every shape and size. Innocuous-looking, the layman would have confused them with working girls, students, fisherwomen and the like, gathered for a spot of train travel. But she knew better. These were battle-ready women. Train-catching - a sport, nay, a means of survival in this break-neck city where the old refrain of Time being equal to Money came alive with disastrous results.

While looking for a place to sit down, she realized that she was hungry. The bhel-man was standing at his usual spot, sourrounded by a throng, dishing out variations of the simple bhel at super-sonic speed, dexterously, almost robotically. She joined the crowd and no sooner than five minutes later, she was in possesion of some delicious looking bhel.

Another three minutes to wait till the train was due, she went and sat down on one of the benches below the Bhojpuri posters. Almost content, she plunged the puri into the mountain of bhel and was about to toss it into her mouth, when a sullen looking boy appeared on the horizon.

It was almost like he came out of nowhere. A nobody. Emaciated, anguish pouring out of every atom
of his unexistence. He had bruises all over his body. Somebody had beaten him up over something or nothing.

She didn't like to give money to beggars. She hated them - their neediness. She had enough problems of her own and could do without beggars pressing on her their implied right to her money just because they had even lesser.

After hovering in front of her for a second, he moved to the next person, aggressively appealing, palm perpetually outstretched. As she watched him go, a whistle pierced the clamor and her train came into view. People around became infected with motion, poised, flexing.

She made a sudden decision, leaped up and hailed the walking form of the boy; she turned him around and thrust the bhel into his astonished arms. Without waiting to see if the urchin threw it away, for bhel ain't money, she walked briskly towards her compartment and succeded in getting in without loss of life or limb.

She felt happy-ish. Yes, it was a good-ish deed. But what could it solve for the poor boy? Bhel and then a beating. Life was too complicated. A good-ish deed was equivalent to a candle in the Milky Way.

* * *

His life was a misery. The memory of previous night made his skin crawl. Although, the beatings were not the worst of it; that constant ache in his belly was. Always around, the Hunger.

Especially nowadays. Business was slow. People weren't as charitable.

He had nowhere to go. He was a city boy. His parents had sold him to Mammu for a small sum of money. What had become of them, he knew not.

As he neared the end of his regular beat, he realized the earnings from the day would be less than meagre. That meant no food and a beating - at best.

He did think of running away sometimes. But fear of the unknown kept him from doing it. He had never known another life. What if it was even more undignified? And where could he go? With little money of his own and no worthwhile skill to live on, some other Mammu would get hold of him and life could get worse. People weren't great. Apathetic at best, evil, many of them.

He walked onto the platform and decided to work the Churchgate-Virar line. Lots of women there.

Ten minutes, less than ten rupees. The train was due anytime now. He walked around aimlessly and then spotted the girl. He had come to dislike her. She was a regular at this platform and the two times that he had tried to solicit her, she had looked like she would like to hit him.

Still, business was slow. He walked towards her, unable to put on a look of abject appeal this time. She gave him the same smouldering look. As the train whistled in the background, he started to move away from her.

That is when it happened. The girl called out to him, then turned him around and almost threw her bhel into his gaping arms. And as suddenly, she was gone. Clutching onto the Bhel, he watched the train ebbing away, aghast.

People did give him food sometimes. But this..this was different. 

He started to walk away from the platform in a daze. He was feeling light-headed, almost dizzy and it wasn't because of hunger for the first time in his life.

It dawned on him that maybe the world wasn't such a bad place after all. Maybe people changed. Good things happened without begging for them to. Things changed. Fortunes changed. A beggar could, maybe-just-maybe, think of becoming somebody else, somebody non-beggarly.