THE OLD MAN IN BOMBAY by Jon C. Jenkins

Bombay attacks your senses. On my third day in India, I find myself awake at 5 am. I get up to walk. I am sweating in the heat. The streets are full. The cry to the Muslim faithful fills the air, competing with housewives bargaining with stall keepers. Frying green chilli, garlic, onions, turmeric, and coriander barely covers the constant background smell of urine. The sky is startlingly blue. Men's clothes are bleached sun white; saris swirl rainbows of unnatural brightness. A dung patty falls behind a cow and a little man in polished shoes does a little skip to avoid the splatter.

It assaults your sense of justice. Out our front door a leper lives. He begs money by cheerfully wishing me luck. I pass a corner where three generations of a family live on a porch a slab of concrete the size of a bed. Here they sleep, cook, eat and procreate. A labourer carries a load of bricks on her head and an infant on her hip. Three men, wet with sweat, push a load of steel bars on a two wheel wooden cart.

It bruises your sense of dignity. We are guests of Bishop Joshi, the Methodist Bishop. Laura S., a co worker, is also his guest. One morning she gets up early to use the toilet. A rat has fallen into the bowl and is resting after struggling for some time to get out. In the dim, predawn light, Laura sits down. The rat with renewed hope attempts to get out. Bishop Joshi sends his dog in after the rat. The dog shakes the rat to death and the internal chaos I experienced was matched externally.

After a week of so, Maureen and I begin to indulge in a before work coffee not "real" coffee but Nescafe in sweet boiling buffalo milk. Every day we walk a few blocks to the railroad station.

We always take the same route. From the front door of the house we turn right. It is a cool looking street, lined with trees. A few hundred feet from the house a wooden shack is near a taxi stop. A man sits in the shop selling tobacco and pan. Here the street noise begins to increase. When we reach the corner, it is like stepping into a minor riot. The sun is bright. It is hotter. The cars are rushing. Pedestrians crowd the sidewalks. To our left is a cinema with office buildings on either side, which are separated from the road by a paved lot. We walk across the lot to the lights, rather than risk crossing in the middle of the four-lane road. When the light changes we move with the crowd into the dozens of wooden stalls in front of the station. Food, magazines, toys and hundreds of other things are sold. We buy an Illustrated Weekly or one of the Indian English dailies and go to a restaurant.

The chairs and tables are old. Air circulates due to the effort of slow ceiling fans. When we enter, the customers and staff stare at the Americans. Because women are required to eat separately from men, we sit in a booth. We have a kind of privacy we never get at the Bishop's.

Here we can talk. We try to share the pain we experience. We hope we can help each other understand or at least appropriate the suffering that constantly grates our sensibilities. We fail. We keep returning to try again.

One morning, as we reach the end of the quiet, tree-lined street, we pass an old man sitting in the shade of last building on the street. His skin is very dark, much darker than most Indians. A fine dust turns his skin a grey where he had lay on the sidewalk. His hair is nearly white. He wears burlap sacks for clothes.

Every day we pass him. He begs; he searches the garbage. He is not a very good beggar he is not a child, a woman, crippled or religious. He is mute, painfully thin, and dirty. I never see him stand; he sits or lies. Late at night at the corner a bundle of rags is there with a grey leg sticking out.

One day a banana salesman begins parking his cart near the old man. The salesman's clients buy a banana, eat it and toss the skin on the ground. Now, we frequently pass the wrinkled beggar eating the white strands on the inside of banana skins.

I know I cannot do anything for him or any of the million or so other beggars in Bombay. But there is something almost reassuring about his being there. He perseveres in spite of the heat and hunger. I am always stunned when I see him smile. It is not often. A passer-by drops a coin in the bowl in front of him, he bows and smiles. I begin to look forward to seeing him. As the weeks pass, we continue visiting the railroad station. Our morning coffee and the old man become a part of a ritual. On our way he marks the passage from a sleepy side street to the chaos of the shopping area. On return he marks the boundary between intense vivaciousness and morbid stability.

One day we leave for the restaurant. We go out the front door of the Bishop's mansion and start down the cooler side of the street. We come to the street's end. The old man is not in the shade of the building.

We never see him again.

-- JonJenkins - 24 Apr 2007