The travail-an aversion
U Sharma
Babesha, Thimpu
“O—ouch”, shrieked Ramu, throwing the hammer on the river bank.
The stoic river rippled silently.
“U—ugh!” My thumb is smashed. It’s bleeding profusely”, he spoke in a low Southern drawl, sotto voce.
The knuckle of his index finger had been broken too.
“I must curb the flow of blood,” he whispered.
“O—ouch!” he cried again, the wail penetrating the fire-shots of the snipers at a long distance.
“What, what’s wrong Ramu?” asked his companion Dilip. He scrapped, without dilly-dallying, a morsel of leaves of Artemesia Vulgaris from the copse, near-by; squeezed them on his tender, but blistered palms, and applied the juice onto the bleeding spots.
“Dilip!” Ramu cried, “I don’t want to do this arduous work. I am sure I will get a fair crack of the whip”.
“Ramu, you are too young to do such a menial and manual job. You will stay at home. I will teach you the alphabets of English and Devanagiri. I will enroll you in school next academic session, come hell or high water,” he recalled his sister-in-law, Maya’s sweet words.
“No! No! I am not going to go home anymore from today. I can’t endure the sadism of my brother, Naray,” spoke he, tears cascading down his fragile cheeks.
“Where will you go, then, for the night?”
“It’s difficult to find a home, friend. It is, but, a cinch to find a shelter,” said Ramu, wiping the incessant tears.
Dilip remained quiet, pro tem.
“You can’t attend the obsequies of the father,” Ramu harked back the words of Naray. “I wish I had tied together the two of you for the same burial,” the malicious Naray had further imprecated.
“We all have crosses to bear in our daily lives,” encouraged Dilip.
“I will not come for the work even if I come a cropper in the days to come,” answered the callow Ramu, adding, “I am at the end of my tether”.
Then, with tears still stampeding down his face, Ramu called to his mind the frequent arguments between Naray and Maya, back at home.
“Why do you have to consider this good-for-nothing boy as your son? Why can’t you first give me a son of ours, before hugging someone else’s progeny?” Naray had uttered these words, wearing the trousers. Maya had remained.
“Oh! God. How can I convince my husband to be cognizant of the fact that a woman is not at fault or has no upper-hand in providing a son, as a husband desires?”
“Education for you! You worthless stripling! I will see how your self-assumed mother enrolls you in school,” rebuked Naray, adding, “If you don’t bring fifty rupees in the evening from work there will be neither food nor shelter for you in this house.” Ramu clearly recalled the acrimonious remark of his brother.
Dilip broke the silence, percipient.
“Ramu, why are you quiet?”
“Like all youngsters, I am straining at the leash to leave home,” replied Ramu with gay abandon.
There was, again, silence on the sandy bank.
“I can’t take the quibbles from Naray, anymore; nor can I bury the hatchet between him and Maya. Should I barf out to my friend that I am not in a position to keep my pecker up,” he whispered to himself. “How egregious is my consanguineous brother?” he groaned, crying tears to the Arabian Sea. His moans and wails went unnoticed.
“Ramu, do you need some money?” asked Dilip.
“Don’t be silly, chum. I don’t care two hoots about money as long as I am happy,” said Ramu, and added, “I shall help you to the hilt— 24/7.”
Ramu, then, focused his eyes on a bird that perched on a watery twig of a cactus plant, preening its feathers, resembling a joyous thrush, with its beak. Its craw looked full.
“Is my belly full too?” Ramu questioned to himself, albeit he had the answer.
The next morning, Ramu found himself lying in-between the twin graves, surrounded by a verdant, of his parents. The twelve year old lad had lost his father at six and the mother at nine. He instantaneously remembered that day was the fourth death anniversary of his mother. He, without letting any grass grow under his feet, fetched some flowers from the thickets around; strewed them over the grave of his mother, and paid his heart-felt tribute.
“Babuji is there any work available here?” asked the ravenous and gyrating Ramu to the burly man at the reception counter of a hotel, in the heart of a conurbation.
“I must take the advantage of this ragamuffin. He must be in the mire. The left-overs and a pittance wage should keep him here,” whispered the tubby man to himself, who Ramu had well-sussed, to be the owner of the hotel, rubbing the well-cared goatee on his badly engineered chin.
“I will consider you, strong-looking child,” said the man in a hortatory tone. Then, he whispered, “I must use the labor of the hireling to my optimum benefit,” picking up a pencil from the table.
“Babuji, what sort of work ____?’
“Of a man Friday,” spoke the owner of the hotel, who had, just over the past few years, become a nouveau riche in the town.
“Babuji, I don’t have a place to sleep.”
“W—well! I shall arrange a bamboo cot in the store room.”
He kept himself silent for a while and spoke, “I shall pay you two hundred rupees per week. Does that satisfy you?”
Ramu nodded with an affirmative. And he cried, under his breath, mumbling, “This is my Hobson’s choice.”
A week later, Ramu smiled at his master.
“Babuji, when will I get my wages?”
“I will pay you on a half-yearly basis in lump sum.”
Ramu didn’t insist.
“Let my late mother’s words of wisdom work upon me,” he groaned in tears. “If not, I can manage digging into garbage.”
He sneaked through the back door of the kitchen, at the pace of a cat, like an experienced fugitive.
By evening, he entered a book shop.
“Excuse me, didi,” he said.
The belle at the counter raised her head and smiled, pushing aside the Reader’s Digest that she was perusing.
“Didi, do you have some old newspapers?”
“W—well, we don’t sell old ones,” she replied, adding, “Why can’t you buy the latest one?”
“Old ones, if you have would serve my purpose, didi.”
The damsel looked god smacked and flummoxed. In fact his remark had her in silent stitches.
She gave him a bundle.
“May God bless you, didi,” said the stranger and vamoosed from the scene like a startled deer.
An old man with steel-rimmed spectacles and much dusted clothes sat on the pavement. Ramu sat, a little away from the man. The newspaper bundle lay beside him.
The road was a seething cauldron of traffic. The distant crackle of machine-gun fire could be heard.
Next morning, a newspaper hawker happened to walk by; passing Ramu who was snoring. His face was covered with the moth-eaten newspapers. His blistered palms exposed to the chill dawn.
“What a punishment to this child?” whispered the peddler.
“CHILD LABOUR ON THE RISE,” read a headline on Ramu’s head, on that flirtatious newspaper.
“ Poor! This newspaper—— neglected,” moaned the hawker. He gave a silent and denouncing laugh, in fact, in stitches, pulling his wooly hat with a bobble on top and covering his goose-pimpled ears.
“EXERCISE A BAN ON CHILD LABOUR,” double-pricked him. Today’s beautiful headline.
“The media and the reality! What a gorge?” he murmured. “But, God, why such—–?” he shed unseen tears.
He dropped a copy of the day’s paper beside the slumbering boy. He sauntered cursing the world.