its me!!

  ‘Doctor Sahab , I really wish I become healthy like you. Just once in my life,’ Pande ji said to Principal Sahab . By healthy , he meant beefy and plump. ‘If I had your built, I would have bashed anyone, who dared to even look at my direction.’ He was a Mathematics Professor at a degree college but other than his boring looks, nothing else seemed to have any association with his profession . On the contrary, he resembled a farmer more: gaunt physique, devoid of any form of fat; sunken cheeks; dark complexion; bland clothes – grey trousers and greyer shirt, Bata sandals in his feet, gamcha on his shoulders and thick brown spectacles on his eyes. He always scurried from one place to another either on foot or on his Atlas Cycle as if already late for something important. And, his anxiety about his finances to pay off his daughters’ dowry was as permanent as a government job. ‘ Maidam (local dialect for Madam), even if I spend 2 lakh per daughter, then too it will cost me 12

Shyamlal was a jamadar , a sweeper, in our Kaimganj house. Without fail, he visited our place twice – like the hour hand of the clock passing through a number twice daily. He had a long broom, quite like what Harry Potter has, except that his broom did what it was meant to do. It was like his third arm, practically attached to his body. I had rarely seen him without it and he looked odd in its absence. ‘Go, and give these sweets to Shyamlal’, my dadi told me. ‘OK’. ‘Don’t touch him’, she instructed. ‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘He is a jamadar .’ ‘So?’ ‘ Jamadars are not to be touched’, she said it in such an axiomatic way as if the sentence demanded no explanation – a first principle, an immutable truth. Except that in my child-brain, those truths were not hard-wired by then. Caution gripped me while giving the sweets to Shyamlal: Jamadars are not to be touched. ---- Shyamlal, strangely, was too good looking to be a jamadar . He wasn’t the typical poor bloke from the 80