It is Saturday evening and I am walking towards the barber’s place. It is that sort of golden evening, sun is setting, bright, but not yet gloomy. I am walking through a busy four way junction, with bus stops and shops on all sides. But being in Kerala, it is not mad rush and not as dusty. There is still a calmness among the chaos, it is still possible to think about other things than survival. There is an old lady trying to jam a fifty rupee note through the donation box in front of the church, there are candles burning and there is a girl in pajamas cleaning around the Mother Mary’s statue. There was a lady coming towards me who looked at me and seemed to smile and not being sure I sort of nodded. It is rare since in these parts we don’t acknowledge strangers, especially across genders. There were parked city buses at the stop which were full with people returning home from the city. I see a row of faces from the bus looking out, expressions blank.
I had been thinking about millions of lives around us. Each of them going about their day, absorbed in their worlds. There are hopes, dreams, disappointments, pain behind each façade and many of which nobody may ever know. It is incredibly sad to think about the loneliness of each of them carrying their burdens silently. How many do we care about? There are people passing us by that we don’t even think about. I guess if we start to care more, it will only lead to depression. I must have passed by some of the people scores of times that I later got acquainted with and didn’t even know they existed. Once we get to know, understand their history, become curious about them and start to care, then they are part of your world. Even when they become part of our world, do we wonder about their journeys – what must they be doing now, what are they thinking about, what are they happy about, what maybe troubling them? Maybe a few, only that much is possible without going crazy? Past friends fade and the ones too close gets taken for granted. It is a such a long journey through the years, experiences, heartbreaks, moments of joy. Among all, there maybe a few who we feel “belong to us”, maybe fated to be that way, where the connection is strongest, where the string doesn’t break all life.
I climb the narrow wooden steps and get in the moldy barber’s shop, the kind the new generation may never step in and which may go extinct when the current ones close. My barber is looking gaunt, his moustache is white as snow, drooping over his lips. White beard and hair. He is usually bit more sharper about how he looks. He doesn’t talk much, except when he is drunk a little in which case he talks about his kids who are now in college, his brother and bit of farming he does. Today he is silent, except for occasional humming along the songs that come on Aakashavaani All India Radio which is constantly playing, whatever they broadcast. He worked on my head for a long time, meditative, working on it like a piece of art.
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