My Friend Bihari

     
                                                   
 He was my first friend in the city after my posting to Kolkata in the year 2005. Strangely though I can’t tell his name I never, in fact, had the chance to know that. While in his own circle he was known as ‘Bihari’ presumably due to his migration from his home state Bihar, to the world outside he was just a rickshaw  allah. On my part, I would rather call him ‘friend’ for if there was any one in the city who could connect me emotionally it was this humble old rickshawallah.

I remember it was the second day of my stay in the city, a hot, humid Sunday afternoon. With the cherished desire to sample ride the famed Kolkata Metro, as I set out of my rented house at Hathi Bagan, I was greeted by my friend Bihari. With brow-beaten eyes animated in expectation, a wry smile struggling to hide the agony of his daily drudgery, he waved humbly at me “Asun Babu”, seemingly mistaking me as a Bengali bhadralok. As I stepped onto his rickshaw and directed him to “Shobha Bazar”, down went his hands picking up the hand bars and racing up the street, the hand bell jingling all the way. As the rickshaw rode swaying along the tram lines that tore the street to shreds, my eyes lay fixed unknowingly on the half-naked man before me racing up like an untiring stallion. The humid June afternoon had set streams of sweat running down his body, his naked heels rounded with cracks, striding relentlessly. It was then a thought crossed my mind whether it was Bihari’s hands that pulled the rickshaw or the power of his hunger. The more I thought about the man, more miserable I felt placing myself in his social conditions, his constraints and compulsions driving him to such disparaging livelihood. It took quite some serious reflections before I reached the Metro station of Shobha Bazar, when my reverie was snapped by Bihari’s muffled voice “Babu namum” as he brought his rickshaw to a grinding halt. As I got down the rickshaw asking “kitna?”, gasping from stress, wiping out sweat in his loin cloth, the wry smile back on his face, Bihari switched to refined Hindi “Apki murjee Babuji”. When I handed him a ten rupee note, my friend’s eyes lit up and rolled lively as he bowed humbly away

Ever since that day we were introduced to each other, my friend had been ruling my heart and mind without fail. Every night before I retired to bed, as I gleaned down from my terrace I would find him lying on the pavement across the street at the gate of ‘Young Boys’ Own Library’, his head resting on the rickshaw seat for pillow, his ‘gadi’ parked next to him in the kerb. From the long line of half naked bodies of the pavement dwellers it was quite easy to identify Bihari for he never faltered from the library gate and his ‘gadi’ too, a red flag hanging from its rear, religiously stuck to him. Then in the morning when I strolled in the open terrace air singing and brushing my teeth, Bihari would be getting ready with a perfunctory prayer to the call of the day.

In the cycle of the daily grind I could not get a second chance to ride Bihari’s rickshaw. Then on the fateful day the CPM had called a city bandh against the oil price hike I got a huge shock when I returned from office that evening only to be greeted by a large crowd of rickshawallahs and local boys near my house, all talking about my friend Bihari. With curiosity bordering on fearful anxiety as I enquired, someone told Bihari had received a lathi blow as the police was confronting a rampaging mob of party protesters and was rushed away with serious head injury. Since then every evening and every morning as I glanced from the terrace there was a vacuum down there, the pavement that had been abode to Bihari for years.

I have seen great people. I have heard about saints and sages. I have read lives of world celebrities. But no one, as ordinary as Bihari, has ever made so deep an impact on me. In fact under the garb of a down trodden destitute he was no less a noble soul. To me he was a living embodiment of Ishopanishad, who never failed to be grateful to God for a life so full of grinding drudgery of dire deprivations.

The image of this man refuses to die down. In fact in the canvas of a rather confused imagery—the environ of this poor man’s metro, the wretched miseries and filth and squalor of slums and ghettos, the corroded streets clogged with city traffic, the dirty linens and overflowing drains along the broken pavements and, ruling over all this, the red banners, the numerous party posters, the deafening slogans beckoning the comrades with lal salams et al. But what stands out to this day is the sirening police jeep in the midst of clashing frenzied mob of Shobba Bazar, driving away bleeding Bihari into that sunset. I still keep asking  myself, could my friend ever return to a lal salam welcome home?
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