A Day (A Page from my Short Story)
He smiled all the time, he thought he liked people, vice versa was true, he made them smile too, he wore nothing extraordinary, his pant pockets always had a Zippo, keys, wallet and some random bill that he choose to pay, he ate chips that had “zero cholesterol” in green clouds on the packaging as one of its usp’s. He looked at all possible things, handmade colour posters, sleeping street dogs, momentary women on roads, drunken brawls for torn rupee notes, dosa’s being cut with forks and spoons, dirt boundaries of flowing waters on the road, confused smelling garbage dumps, people sleeping on push carts, kids going to school in pressed clothes, bus stands with no stand, techno feeling regional language song cassettes on display, worshipped movie stars adorning auto glasses from the inside to avoid any disrespect from the wipers or the rain, butt scratching made look like wallet accessing exercise to the other, places of worship with and without gates, hollow ditches on roads, altered silencer bikes with pillion riders leaning hard enough to push the driver off, hoardings with advertising agency’s marvellous ideas, dust laden corners of shops selling broom sticks, little boards for classical dance classes, the blue background with the yellow font of tutorials for school going kids, skirts low below the waist and high above the knee, empty place for kabbadi practise later for cricket with wickets diagonally across the rectangular plot, kitchen ware jam packed with each other to shout out the variety, walls high enough to give necessary complex to cats, wide roads with speed breakers, by lanes leading to dead end’s, police men in white and khaki, street lights with papers all over, news paper vendors refusing a sale due to change issues, hot chip shops for all, well cooked attractive chicken rolling in tandem for the hungry, office buses with black windows and huge logo’s on each sides, shoppers returning back with content, parking lots with people in helmets contemplating, defunct traffic lights, women in groups, men looking more harder at them, wonders of disposable income, mannered assistants in coffee shops bending to suggest their personal favourites, parrot befriended modern dressed sadu reciting future for the present, brown painted iron housing onions, lanes that bifurcated to further lanes, people with hands in pockets walking looking down and no further, small boxes open on three sides for cigarette access, camphor sachets piled beside the temple, pairs of footwear left with trust getting the occasional glance from the owner and thanking god for still letting them be there, discussions that led nowhere but to desperation, imported glass for rupees fifty placards hanging from beach umbrellas, illegal published books with faded covers on sale with attractive offers, straight-walking-to-you men selling sun shades on sunny days, kids with running noses running after others in their grease coated smaller than them clothes, dropped food packets with cooked rice flowing from the loose ends of packing onto the road, camouflaged lizards resting in corners of cement steps on walls, kids with guitars and crazy looking hair passing by on vespa’s painted in light yellow, city buses with enough space for a hundred more, social messages on auto behind’s for the common man, an occasional camel striding across with pride on well laid tar, marriage cars giving a glimpse of how would the bride be if that was her ride, photo shops with thirty pass port size photos of some random guy stuck from the inside to show the quality and competitiveness of the store, chattering girls giggling, pointing at each other and giggling again, match watching public grouped into a geometrical structure to catch the occasional cheer leader in a twenty20 match and curse whenever a wicket fell, rear glasses of cars with artwork on the dust that rest due to inactivity or illness, news paper reading men waiting for that perfect news to cheer them up or at least help the bus be on time, auto drivers chewing pan and spitting it far from the auto content with the shine that shone from the auto thanks to the morning round of cleaning, he saw them all, never did he see her. He promised himself not to smile, not to smile that special smile; he let it be all for her, for her he told himself all the time and smiled to himself thinking.
