The Vegetable Seller, by Maitrayee Dasgupta, Bengaluru
Born in Shimla, Himachal Pradesh, raised in Kolkata, West Bengal, and currently residing in Bengaluru, Karnataka, Maitrayee is determined never to lose faith in human goodness.
Editor’s Note: Maitrayee spoke with Anil before writing this story and got his blessing to describe his situation and use his real name.
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Bangalore was bathed in golden sunshine. With the courts closed as if on extended holiday, I sat down with my morning cuppa, some hot buttered toast and a pepper-flecked omelette, and opened the newspaper.
Sixteen migrant workers dead as a freight train ran over them while they were asleep on the tracks, exhausted from walking. The tea burned my throat. Yes, I had read about thousands of workers walking back to their villages as they would rather die in their homes than starve in the cities, but this! Why did these sixteen fall asleep on the railway tracks? How exhausted were they?
My helplessness was like liquid fire, born from a feeling that I was too insignificant to change anything, or help anyone.
Suddenly, I heard a full-throated call, “Tarkari, vegetables!”
Oh, so there was a vegetable vendor in this new neighborhood we had just moved to. I shook myself from grief to live up to my family’s requirements. We needed vegetables, so grief could wait.
A thin, young man with a head full of lush, unruly hair pushing a wooden handcart laden with fresh greens, reds, and browns spoke to me in Hindi, while he spoke to others in Kannada (the native language of Bangalore). I was intrigued.
“Where are you from?” I asked him.
“From Agra, Uttar Pradesh,” he said.
Surprised at his perfect Kannada, a language that I was still struggling with despite my seven years in Bangalore, I asked him how he knew Kannada so well.
He smiled as he said, “I speak to people, and in the last three years that I’ve been in Bangalore as a construction laborer, I learned it.”
My wonder was growing. “You were a construction laborer? Then how come the vegetables?”
He said, “When the construction sites closed in lockdown, my friends went back home, but I bought this wooden cart with 5,000 Rupees, some vegetables, and started selling.”
“And is it going well?”
“Yes ma’am,” was his answer. “It’s been good, and I’m planning to rent a small shop now. You can order from my shop soon Ma’am.”
That minute, I stopped feeling helpless. I knew what I could do. Buy from him myself, and tell others to also buy ‘ordinary vegetables’ from the ‘extraordinary one’ who had stayed in the city, adapted, and flourished. The one who was opening a shop while others had closed.
I asked for his mobile number and put it on all the local WhatsApp groups and websites that I knew. My grief wanes every time I see my ‘tarkariwala,’ whose name is Anil.
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(This story was prepared for an “Imagine Another World” online storytelling workshop held December 12, 2020.)
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