Who cares for the brands?

Chilling foggy winters of Delhi. 7:45 am. Running late to catch the bus, Neeta took a rickshaw to reach the pickup point for the office bus.

” Bhaiya, jaldi chalo.”

The rickshaw puller applied his full force to the paddle wheel.

The cold waves were slapping the face and the earlobes. The rickshaw was moving into a cloud of fog with minimal visibility on the road.

“So cold outside and that too on a rickshaw, wish the bus could pick from nearby the house” were Neeta’s thoughts.

Keeping a tab on the watch, she was worried of missing the bus.

Suddenly her eyes noticed something, dreaming which, the frosty currents rushed throughout her body.

The rickshaw puller was traversing the air without any woollen on him. Just wearing a skinny shirt on the top..

“Oh God, how can he survive in such a cold without a sweater” Neeta tried to assess the climate. The mere thought of living without a woollen made her shiver.

Trying to find out the cause, she asked the man “Bhaiya, apne sweater kyon nahi pehana?”

And there came the reply which changed her vision of life, the hallucination inside the mind. The scarcity of the poor.

“Gilli ho gayi hian, sukhayi hain.” He replied innocently.

She was wordless.

The episode kept her thinking “How can I help someone so poor, not to afford a second sweater. On the other hand, we the well-off people are overloaded with brands consciousness. Look at the people on the roads, who do not have a single cloth to cover themselves.”

Her mind scanned the woollen in her house which she could share with the rickshaw puller. So much was she taken aback that she couldn’t communicate it with anyone in her family.

Next morning she quickly picked one of the woollen from the old clothes stack in the cupboard and ran so that no one can make out what is there in the polybag.

She herself was not sure whether she would find the rickshaw puller again or not at the same place. She was running, getting late again for the bus.

Her eyes recognised the same face standing near the same point. She hurried up to the rickshaw puller and  handed over the poly bag.

“Bhaiya yeh lo” and she rushed out of sight, gratified that she did a single thing for someone unknown and needy.

©Deepti Sharma