Yellow and Black
One can taste the salt in the air.
As one sips the watery cutting, the smells of cigarettes and rain and fried vadas, all the same. It is about seven in the morning. The city is already in it’s cold sprint as the day’s race has begun, honestly which never ended the previous day.
The city of dreams, they call it, quite the irony, for the city that never sleeps.
Thousands arrive at this island city everyday, and they are greeted by him at every port of entry. He is the subject of the first impression of the city’s millions of inhabitants. The new arrival, soon about to himself blend in with, judges the city’s local nature by the actions of the man in khaki, or sometimes white.
Our new arrival finds himself astounded, early on, that he follows the meter unlike elsewhere in the country. Perhaps he experiences no dearth of business among the millions in the city. Offering carriage around the maze-like streets of this crowded city, he not only charges for his livelihood, but tries, and almost always succeeds in gathering a gem of a story.
I envy him, for he gets new stories, new people and new jokes everyday he works.
Our lives, so cluttered with a thousand lofty dreams and a million unfulfilled wishes, battling and slogging through it, one problem after another. Till we are born, till the end of our time, we take down one problem, a cousin of it rises, and then a friend of it.
And we make it through this endless cycle of dropping of one problem and picking up a fresh one, along the way out of this life. But him, he earns his coin through a cycle of picking up a fresh story and dropping it at it’s end, only to pick up a new story, all day.
It is he who makes his ends meet with the occupation of carriage of people, the one from the city of insomniacs breathing the salty air, the one I am jealous of, the one collector of stories and the most honest human accounts.
