The Sunday sermon spelt out our intended mission for the coming 12 months: Caring for Creation through Conservation. We were told that the youth of our Parish would be visiting our homes to educate us in caring for the environment, recycling waste material and, in the process, they would also collect all unnecessary items like excess plastic bags and packaging materials.
Now, I have some enthusiastic visitors to look forward to. I have, for a long time, been looking for solutions to the disposal of various packaging and unwanted add-ons like plastic measuring spoons. I thought that if I collected enough (and it does not take much time to do that considering the speed at which a normal household goes through cereal and detergent packets!), the Companies would welcome the return. No go.
The plastic spoons were snapped up by my maid to be exchanged for garlic. Cardboard cartons went with the newspapers for selling and the rest - inner packing, wet packing – was sadly consigned to the waste bin. One of our windows overlooks the municipal garbage dump. Not a scenic view but a very educative one. One can study those ubiquitous scavengers, the crows, or the rats and multiplying cats. Or even the humans. Man, woman and child, they visit, they pick over and then collect what they particularly specialize in, carrying away the ‘lucky finds’ in discarded cement plastic gunnies – the great Indian recycling machine.
This reminded me of Sapna.
My husband had wound up his business and we were shutting shop, quite literally. With shutter rolled up, we sat down in two comfortable chairs with a rather large cardboard carton between us and a stack of files for each. We sorted through the files, discarding with a will every unwanted scrap: correspondence, manuscripts, proofs, notes and other assorted jetsam of twenty years and more. So absorbed were we in our task, that we did not notice the little slip of a girl watching us, anticipation in the gaze. When I did look up, I noticed her hopeful expression. Dressed in a ghagra-choli, her shoulder length hair in a tangle, bangles a jingle and a sack that was three times her size trailing behind her, she could only be a rag-picker. So young and already a wage earner!
This was not the time to quibble about child labour, and we beckoned her forward. She eagerly emptied our carton and we told her to keep coming back for more till we were done. This she did on winged feet, returning almost immediately after disappearing around the corner. Finally, it was time for a break and we shut shop, telling her to come back same time, next day. She kept reappearing till we had cleared out every unwanted piece of paper. And at the end of it all we were bidden farewell with a stunning smile. For a time, she had a steady ‘income’. Her reward from us was some cash and a bar of chocolate. Maybe she should have been in school, but then our paths would never have crossed and perhaps her family, whoever they were, would have had to forgo a better meal. She told us her name but was not too forthcoming with any further information. Today, she would be roughly ten years older. Twenty, twenty-two? With, perhaps, a child of her own?
PS : This piece is supposedly in the style of Cory Doctorow!!
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