It has just been another of those typical Saturday mornings in the Indian high tech cities, which we salaried people call weekend. So it looked as if the business clock of the city has started a few hours late. The cuckoo, crow, and who knows what other varieties of birds were busy presenting their symphony. Not that they do it only on these great days called the weekends; but only on these days you become able to have some clear picture of their melodious chorus, due to the thin human interference. Dust free roads, sparkling sunlight, men-n-women in black and white on stroll,... these are some typical sceneries that you find on a weekend morning in Bangalore.
But for people like Salim the auto driver, Satya the vegetable vendor and of course our own Chinnamma, days and dates seem to have no special significance. Yeah, Chinnamma, the lady who comes everyday early morning to wash our utensils and clean our household; she must be around 35. Of course with the evergreen or ever yellow look on her face, if Sarita would say she is 30 or 40 or 43 or..., I have no proof to support my axiom on
Chinnamma's age. Age is a luxury that only the non-poor can entertain with!!!
I and Sarita have never bothered ourselves with the exact details of Chinamma. And our language barrier, with Chinnamma's Hindi vocabulary amounting to two words and Sarita's Tamil proficiency limited to a few words, has stopped a gregarious housewife like Sarita from getting the family details of Chinnamma. All we knew was that she belonged to some distant village of Southern Tamilnadu and her husband was long dead in some odd road accident for which she is yet to get the 1 lakh rupees of compensation from the car owner who caused the accident. And of course she never failed to entertain her guests. Every week we would be having a few new faces in her one room roadside temporary home. But we have to admit that we have never seen Chinnammma in a gloomy mood in our last two years of stay.
And on that particular Saturday, my old friend Manu happened to pay us a visit in the early morning. As far as I remember I have never seen Manu rising before 9.30 in the day, when we were roommates in college. Of course time and marriage have the potential to change anything and everything!!! On enquiring, Manu told that he had come to take a few snaps of our Chinnamma. Photography has been the hobby of Manu since the days we were roommates. Of course presently for a long time, we had not been in touch, hence I had no chance to know if he had still persisted on his hubby. But like modern art, I have always failed to appreciate his snap-shots. Still I successfully hid my inability all those days. So continuing on my old habit, I again suppressed my surprise on why on earth should Chinnamma be photo graphed. Like ever, I appreciated (of course against my inner voice) his choice of subject and without delay asking Sarita for some snacks. I myself went to call Chinnamma. But my old friend stopped me and expressed his desire to frame Chinnamma along with her very own milieu. So we went outside to find Chinnamma busy in her eternal unending list of some odd job. This time she was cleaning the coconut leaves to gather the sticks for a broom. On hearing my voice, she just stood up and starred in a way as if asking like the Aladdin s jean "Just a call and I am ever ready to do any small chore for you, disregard to the time and place". But this time, I asked her using heavy sign-language to just sit down and do her job but give a glance towards us. With a lot of effort and another lot from Sarita we could finally convey our idea to her. Our good old friend, then, took his own time in adjusting his accoutrements and then another couple of minutes to take a few snaps. Busy as always he was, he left soon after finishing the job. But we could find Chinnamma working (who knows what) at the same place and for a quite a few hours so...!!!
And the very next day Chinnamma came to Sarita all blushing. We have never in these two years marked that pinkish Chinnamma!! May be some of her enlightened kids have told her about the magical instrument called camera ! So she told a lot of things to Sarita, from which she could clearly get that she wants to have a glance of her snaps. But I knew my friend very well and hence by another great amount of gesticulations, we conveyed to her that we will give her the photos after three months. And the next few days we saw Chinnamma glancing at the undecipherable thing called calendar on the wall. But soon she forgot the episode and was back to her old Chinnamma form.
Again it seemed, marriage and time have changed my friend. Because very soon, one day I got a mail with all those snaps of Chinnamma as attachment. Very religiously I got the best printouts of them as soon as possible. On coming to home the first thing that I deed was to show those snaps to Sarita. Though she was not impressed, but she appreciated Chinnammma's photogenic face !! And next we had to call Chinnamma. As ever, she was prompt enough to appear before us within a few minutes. And I handed over the snaps to her in a presidential demeanour, as if handing over some gallantry award to some army chief. Seeing the snaps, Chinnamma was dumb stuck. Her labour-stricken raged fingers touched her very own photographs. How strange, beautiful it would have looked to her eyes. We had doubts about when Chinnamma would have last looked at her own reflection on mirror. So obviously this reunion of Chinnamma with her alter-ego was a scene that neither me nor Sarita could ever forget. I positively doubt if Eliot or Keats would have been able to put those out-flowing expressions into words. Nor can there be any word for that emotion in any language of the world of mortals. And a matter of minutes, she was out of her trench of bliss and was smiling and blushing. Sarita conveyed that there was no other chore to be done. And she left for her home in a manner that can be compared to the way a Cat chases a mouse, swift though but silent enough.
Then for the next couple of days we could find Chinnamaa showing her snaps to every odd friend out there. It became her favourite hobby. May be for the first time in her life she got a HOBBY..!!! For people like Chinnamma words like hobby sound too expensive. But there was our very own Chinnamma, spending the few minutes of her hard earned time in her newly possessed pastime. Me and Sarita were observing her as our pastime, while our friend, the father of these pastimes, must still be enjoying passing his time in supplying a few more Chinnammas with their very own ALTER-EGOs...!!!
