Monthly Archives: April 2009

This same room serves as the bedroom, drawing room, and the kitchen; I prepare my own food on a kerosene stove, and work during the day. Evenings are usually passed by sipping tea at a bus stand. It’s a very small village, with irregular and erratic supply of electricity and drinking water, a deserted and desolate place, populated with a few families one can count on the fingers of one hand.

During peak of summer, the temperature reaches around 46 degrees celsius.

Many times I have asked myself what am I doing here but never came up with any logical reason. Ultimately I stopped thinking about it at all.

Today this stove is giving me real good trouble. It is already past noon and I wanted to cooke rice which I intended to eat with goat’s milk, because that’s the only edible food available. But for the last hour I have been struggling to fire up the stove, the room has filled with fumes of kerosene as sign of my struggle to cook something. Once a week, a bus arrives here, usually empty. In a little erratic and piercingly straight forward manner, I asked her what she wanted and said she should knock at the door before entering other people’s place. I never had a habit of locking my door in this place.

What a strange reply I gave. I agreed to keep her at my place for work.

I always found my food ready, room cleaned , clothes washed and folded properly. As far as her work was concerned I never had any complaints. Using different modes of transportation, by bus, by bullock cart and by train, finally I arrived at my new place of posting and joined the office.

It was the month of December and I had lots of vacation time left so I took time off from work, packed up a few belongings and set off for the the place, the given address. My money was the only source of relief for her old blind lady.
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