Sunday, December 26, 2004

A day watching street hawkers around my home

If you want to be solitude, my home is not the place to be even if nonoe is around. Kabadi, Raddi, Paper hawkers would patrol the area so many times. Screaming out in their own special pitch, which is pleasing in a certain way. You can find them with trailers behind for scrap collection. Or simply on the bicycle with 2 jute bags hanging in perfect balance on both sides. Then there would be vegetable hawkers. The entire space would resound with their call for taking fresh vegetables, they would name them all. You would feel like buying even if you don't want to. Then there would come the janitors, from front side and back side, two times. Open the door! They would just use their broom stick to bang on the steel doors. Do the cleaning on the front and back yards. Leaves, dust, papers, garbage. Would go in their bamboo made saucer like container. They would have 2,3 different types of brooms. Mom would babble with them for sometime over garbage not picked properly or not showing up the other day. And they would come, clean up toilets, and set off. The day has just begun. You can hear more calls from varied people, steel utensil sellers, cloth, carpet sellers, fresh juice makers (sugarcane, grapefruit, orange) and so on. Then sometimes would come the piercers, asking for girls to get piercings in nose and ears. And at times you could hear stone-tillers, asking to get your household crushing stones tilled for better performance. Or knife-sharpners. Or gas stove fixers. The day would be filled with myriad of calls.

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