Last Friday, I had stopped at a tea-shop on Cathedral Road, just opposite Stella Maris women's college for a cup of tea. Its one of the many tea-shops in Chennai, run by Mallus and apart from tea/milk/coffee, there is the standard range of eats - samosa, vadai, etc. As I wait for the tea, I pick up a vadai - yeah, I know that the taste is nothing much to write home about.
The guy brings my cup of tea & as I sip on it, I see an emaciated elderly woman (65 yrs or so) walk to the tea-shop with a kid in her arms. The kid also looks under-nourished. Its a boy who would be around 2 years old and I am instantly reminded of my son. Sort of like whenever I see old people on the streets, my mind instantly brings forward memories of my grandparents.
She fumbles around in the folds of her saree and brings out a couple of coins. She asks for a cup of milk and hands over a 5-rupee coin, which the tea-shop owner puts into his cash-box. She was expecting some change back, but the guy tells her that it costs 5 bucks.
She gets the milk and brings it to the lips of the kid, making me want to tell her that it might be too hot for the kid. But the kid just turns his face away. She tries a few more times to feed him, but he does not seem to want it and turns his face away everytime. She looks around and notices that I am watching - I move my gaze away. She moves a little away and somehow makes the kid drink half of it. She drinks the remaining milk and after returning the glass, she moves to the adjoining shop which stocks bakery products and junk food like chips.
She buys a packet of chips and hands it to the kid who takes it eagerly. She pays for it (Rs.6) & walks back in the direction from where she had come. I have this feeling that both of them are hungry & the milk or chips is not really going to help - they need solid food. I think of offering some money, but worried about her reaction because though it looks like she is short of money, I have no way of knowing for sure and could end up hurting her.
At the tea-shop itself, I had taken Rs.50 from my wallet & have it in my hand. But even as she is nearing where I am standing, I am unable to decide. Anyway I decide to take the risk and just as she passes by me, I handover the money to her and tell her to buy some food for her and the kid. She is surprised since this was unexpected, but takes the money and moves on.
I am also surprised, because till that precise moment, I was not sure of what I would do. Many a time I have thought on similar lines, but backed off at the last time (due to being unsure whether I would be hurting their sentiments) and was expecting this time also to be no different. I know that 50 bucks is no big deal & would maybe get her just a decent meal. But yeah...
Anyway, I am there feeling good that I finally managed to do what I could not over many previous instances. And giving is anyway much better than getting. Something I saw from
what William Gates and W. Buffet are doing. Both of them figure at the top of the richest men in the universe list, but are currently out to give out a significant portion of their earnings to those that need it. A good gesture, which makes me admire Bill, someone I always thought of as a capitalist American. But...
But what ? Though my wife is not the daily facebook-hotmail-gmail type, she does catch up with her email once in a few days and ofcourse she checks my blog too, since she knows that this is the only way to keep track of a loud-mouth like me. :-) And so she is bound to read this too. So what, you would think ?
Well, lots. Unlike men, women have elphantine memories. You slight them (knowingly or unknowingly) once and it just gets written into their Non Volatile Memory (NVM) - to be recalled at the slightest requirement and to come back to bite you. And so it is in my case. Well, it's a long story.
Some 10 years ago, when my wife was not employed, she used to be at Chennai, manning home as a homemaker. Which meant that not only did my flat look like a proper home, I also got a hearty breakfast and lunch to go everyday. She was just getting used to the Chennai way of life and was slowly picking up Tamil - she speaks pretty decent Tamil today.
Anyway, one day I return from work and she tells me about her day. Some woman had come with a sob story and she being the girl she is, melted immediately and gave the lady 20 bucks. I am mortified because I feel she was cheated for being the gullible girl she is and 20 bucks back then was a big deal. I immediately start a big lecture about how she does not know to differentiate fact from fiction and how she does not know the value of money. I could have stopped there and things would have been great.
But no, the loud mouth that I am, I went on about how she does not know the value of money, because she does not know how hard it is to earn money. That really hurt her. But since she is not the typical bite-back kind of wife, she just swallowed it, though she wrote it into her NVM. And since then, after she started earning, whenever a situation arose, she would take this weapon out at me.
So, I am sure that when she reads this post, she is surely going to remind me of how wrong I was to have reprimanded her about giving 20 bucks to a poor soul, when I have done precisely the same thing. Hmm.
