GARBAGE DID GOOD TO GRACE.. GRATITUDE TO GARBAGE!
Has the New Year 2024 with all it’s numerical prediction and probabilities; cosmic arrangements and design, making me highly optimistic about the dark and disturbing dustbins too?
Well, maybe I was wrong or rather not optimistic about the ‘gandagi ki khooshbu. ‘ over the years. Probably my planetary bearings urge me now to take a deeper look into all that has been cast away.
This morning I left home around 7am in my regular cab which I hire when I have to travel very early or return home after sunset. The reason why I hire this particular vehicle is because the driver of this car is a very young man of twenty two with twinkling eyes. Kiran is just another boy who is as sweet and kind as my students. How happy his voice sound from the other side when I call to book him.
All throughout the trip be it for a couple of hours or for full day he offers his sincere services as my own brother would have done. He does not accept any extra gratification from me. He talks very less and is shy to even say a yes when I offer him tea and snacks.
So anyway Kiran arrived on time, his car clean and spotless. The chanting of the melodious Suprabhatam playing. The little tabernacle well laid out on the dash board with fragrant flowers and a flickering LED lamp. I got in and placed my belongings and as usual settled comfortably as usual with an empty stomach, all set for the twenty nine kn journey into the city traffic heading towards my clinic for the routine health check up, the annual pilgrimage just after the New Year celebrations get over and you either become aware of what could have been affected or just check on your lipid profile to be sure how much more you could stretch it out over many festivals lined up. Though I had not been bit by any of the excess bugs, this is my pilgrimage every three months.
The car hit our unnamed forest road and through the thick fog we drove through the sleepy green canopy, where we could hear the morning assemblies and associations of various species of birds, squirrels and other insects. At times to me the rhythm sounded like the beginning of the day activity and at times they seemed to wrap up and take the curtain call for the previous night’s jamming. They would know best as none looked sleepy, tired or fatigued. It was I, the only lifeless soul taking on the beat for the body maintenance regime.
Bird brains are small but happy! I lamented.
We reached the busy main road, rather the highway, where every soul under the infant sun seemed to be busy, chasing their dreams and aspirations running behind buses, cabs, autorickshaws..
The super jets that would carry each one of them to their workplace for the day’s grinding, one more thumb would press the biometric machine to stand witness that you are alive and kicking. Now don’t ask me who kicks better? Life or living?
Actually it took a while for me to withdraw from the jungle logistics to get on to the bandwagon of city dwellers.
Kiran, a skilled young driver manoeuvred through the fast and lazy traffic, at times dodging and at times pulling the brakes.
It was such a dreamy pleasure to drive through the GKVK stretch. The whopping cheerleaders of the bougainvillea ! The seem to be like the cheering teenagers approaching their hero in waiting. The blooms take your breathe away. They line up but not in orderly fashion but like crowd in slanting gaity with their mini skirts and pompoms like waves rising and rising higher to call out and distract drivers..
The ride was all fine through Vidyaranipura, the new township exploding with necessities and logistics. The Hop Coms are pretty attractive and the prices also seem to fair.
All the misfortune of the joyful morning ride showed up when our car was just about to enter the Malleshwaram stretch from the Metikere area. Doom’s dangling dagger released itself and a speeding biker hit our vehicle on the mouth and face, resulting in him rising into the air like a dry leaf and dropping on the concrete divider. The sudden impact with the flow of traffic, zoomed in more number of two wheelers to nose dive into the vortex of the zone of impact.
Goodness Gracious! The victim was a stout man, and now he had a fractured arm and skull. Utter chaos and cacophony devoured the situation. Ambulance, police, Kiran, scooting, calling, trying to control the untoward situation.
In the midst of this I could feel my neuropathy parameters going bonkers, brain fog, eye sight hazy and throat parched. I was a seated vegetable in the car and perspiring profusely. I was about five km away from the clinic and about twenty two km away from home. I had absolutely no idea what was happening to me but I was silently sinking.
I had no reflexes to call home or atleast come out of the vehicle. Empty stomach hallucinations can add visual and psychological derangement in mobility and that is what was happening to me.
After a while I could sense a knock on the window. I barely opened my eyes and in a daze identified an auto driver who has dropped me to school, he saw me and may be the rapport I have with every auto driver I travel with through ‘Poet in the Auto ‘ video program prompted him of my health hazard.
I opened the door and asked him if he bring me back home. He immediately agreed and shifted my belongings in his auto and helped me too to walk to his vehicle barely 6/7 steps but for me that too then it was a terrible terrain to walk.
As the auto rickshaw began to move I could feel the chill morning breeze sweeping my face, I was surely feeling good but I felt my lower abdomen churning and the heart squeezing and flushing. Would puking give me a relief? Would drinking some water push down the bile for the time being?
I requested the driver to stop a while and I got down but there was no sign of a throw up but intense churning and vibration within. A different sort of palpitations and anxiety gripped me and again the immobility was gripping me.
All of a sudden I got a bad odour in the air and looked at myself to see if I had succumbed to nature’s call since I had no control of all the break down inside me.
I was standing in a dump yard, a garbage segregation zone. Filth, dirt, trash in heaps, in the midst of all that young children playing adults in colourful haute cotor ensembles smoking bedee, sipping tea, oblivious of all the dirty, filthy, unhealthy surrounding.
One look at all that lay before, behind and beside me I vomited, vomited all the tension that had built up due to the circumstantial hazards, my chagrined mind let loose of the trauma.
How I thankes the trash, the filth, the garbage and those unkempt people who redeemed me from my state of panic and shock.
Frying pan to the fire is this what it is I suppose. I was much better and felt light. I was in control of my life to return home safe to a great extent.
All that was dumped and disposed so graciously received all that was disturbing for my well being. I cannot thank less or I cannot underestimate the role of all that is supposed to turn obsolete, waste and filthy.
©grace