Arsh Mahal diary – Day 9

It has been a day of revelations.

Did you know that in some parts of the world, not too far from where I live, you can barter your hair for steel vessels? Not just your hair but anyone's hair (human) that you may wish to painstakingly collect as a result of natural shedding, intentional shearing, stalking females in the neighbourhood and suchlike. Did you further know that a kilo may in fact fetch you something as eminently desirable as a oil-can?

I did not know this.

Did you further know that milk packets or random plastic slippers can purchase for you channa and palli-patana? That children in that very same part of the world that I speak of are encouraged to learn to look at disposable waste as synonymous with little afternoon treats? And such persons as do entice away from you your hair and plastics come regularly stalking the streets of this world, jiggling their plates and pans or vaunting their channas and peering through your doorway?

Thrilling as these newly acquired titbits of worldly knowledge maybe, they would not have been sufficient to excite this post in my present state of soreness.

It was something more. Today after decades of futile battle, an old and perhaps my foremost and most intense mind-worm has quite fortuitously been laid to rest!

When I was very little, perhaps even before I had learnt to talk properly, I happened to see something that thrilled me intensely. A man with a bandi -like contraption, surrounded by children, stretching out bands out hot-pink gooey substance into absurd shapes – animals, birds, wrist-watches, fingerings and handing it over to the clamouring children. And suddenly, incredulously, I realised that those things were edible. Those lucky children were eating their wrist watches! The thrill and the image stayed with me well into the time I had learnt to communicate reasonably. I repeatedly asked my mother about gooey pink parrots, eating your wrist watch, fantastic moustached-men who would make you some of your own, which you could gently slide into mouth and dispose of, if you grew weary of it. Frustratingly then, understandably now, she thought it was something I had seen in a dream. I think I also asked my father and sister but they were useless. It is intensely frustrating for a child to have to depend on adults for her gratification, but even more so not to be able to convince them of the existence of its source.

I thought longingly of pink parrots for several years, well into my girlhood. But as the pink memories blurred, I felt convinced too that it may merely have been a mid-summer noon’s dream. It seemed fantastic enough for it.

But today when the women of Arsh Mahal basti were enumerating the variety of their barter economy, one of them mentioned wrist-watches for old used-up notebooks. When I cocked a disbelieving brow she chuckled and said that they were just candy. Bells peeling madly in my head, I bombarded them with questions. I had found him! My magic- man who made candy-watches. If they were taken aback by the ferocity of my interest, they were equally sympathetic of the reason for it. I thanked them profusely and exacted a promise that they were all to keep a sharp look out for him and take me to him immediately as he is spotted anytime in the next week.

I am keeping my fingers crossed that the candy-man visits while I am still going to Arsh Mahal. But even if I don’t get myself my pink moustaches, I know at least that it has always been possible. Only, I hope my mother remembers what I am taking about so that I can at least have a ‘I told you so!'