Story 1 – The boy and the flower cart.
‘Please, please, you need to admit my father, he is dying, he needs oxygen. Please!’
The security guard outside the hospital stood upright from his chair and came forward to open the huge hospital gates. The gates swung open and the kid was about to run back and wheel in his dad but an ambulance zoomed into the hospital with some other patient and the guard closed the gate promptly after that.
‘My father is dying. He is dying. He is dying. Who do I talk to? Ammmaaaa!!’
The kid started wailing in front of the gate while the guard adjusted his mask over his nose and shooed away the kid with a flick of his hand accompanied by no words from his mouth.
‘Amma. Amma. Amma. Come back. Amma,’ the kid kept wailing and calling for his deceased mother. The kid’s father lay flat on the wooden cart a few feet away. The same wooden cart on which the father and son sold flowers in the morning, now had become a death bed for a dying man and would soon become a stretcher for a dead man.
The kid’s father was coughing and convulsing. No words escaped his oxygen deprived body. Corona virus ruled the nation at this point of time. India was getting fucked from all sides – left, right, top and also what they call the bottom. Political blunders over political blunders. The kid spared a rare thought thinking about those politicians. After thinking about them, he had only one follow up thought,
‘Bloody assholes’.
He strode over to the flower-cart-cum-death-bed and looked at his dying dad. He had pushed the cart around the city with his dad lying on it and struggling to even breathe, while they searched for a hospital that would accept them. Every damn hospital had turned them away by saying,
‘We have no beds, sorry’.
Even the government hospitals had turned them away.
The kid had no choice, no other option than to sit and pray to his mother in Heaven. Maybe she could parley with the fair Gods and broker an oxygen deal or a cylinder – just a cylinder would be enough, the kid thought. The kid had dreams you see, despite being poor as hell, he would make sure he read 4 books a week, sitting under a street lamp, after spending all day selling flowers with his dear daddy. The books were sourced by the few good netizens around the area who had set up a book club for the underprivileged.
A BMW zoomed by them, and then an Auto-Rickshaw prodded behind it. The kid noticed that none of the occupants had masks on. He grimaced at the flashback of the police lathi-charging his dad for not wearing the mask in the market. His dad always wore the mask. In fact, he was the one who forced the kid to form a habit of wearing the mask, and not the other way round. Yet, when the mask was down for a few minutes, the police had promptly come and dutifully hit his father black and brown. His dad had worn the mask almost all the time, and now he was dying at the hands of the wretched virus.
The citizens of Bangalore were cozying up to another cool night, snuggled up in their high rise apartments, away and beyond the problems of the night streets. Down below, a little boy and his father sat side by side, awaiting a common fate. The kid had stopped wailing now, and his father was trying to say something but he had to stop and gasp for breath.
‘Appa. Appa. Everything will be fine. We will make it through the night. Remember, we need to sell the flowers tomorrow or they will go spoilt!’ The kid spoke whatever came to his mind.
His dad started writhing in pain. His lungs felt like lead containers with exploding lead balls inside. His chest felt like the chest reeling from a continuing stabbing of fate’s knife. His eyes bounced around in the night, trying to do something, god knew what. Finally, his eyes came to rest on the boy and he came forward to say something to the kid, then again, he couldn’t say anything. His mind wouldn’t warrant another expenditure source of precious oxygen.
Just then, a group of people had formed on the road and most of them had their mobile phones out and they were recording the drama unfold in front of them with flashlights beaming in the darkness. Their mobile phones would capture the death of a man infected with Covid-19, who after failing to get any type of care from the State or from the People, died on the street. The mobile phones would also capture the loud weeping of a small kid who sat on the cart next to the dead man, presumably his son. Nobody would dare go near them, lest they get the Corona.
The video would become viral the next morning and the morning after that, the video would sink to the bottom of the abyss, surely. And in the days beyond the initial grief, the fatherless and motherless kid would go and stand in front of the Vidhan Soudha (State Parliament Building), wipe his unrelenting tears and swear to God, or Devil, whoever the fuck was listening, that he would have his vengeance. The people responsible would pay, and if they didn’t, he would make them.
