Tuk tuk revelations

The tuk driver asked me whether we should go through Borella. I told him to take me from a route that avoids the usual city nonsense. And he did.

So we wound through narrow streets lined with modest houses of wood and tin facades, rubble and human bodies. Children played in railway tracks while groups of women, young and old huddled together in groups and starred at the distance in communal unison. Some were crouched on the ground while some perched on cheap plastic chairs that had probably never seen better days. Poverty was evident in this area but the smell of delicious cooking permeated through the air. Nothing fancy - just a flavorsome kiri hodi and some other condiments maybe to be had with rice or perhaps string hoppers. Men waited alongside tiny boutiques selling fruits and vegetables - not a lot, a few beli fruits, some scrawny looking mangoes and papayas, a few bunches of bananas either too small or too ripe to sell.
Most houses had no doors but had curtains on the windows. Girl children in dainty cotton frocks with hair neatly combed back into pony tails or pigtails either crouched on the ground along side their mothers or sat in the laps of aunties and grandmothers and either chattered or stared intently at the elders' faces obviously fascinated. Harsh fluorescent lights inside these houses gave out a cheerful homeliness that would have in another place seemed impossible. In the half light of the evening rapidly heralding the night their faces glowed with a satisfied indolence. I wondered what it would feel like to live amidst such beautiful solidarity. I wondered what the mothers told their girl children as they sent them to wash, tied ribbons in their hair and rubbed talcum powder on their faces. There was a sense of belonging there, a feeling of wholesomeness, a warmth that is unlikely in the solitary lives we lead in our own communities today.

These people were neither slum dwellers nor belonged to the average middle class. They were neatly and properly dressed, the children's faces were washed, their hair combed like that of an average middle class child. They wore sensible cloths like the average middle class but had an air of comfortable relaxation and contentment about them that the average middle class does not have. They had clean cloths and clean manners, clean houses and clean faces. Yet they had no fancy jewellery and I'm sure nor any considerable savings to call their own.

Was anyone even aware that there was such a class? Oh who says that we need to class and grade everything anyway? No need to put things and people in boxes, globes, circles and triangles. We are no longer toddlers.   

And then we fell on to the main road again. A couple was arguing inside a car. A man was yawning behind the wheel. A girl clutched the steering wheel in terror while a bus suddenly swerved in her path and nearly hit her. A woman sighed and looked at her watch in a bus. A youngster was poking around in her smartphone. A young man had his bluetooth on and was on a call. For a moment I imagined him to be talking to himself and I smiled to myself.

The Baseline is such a drab road to travel along. The usual honking, the usual brake lights of vehicles starring at you with their drunken red eyes. The usual air of impatience and annoyance. Unlike the other side of the city - so full of life and warmth. And not the scorching heat of roaring engines coughing out toxic fumes choking your insides, throttling what's left of life inside with their sheer mechanical indifference.