Skip to main content

The vegetable vendor

The vegetable vendor yelled. It had been an hour since she ventured out in a somewhat posh locality to sell vegetables. This has been her routine since around a decade. She made a small profit in a day and on some good days the profit touched Rs 100 mark. But in most of the days it was much less than it. She managed few hundred rupees, usually breaching the Rs 1000 mark a month. That was barely enough to make her family earn a decent living. She had been living with her 3 children, which she had before leaving her abusive, alcoholic husband. Like many others she dreamed that her children will have good education. She was an illiterate but she understood the importance of education for good living. This was one of the reasons she did not allow any of her children to work, though occasionally they helped her.

Today seemed a bad day. Not even a single buyer since an hour. Finally one lady showed up. She was a 30 something, stout, seemingly snobbish lady with loads of make up. She came and enquired about the prices of the vegetables. She hated leafy stuff, usually avoided potatoes as she heard it made her fat. Finally after few minutes she decided to go for few brinjals.

“How much does it cost”

“Rs 22 a kg”

“I need to buy only a quarter”

“Theat will cost …”

“I mean 250 grams”

“Rs 6”

“How come? See 1 kg costs Rs 22. So 1/4th kg, I mean 250 grams should cost 22 divided by 4, nearly 5 rupees”

“No. It is Rs 6”

“Still … Rs 6 is too much. Tell the right price.”

“It is 6 only”

“I’ll give Rs 5. Not a penny more”

“No. It costs us so much. It is not possible”

“OK. I’ll get it from someone else”

“Ok. You can have it for Rs 5”.

The lady gave Rs. 5, took the brinjals and got inside her Honda City which was waiting for her to take her to a beautician.

The vegetable vendor looked at the soiled Rs 5 note, smirked at no one in particular, and moved ahead.
Labels:

Comments

  1. karma9:12 AM, May 10, 2007

    r v suppose to be feel sorry for the vendor????

    ReplyDelete
  2. Nikesh Rathi10:43 AM, May 10, 2007

    @karma
    It all depends upon how you choose to feel about the vendor.
    You can feel sorry about her, or can lok at it from that snobbish lady's point of view or vendor's point of view or combination of both.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Shop @ Amazon

Popular posts from this blog

An area of darkness ?

The title of this post finds its origins in a novel with simlar name written by VS Naipaul. Set in India, some 40 years ago or so, this is a kind of travelogue of author's brief stay in India where he found it to be full of superstitions, ignorance and darkness! Many decades and many MNCs and malls later, few parts of India seemed to have chucked off that tag, but there are many places that haven't and continue to remain shrouded in ignorance. Move few hours away from a city, travel in a second class train compartment or a dilapidated state transport bus and you get to see the dark underbelly of India Shining. As one of the characters in the movie Rang De Basanti says "Yahan zinda rehne ki jung mein logo ki zindagiyan nikal jaati hai" . So true it seems! My day today was spent being kind of lost in similar thoughts. To start with, I when I boarded the ST bus, a woman was wailing. She may be in her 20s or something, but she was crying in some peculiar musical tone. At...
13 comments
Read more

The Detour

The 7 year old girl walked from school to her home. This was the first time she was walking alone on that route. On any other day, her mother would have gone to pick her up from school, but not that day. She was not aware that schools were declaring holiday an hour and a half earlier due to trouble in the town owing to some agitations and protests. Only few parents could be intimated about this. A friend’s mother accompanied her to the lane leading to her apartment, from where it was just a minute’s walk. But that day, for some unknown reason she decided to roam about a bit and take the longer route. It is not always that she gets to roam about, and no one would know about it. After all she wouldn’t tell her mamma about that. The road was almost deserted. It was usually the case around the noon time in this part of the country. She walked ahead leisurely, singing and dancing all along as if she owned the road. But this was short lived. In couple of minutes, the scene changed....
7 comments
Read more

The Forest

The Toyota Qualis and the Chvrolet Tavera stopped after a long journey. It was almost 9 in the night and it was pitch-dark. Night times in a forest are always pitch-dark. Adding to that it was a good `thirteen days since the last full moon day. Adding to this, the cloudy weather made visibility close to zero. Later in the night the forest would be engulfed in a fog making it nearly impossible to see. The only noise audible was that of silence, few random insects and that of a train going at a distance. After a long journey they all were quite weary and all they wanted was some rest so that the next day morning they can head for tiger and rhino spotting among many other species of flora and fauna in the wildlife sanctuary. Right now it was time for some parathas, maggi and booze. All fifteen of them headed for the cottage which they had booked, sat near the fire place relishing food, chit chatting about college life, universe and everything. But chit chatting wasn’t what they came ...
10 comments
Read more

Cycle

After a failed attempt at jogging, I roamed about aimlessly when an idea struck me to have a ride in a cycle, couple of which is lying in the “recreational area”. I was longing since long to ride a cycle sans motor. There was no particular reason for this feeling; it was that just I wanted to have a ride. The 2-3 km ride was a tiring experience, especially for one who is having this after a long time; but I was gleeing all along. As an infant, I loved going about in a tricycle. Then I became too big for it and got a cycle. After several attempts and many falls, I mastered the art. I used to flaunt it in front of my friends, who flaunted theirs. As I entered teens, the bicycle seemed smaller; so I got a bigger cycle. As years progressed, I learnt to ride a 2 wheeler. Now I started to find the bicycle too childish for my tastes. I tried to reason out why I should get a 2-wheeler to go to a particular place. Sometimes I succeeded to get it, and sometimes I didn’t and had to go around in...
5 comments
Read more

K-eediyot box

(Disclaimer - Please do not think that I don't know spellings ... my numerologist told to use the above spelling for eediyot and add a k before it, this will help generate more TRP and comments for the blog) Time 7 : 30 - 8 PM, 8 - 8 : 30 PM .... 10 : 30 - 11 PM Venue - Zee TV, Star Plus, Sony entertainment etc. etc. Figure this - A family drawing room belonging to an extremely rich business house occupied with a mixture of emotional and scheming characters - 1 saas, 2 bahus, 1 son (+1 who makes an entry unaware of what is happening), 2 random distant relatives, 3 random cousins, all mouthing dialogues that have earlier been said by actors ranging from Nirupa Roy to Rajesh Khanna, followed by a long silence, 13 camera angles for same scene (top view, side view, cross sectional view, lateral view, 45 degree elevation view) , flashbacks and memories that last few episodes, good people becoming evil, evil people actually being un-evil, rebirths, amnesia, a background score that often ...
11 comments
Read more