It’s a wet overcast day, a perfect monsoon day in Mumbai. I’m sitting in a taxi heading for home, my fogged window revealing more than it hides of the city.
Somewhere on the expressway, that euphemism for a crowded highway of stray dogs, cattle, cycles, rickshaws, buses, lorries, and container trucks moving between the airport and the city, I notice a strange scene. An elderly man is pulling a cart. An elderly woman, possibly his wife, and a young girl sit at the back, thin, emaciated, forlorn, holding each other. The old man pulls stoically, indifferent to the traffic parting and closing around him. It is a strange sight for Mumbai, where hand-drawn rickshaws are illegal.Sufficiently curious, I stop the car.
Why are you pulling the rickshaw?
Because it’s all I can afford, he says. And I want to make a statement.
I learn, in the next few sentences, where he is going. The child is unwell, shivering under the thin awning at the back of the cart, and the hospital is still some distance off. I offer to drop them and wait for him there. He is reluctant at first, a pride in the reluctance that I recognise without yet understanding, but he sees how much the girl is shivering, and he agrees.
At the hospital I stay with them as they fill forms and describe symptoms three times over, the way hospitals always seem to require. As they are completing the formalities, the old man arrives on foot. I ask him where he has parked his rickshaw. With a smile, the first lightness I have seen in him, he tells me he left it near the gate. The one benefit, he says, of a hand-drawn cart.
We wait for the doctor together. For a while neither of us says much, he asks after the taxi, whether the meter runs even when I’ve stopped for someone like him. I ask nothing yet. I am still turning over his line from the expressway, the statement he said he wanted to make, and I find I would rather wait for it than pull it out of him.
It is he who returns to it first. You are still wondering, he says, not quite a question. Then he tells me.
He worked in a bank till he retired, he tells me. Rose, over thirty-eight years, to assistant manager at a branch. His wife never worked a day in her life. His son was an indifferent student who managed to graduate with a second-class degree, and through a client of the bank, the old man got him a job.
A few years passed. The son married. They had a daughter. At that stage, he says, life had reached a happy plateau.
Then the meltdown of 2008 coincided with his retirement. His son lost his job and moved back in with his parents. The old man tried hard to find work, for himself, for his son, and had no luck at either. Months passed like that, he tells me, each one thinner than the last, until something in him simply gave way the way a held breath finally lets go.
Out of that despondency, whilst watching an old re-run of a Bengali movie about a rickshaw puller and his nefarious climb to recognition, that the old man decided that pulling himself and his family through the city on a hand-rickshaw would make himself impossible to ignore.
His wife had wept, he told me, actual tears of shame, not sorrow, when he first spoke of it. His son had been blunter still, accused him of losing his mind, of turning a private humiliation into a public one, dragging the family name through traffic for strangers to gawk at.
A trolley rattled past us down the corridor, its wheel catching on something, and he waited for the sound to pass before he went on.
Think what the neighbours will say, they told him. Think what your friends at the bank retirees’ association will think of you, a man they once addressed as sir. And imagine, his son had said, voice cracking somewhere between fear and fury, if someone picks up the story, a photograph, a video, a line in some newspaper’s local page, and it follows this family forever, follows his daughter to her own wedding one day, a grandfather who pulled a cart like a beast of burden because he could not accept his own retirement gracefully.
He had listened to all of it, he said, without raising his voice, the same evenness he used now with me. Then he had asked them only one question. Where were there, he said, when it mattered, when I searched for work in every direction and found none, when the account closed itself and no one came to reopen it? You are ashamed now, of a cart. Where was your shame then, when a man who fed this family for forty years sat in an empty room with nothing to do and no one asked what that silence was doing to him?
His story left me bewildered; not at the scale of his response, but at how much rage and precision could sit quietly inside a man who, minutes earlier, had smiled about where he’d parked.
He was quiet for a while after that, as if surprised at himself for having said it aloud to a stranger in a hospital corridor. Then he continued, more evenly now, the way he must once have explained an overdraft to a customer across a desk.
You know what they do to a man at sixty, he said. Thirty-eight years I opened the shutter at nine, counted the till, balanced the ledger to the paisa. Every morning six o’clock, out of bed, ironed shirt, seven-thirty bus. Every evening seven-thirty, home. Thirty-eight years of that clock, and one day they simply stop it : your account is closed. Not because I had grown foolish. Not because my hand did not add correctly anymore. Because a calendar told them to.
Outside the corridor window, the rain had picked up, striking the glass in short hard bursts, and for a moment he watched it rather than me.
He held up his hands, turned them over, showed me the palms — new calluses sitting on top of old, softer ones.
You tell me : where does thirty-eight years of experience go? Into a cupboard? A man’s hands do not forget how to work merely because the world has decided his working is finished.
He looked past me, toward the ward doors.
So I thought : if they want to retire me, let me show them what retired looks like. Let me pull something with these hands that everyone can see. Let me go backwards through their forward city, on a cart that was old before independence, and let them ask themselves the question I could not stop asking : who decided I was finished?
He was not finished, either, with me. The evenness cracked again, and this time there were no tears left to hide it, only the bare voice underneath.
I do not want your pity, he said, looking at me directly for the first time since we had sat down. I did not stop this cart to be pitied by a stranger in a taxi. I want what I earned. Thirty-eight years, not a gift, not a favour, earned, and still I must prove myself worthy of a seat at a table I built with my own hands. Is that dignity, or is that a hand-out dressed up in kinder words?
He wiped his face with the back of his wrist, the gesture rough, almost angry at himself for needing it.
And you know what frightens me more than my own account being closed? My son. He is thirty-four. He should be at his peak, not sleeping in his boyhood room.
He looked down at his hands again.
Somebody has to make a noise loud enough. Even a foolish noise, an old man dragging a cart through a highway built to go seventy kilometres an hour. If shouting will not do it, perhaps shame will.
The ward door opened. A nurse called the child’s name, and something in him changed instantly and completely, the fury folding itself away, the father-in-law, the grandfather, stepping forward instead, asking only what the doctor had said, how high the fever was, whether she needed to be admitted.
The doctor kept her overnight, a viral fever, nothing more, but the child was dehydrated and needed a drip till morning. The old man thanked me twice, formally, the way a bank officer thanks a client, and would not accept anything beyond that. I left him on a plastic chair in the corridor, his wife’s head resting against his shoulder, both of them finally still.
Outside, the rain had not stopped. I found the cart exactly where he said he’d left it, near the gate, its wooden shafts resting on the ground like something laid down mid-sentence. No one had touched it.
In a city that steals unwatched bicycles in minutes, this particular kind of cart drew nothing but glances, too old, too strange, too much like a question no one wanted to be asked.
I got back into the taxi. The window had fogged over completely in the time I’d been gone. I did not wipe it clear. I let the city stay exactly as illegible as it had been when I first passed through it, except now I knew what the fog was capable of holding : a ledger closed thirty-eight years too early, a son sleeping in his boyhood room, a girl with a fever who would grow up in a flat too small for the people who loved her, and one man’s decision to go backwards through a city built only to go forward, because it was the only form of speech left to him that could not be filed, dated, or retired.