Words From Vaish

BULLSTRUCK Travelling in a crowded DTC bus, I happened to notice a slogan painted on the curve where the roof meets the side. “Untouchability is a crime against Man and God” it read. Whoever had put up that slogan needn’t have worried; I couldn’t have practiced untouchability even if I’d wanted to. An angular bony gentleman was “touching” my midriff with his elbow and a rather corpulent lady was “touching” my left big toe with sole of her Kohlapuri chappal . Though national solidarity is a desirable goal, I wished I wasn’t so “touchable” or in such intimate physical contact with my fellow citizens. I was luckier than most, having acquired standing room inside the bus, many of my fellow commuters were doing a Spiderman imitation in the doorways. The aforementioned gaunt gent livened up the journey and not just with his funny bone applied strategically against my solar plexus. He was dressed in an Edwardian toff’s outfit from the waist up and below that a diaphanous dho...

A Winter Vignette T he park was a patch of lawn fenced in by black iron railings and a privet hedge. It was a green oasis sandwiched between three rows of mews houses in a quiet housing estate. The people who lived there were mostly childless, so few kids at play  disturbed the neat rows of chrysanthemums, carnations and hollyhocks. Every morning, the girl in the window used to crank up her recliner bed. She would get into the wheelchair parked by her bedside and wheel herself to the big bay window at the end of her bedroom. The park below was as desolate as a cemetery in the pale fog of a cold December morning. At 7 o’clock sharp, the man from the Central Reserve Police Force wheeled his battered old bicycle down the gravel path from the main gate. On this morning, like so many others, he propped his locked bike against a tree and went into the gardener’s shed. The policeman came out a few minutes later, wearing a tracksuit with the letters CRPF stenciled o...