The missing Paperwaala

‘Don’t you think these papers have piled up too much? Please do something about it……….’ That was the desperate plea of a lady who wanted to try and get the clutter away and out of the house …….. but the response as it has been for the past three months was same…..steadfast…….’Let’s wait a while longer, he will come…….’. I shook my head and wondered for the umpteenth when if ever he was going to come…… Who is this ‘He’?  He happens to be our regular paperwalla who has been taking our old newspapers, books, cardboard boxes and the likes ……….. An old person who comes on his battered cycle (come to think of it, both look the same - old, battered…..)  with a ‘Papaaaaaaaaar’ cry in a peculiar way (no two cries are similar and each of these paperwalas have their signature call ….) to alert you that he is passing by. I cannot recollect the years that he has been coming to our house…….from the time that my elder daughter was two or three perhaps……now she is eighteen. A long time indeed. He usually used to ask my husband for odd jobs as well and used to clean up the grass and weeds around the house, do some repotting, plant a few trees around etc…….From my husband’s conversations with him, we knew that he was a Rajasthani, came to Bangalore long back, got married here and settled, had four kids or so. He had invited us for his daughter’s wedding as well, though we could not go as we were out of station at the time. A few years later, came the story of his daughter being admitted in a hospital with severe burns as a stove had burst………Was that the truth I wondered, you never know with things being the way it is in our country. He struggled but took care of her medical expenses …………. He was mostly in shabby clothes, uncombed hair and used to address my  husband as ‘yajamaan’ which I found funny…….He would park outside our gate and give a loud ‘Yajamaan…..’ to catch our attention. Almost all the residents of our street used to pass on the old papers and stuff to him only, you could say he had a monopoly on the area. Sometimes he used to pay us the money for the stuff taken, on his return route only in the evening ………… And then suddenly one day he stopped coming, perhaps posing questions in the minds of the people to whom he might have owed money, but of course the amounts would be too small.  Still the human mind works in a certain way only, mostly doubtful, ready to believe the worst. We know longer heard his ‘Papaaar’ cry on the roads…….days passed into weeks and then months…….we wondered what could have happened……..could he have passed away……..And my husband steadfastly kept saying ‘No no…..he will come, let’s see……’. After about three months or so, I was fed up with the pile and said, please do something about it. We don’t know his house, and cannot go in search of him. So finally we got rid of the piled up papers, which was a task in itself as it so happened that my husband called one or two other vendors passing by and caught them trying to cheat with the weights !!!!!! (That won’t do dears….integrity counts for a lot ………).  Ah…….so he put them in the car and went and dumped them at the shop. So the paper was dealt with and no longer was the pile around to remind us of the missing paperwaala……. But we continued to wonder. After about six months or so, one Sunday while I was busy working in the kitchen I heard the familiar (much awaited ) ‘Yajamaan’ call from downstairs. With a huge relief and a smile on my face, I ran to the balcony and saw our paperwaala standing down there with a walker in his hand ……..Both of us rushed down and asked him what had happened……..He said that one day while he was going round on his cycle, a car came from behind and mowed him down and he was seriously injured and had to be in hospital for months and underwent few operations as well, had rods put in the hip or so etc. We stood speechless wondering what to say and a thousand questions going through in our mind ……. ‘Who bore the expenses, How do you manage now if you don’t work?’ He said that he had been in a Govt. hospital, the guy who hit him also helped little, few others also helped……….Now he can’t ride the cycle again and took an auto to just come and inform us about his whereabouts. He actually owed some small amount of money to our tenants and wanted to inform them why he had disappeared. We said not to worry and told him he should come down when he can for any help he may need. Since then he has visited us couple of times, now he says he will probably take up work as a gardener in the nearby park. So the paperwaala turned into a ‘maali’ ………but the piled up old papers of my house remain always ………until I literally force them out. In olden days where (when) I grew up, we really had a personal touch and conversations going with the milkman, postman, paperwaala, sabjiwala, ishthriwala et al. I remember my mom used to make sweets for Diwali and would neatly make packs of the same, one each for all of these. I do not know if they still follow the same rituals now back home …… But in a city like Bangalore where people don’t have time for their own family, do we even notice these people who walk in and out of our house……..they are just a few people who are our also rans in the race of life..……I keep thinking about how the life of a paperwaala turned out much to be like the old newspapers that he used to collect from our houses ………..old, torn, useless, unwanted, probably hopefully recycled into a new and better life …………