The White Handkerchief

The bag on my shoulder was little heavier that day; it was the weight of those new books I had purchased while strolling up and down some street in Colaba. The train took a breather for few seconds at some station allowing women to crowd the already crowded ladies compartment.

I adjusted the bag to hear some raised voices. Enquiringly I looked in their direction. Women were pointing fingers towards a kid. Like a battlefield the space was divided in two halves. A boy, 8-9yrs of age was the lone commuter on one half of the compartment and the other half was inadequate for the women pointing fingers at him.

What was the paranoia about? I was wondering, a stinky street kid is no object of awe for the local train commuters. I looked harder as the panic voices couldn’t tell me anything. Now I could see the lanky kid wearing those oversized torn clothes that made him look sickly.

I realized then that the women were staring at a white handkerchief in the kid’s hand. Mumbai had few days ago witnessed a series of bomb blasts in local trains. But I was sure the all-famous Mumbaikar spirit would not surrender logic so easily to imagine explosives in a kerchief held by that fragile hand.

When my muddled mind was struggling to make sense of it all, the kid opened the white handkerchief & took it to his nose. A groomed, neatly dressed school kid using a kerchief to wipe his nose would have been a mundane sight. But seeing this urchin do the same was unusual and what followed was shocking. He took a deep breath in that handkerchief, his facial muscles flexed in excitement as he pulled the handkerchief away from his nose.

I was no stranger to the worldly horrors. There were too many newspapers in Mumbai gallantly breaking news of drug trafficking, murder, scams.. the list is never-ending. But to actually witness a kid so young demonstrate the horrendous reality was nightmarish.

Numb and frozen my thoughts were. Then suddenly a shrill piercing voice broke the trance. A lady had gathered guts to trespass into the kid’s half. Middle-aged and possibly a mother of 1-2, her motherly instinct wasn’t ready to give up on the kid. She was trying to stop the kid from smelling the white powder in that white handkerchief again. Empty eyed the kid stared at her. I wished I could snatch the kerchief and fling it out of the train but I was glued to the ground.

The train was slowing down to welcome some more women to witness the dread. As the women were struggling to get in… the kid dissolved in that crowd.