He rolled the last one. That would be it for the day. He hated working late before a holiday. He would miss the early hours of the morning when the air was fresh. He looked at his hands. Black. As always. He lifted his fists to his face. The thick smell crawled into his nostrils. Months back, when he still held on to the hope his anna had promised him, he would have found it repulsive. Now, it was just another affront to his senses. Like the black all around him. Like the coarse powder that lined everything about him. Like the laughter of the younger children outside that hadn't entered his world yet. They would eventually. They, too, would be conditioned to ignore all of this. That's how it always went. Anna had spoken of a way out. But he wasn't around. Not after the fire at the other godown last year. Anna had spoken of going to Madras. There was always a job in a big city. And you didn't even have to get your hands covered in the powder. You could make tea. Or sell something on the streets. A decent living. Anything seemed possible when anna said so. All those dreams went with anna and the fire last year.
He got up and walked towards the exit. The coolies were lazing outside. One of them held a beedi in his hand. Anna used to smoke too. Nobody could tell anna what to do; He was older than all of them. He knew much more about the world. If anna smoked a beedi, it was because that was what all men did. He kept begging him to stop. Not that his words were heard. Anna did as he liked. It was the privilege of being born a year earlier. A year earlier. He was as old now as anna was on the day of the fire. Time seemed to mean so little now. Day after, the work would resume. There was always an order, especially for the large thousand-walas. Even after the festival, it would be no different. He thought of what could have been if that fire hadn't started. If only anna had listened to him and stopped smoking.
Thank you for reading. That was my first attempt at writing some serious material. I hope I didn't disappoint. I don't really know why I wrote it. Some conversations I had been having recently laid the seeds for it. I just hope you like it.
Happy Deepavali.
7 comments:
ok . :)
...?
umm... is this post about child labor or is it a msg to stop smoking? especially at a fireworks industry? :|
Does it matter? :)
The metaphysics behind this simple story is truly unimagaginable. The Anna character which the protagonist projects, serves as a mere reflection of his need for a father figure in life, suggesting he was abandoned and/or abused. I love the way you parallelized the young protagonist's life with smoking a beedi in a cracker factory : Harmful, yet necessary to satisfy unexplained urges. A tightrope walk between a slow death and a fast one.
An interesting point again is the concept of the age difference. The author has managed to slip in a little pun which only intellectuals can grab. One rupee used to be 16 annas. Taking a direct proportion, the metaphysical character "anna" could be 16 years old. So the protagonist is only 15 years old.
Finally the fire in the factory could be allegorical to the burning of the phoenix. The walls the protagonist built shielded him for 15 years. Finally, he chose to burn these walls down, the hopes of going to Madras, to pursue the one thing he was good at : cracker-making.
*scratches head*
I'm with you on that one... 0__0
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Don't be mean ^_^;