Reality Check Route

In which I share three poignant observations that strike me on my daily morning trip to the gym.*

Every morning after I’ve dropped off the children to school I make my way to the gym across Phase Four and Two. The route my driver takes ensures that every day we pass  through the same backroads of Defence. The familiarity is hypnotic. The grey boxy concrete structures do little to stimulate the senses. Occasionally new configurations of craters and cracks appear in the roads, but mostly we drive through these streets on autopilot. And occasionally the silence is punctuated by a sharp intake of breath as a car pulls out before us from a side-road, the hapless driver giving nary a glance around him or her. My driver has long since wisely learned to quell his fight or flight reflexes and maintains a dignified, if smoldering, silence.

Along the way to the gym and from there back on towards home there are three checkpoints  I  pass through. These are not military ‘checkpoints’ per se, though we are in Cantt (short for Cantonment - Raj nomenclature persists in the lingo), but have been designated thus by myself.  In case my inner state may be slightly off kilter, going through each one of them recalibrates my inner compass to 'Gratitude' in the north and 'Humility' in the south.

The first is the blind man who stands, come rain (and when is that?) or shine, along X street. Clad in shalvar qameez, his longish hair kept in place by a cap, he stands there for hours with one hand outstretched, the other leaning on a cane for support. I’ve never seen him arrive or leave. He’s just there. Every day. Under the baking sun, near the corner of his street and Sunset Boulevard. His blank expression seems dignified, maybe even aloof. Unlike other beggars working the traffic junctions in the Defence/Clifton area, he’s not being led around by a scrappy child, thrusting unseeing eyes into your car window. No: he just stands there and waits for whatever comes his way – not ever knowing whether it may be a car careening towards him out of the control of  some spotty underage driver (of whom there are shamefully far too many in our city), or if someone is giving him coins or notes.

His otherwordly demeanour is a daily salutary reminder of the most obvious fact in my life: there but for the grace of God go I.

The second checkpoint is a short strip which I’ve come to call the Conference of the Babas. Again, every day between three to eight bearded Babas with topis on their head gather along a street corner, united by the fact that they are all either paralyzed from the waist down or limbless. Each one sits perched in his own wooden cart, leading me to wonder whether there’s a hierarchy of models and add-ons to this range of vehicles.

What fascinates me is how does each individual earn their portion of the sadaqah distributed by the passersby. It’s a conundrum: do they band together in musketeer fashion and share out whatever is given equally? Or do they take turns to pocket the baksheesh? Do passers-by familiar with this group take this into account and make sure to give each and everyone of these hapless mendicants a portion?

Each Baba seems to pitch up without any guarantees of how much he’ll earn on a day. But pitch up they do. They banter. They smile and laugh. As they sit there they commune in a brotherhood that gives them hope and purpose in life. They've even planted chillis and corn behind them, homesteading this corner in a symbolic way.

The last checkpoint is the rows of itinerant workers – karigars – that line Gizri, that attenuated medieval version of ‘Homebase’. They line up along this strip of hardware stores like ribbons of dusty brown crows. Hunched up before colour charts with small piles of tools neatly stacked up beside them, they are doing what every humble creature does: testing providence. The hadith (sahih or da'if its the meaning that counts, not the soundness of provenance) comes to mind ‘Does a sparrow know from where it gets its sustenance of a day? And yet every morning it wakes and flies off in search of it.’ And finds it of course. 

Slightly less active than sparrows, these skilled and unskilled menfolk hunker down hoping for a day’s work that will give them honest bread. Sometimes I want to be able to tell all of them, ‘Come! I’ll give you work!’ But alas: neither am I in the construction industry, nor fortunate to be building my own home, nor so unfortunate that the home I live in requires massive daily maintenance (though I have invited the plumber to move in with us as we seem to need him on an almost daily basis!).  They sit there day in day out with trust and good expectation.

The Gizri flyover now obscures the row of hardware shops and the day labourers lining the street.

All three checkpoints remind me of what Allah says: ‘I am with my slave’s good opinion of me’. This was my grandmother’s mantra – may Allah rest her soul in peace. She took stock from this hadith qudsi and overcame disappointment, fear and anxiety through it. Like her too this teaching is one of my own pillars of faith. Have the best expectation of Allah – not of creation, but of the Creator. The Creator’s agenda may differ from yours, so best delegate even the expectations to that power that knows what is ultimately best for us.

Daily I am humbled at these checkpoints. Daily my heart is prevented from becoming blasé and cynical. Daily these reminders invoke in me profound gratitude that is purified of any complacency or smugness. And daily I say prayers that these folks may find the sustenance they need. While the gymming gives my body the workout it needs, this reality check route is a daily tonic to my ego-self’s outlook. And I always return home in a cloud of humble reverence.

*This was written in about 2008/9. Of the people I mention here,  only the blind beggar has moved. My kids have since moved onto other schools and I no longer gym at the same place. Any foray into those areas still invokes the same effect, however.