Known yet unknown tale of 2 cities

Nope not being that bigot who prefaces his jibes against the chosen other with I have MuslimDalitBlack friends Still pretty sure unlike you I have hung out at least for an evening as an equal with a homeless man for reasons that arent zoolevel poverty tourismHis name being Ajay At the time we met hed been sleeping for 13 years with 3000 others on sandbeds by the sea off Mumbais relatively posh Mahim Causeway Equally aware of not coming across as romanticising poverty the fact is that I found young Ajay to be one of the happiest people I knewHis simple formula involved waking up in the morning standing on a designated pavement where a truck would pick up dailywagers from and drop them off to various locations that required people for oddjobs mdash mostly to do with billboardshoardings in Ajays case Late evenings hed spend drinking away before a decent dinner mdash both of which hed bought from exhausting the earnings of the dayDuring the wedding season when he could double his daily income in waistcoat and bowtie standing behind food counters hed take the following day off from work mdash since the booze plus food was already taken care ofNo it did not occur to me how saving nothing for the rainy day and it rains a lot in Bombay placed Ajay perennially on the jagged edge of emergency A gentle push and he would fall I was only awed by his deeply uncluttered carefree lifeAlso I didnt ask what according to him did he do for a living For in its deeper definition is how you can distinguish work from home WFH yeah mdash for someone who has neither By general parlance Ajay would identify himself as someone who has work mdash kaamkaaj as it wereWhat he doesnt have is a job or naukri meaning certainty of monthly income broadly That makes him a freelancer albeit at the bottom of the pyramid of the gig economy mdash a reality for hundreds of millions of workers in every sphere middleclass included with fewer and fewer labour rightsHierarchically homeless Ajay was way too many notches below someone in an upmarket slum and chawl But if you asked him where his ghar or home was he would have an answer mdash his gaon or native place so to say Bombay was his thikana or location The electricpole closest to his sandbed all of them have a unique number was his current as against official address mdash for correspondence with his cellphone serviceprovider for instanceThat said if Ajay could afford an upperclass lifestyle in the city that was still not his own hed be addressed as an expat For the fact that hes poor hes a migrant And if he was desperate enough to travel to a foreign land in the simple hope of competing for a better life for his family he ran the comical risk of being considered an illegal human being altogether Cosmically adjudged so by other humans whose existence in that area can only be explained by an accident of birth besides their own ancestors history of migration Whos not a migrantPainful as it must be surely there are multiple reasons for people to move from home starting with work of course But its dignity and hope I suspect that keeps them forever where they migrate to Cities are seen as repositories of hope even when life is even more demandingpunishing At least peers cant see it Theyll envy the big house youll build back home for them to gawk at eventually hopefullyAs for selfrespect arent there but chiefly two ways to overcome the zillathumiliation of class and more so caste of the feudal closeknit rural India One education Two the anonymity attained through urban cosmopolitanism The latter defines your worth wholly by the economic transactions you make mdash between landlordtenant shopkeepercustomer contractorlabourerhellip But this relationship unlike human bonds is too transient Youre simultaneously out of mind once youre out of sightIts not a surprise therefore that when an unprecedented nationwide lockdown was put in place to contain the spread of COVID19 the volcanic eruption one experienced of Delhi and Mumbais invisible migrants hitting the streets in hundreds of thousands seemed shockingunexpected to everyone watching it from their living rooms on TVWho were these people willing to walk back thousands of kilometres to where they called home Instead of being willingly pushed with sticks like snakes into holes while the other city they served was in for a staycationThey had no work failing which they were instantly of no use to anyone And theyd never had a human employer mdash only an AI bot paying them by the hour anyway The social distancing always strongly practised between the two cities mdash of the seth and the servant mdash ensured the puzzled betteroff only felt the workers must indeed be fed for free As if they were beggars Last checked Ajay had long moved out of Mumbai Glad Hes the only one in that entire mass that I wouldve even vaguely known anything aboutMayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture He tweets mayankw14 Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe 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