Just another day. I leave office and wait for an auto to ferry me home.  A cheque I had deposited on Monday, should have been credited by now, I think to myself.  It surely would help. I am listening to music. A ritual to lose my mind that sometimes can’t focus on life or work, into something that demands nothing. An auto stops and it is when I settle down with my bag, phone and earphones that I notice..a little child tucked away at the back of the seat in a little hollow. She is playacting with a plastic box..pretending it is a phone and eyeing mine with a beautiful, open smile.

***

I ask the driver who she is and it begins. The story am not..was not prepared to listen to. I take off my ear phones. This is his daughter. She is not at home because there is no one there. His wife is at the hospital with their second daughter, a little baby girl who is sick and needs surgery. ” Gareeb aadmi ko hi maar padti hai sabse jyada,” he says and in the little space between his pain and helplessness, he notices another driver, struggling to drive  his auto that has run out of petrol. He slows down, puts one foot on the back of the auto to  push it  to a nearby petrol station.
***
He then tells me just how much money he needs. It is not much. Just about the same amount I spend on a high-end restaurant meal  in a particularly lucrative month. He tells me that he is coming from his brother’s house where he had gone to beg for some money but was turned down. He has been running all over the city, seeking help in this rented auto. I am his first passenger today. Tears stream down his face. He wipes them with his sleeves and keeps driving. The story has not ended. The wife is polio stricken. His mother had given her word to a friend that he would marry her daughter and so  he did. But they are happy together and he says, ” I could not have asked for a better wife..she never complains about what we don’t have.”
***
The daughters have come to the couple after a wait of nine years and it obviously did not occur to them that they are not sons in a country less than crazy about daughters. It is the possibility of losing one of them that is making him cry. The auto has seen better days and he tells me that the newer ones do better business..the green ones. They have better mileage, they are less bumpy and he wishes he could have one of his own. But he jangles his pocket to show me what he really has. A few coins and his daughter is hungry and he has not been able to feed her the whole day. The little girl is giggling at me, smiling into the camera as I click her picture. Unaware of the tragedy that just might be unfolding in her parents’ life. “This will be the first ever picture clicked of her, ” he slows down to see the image and smiles.

I wonder if the money I have been waiting for has come in my account. I make him stop the auto near an ATM and check. The money hasn’t arrived yet and I can’t help him. So I ask him to meet me outside my apartment gate in the morning. I will check my account again and if the money has not yet come, I will borrow some and give him. He looks calm and dignified and asks me, “But how will I pay you back?”
***
I tell him he will when he is ready. “Maybe, I can give you some every week, ” he says. He takes my number and poses with his child when I ask him to. His smile lights up his face. I am not a cynic but a little question nibbles my mind after father and daughter are gone. What, if he is lying? But what if he is not? If he is, I will have to postpone my favourite restaurant meal by a month. And maybe he will spend the money on something he needs  more than me. And if he is telling the truth, maybe his baby daughter will come home to him, safe and sound after proper medical attention.
***
I come home feeling a bit ashamed. At just how little I know of the world I live in. And how the money I spend on non-essentials without thinking could mean the difference between life and death for someone else.
***
Same world. But with so many detached worlds swimming in it. Me with my earphones trying to drown real voices. He with a story he desperately wants someone to hear.
***