I pick up an antique compass labelled “Marion Ross” on
Colaba Causeway. The innards of the city have a lot of history on offer that
you can own if you’re willing to shell out the Rs. 750 he’s asking you to. I
won’t buy, not the old compass, commissioned to mark yet another boat-ride of old, white colonial men from the continent, nor the pocket watch which has a ferocious
eagle on either side. It tells the right time madam, he says, battery operated.
Take it, he says, I’ll give you a good price.
Desperate to make his first bargain for the day, the young relic
seller sells me his story. These antiques came all the way from Jharkhand
madam. They are very old, British-zamaana. Why from Jharkhand, I ask. The
British ruled there too, he says incredulously. He wouldn't be doing this, my
young friend, if he had found a job in the city. An interior designer graduate,
he came from Jharkhand, looking in a place where there is so much lose. Why
Mumbai, I ask, everything costs so much! That’s why madam, that’s why I came.
Now won’t you buy something? Won’t you buy today? I must earn madam, I must
earn till I find a job.
I didn't have the heart to tell him I wasn't going to buy.
But that his story had more currency than what he sold. He could peddle that
story for so much more, he could create the legend of the interior design grad
who runs a humble antiques shack. That he was so quintessentially India in that
moment that it was both heartbreaking and beautiful.
I should’ve asked his name. But he had lost interest in me
already. He was trying on a fake watch a fellow-seller had brought in his
kitty. This is how my life is now, this is how it is, he said to no one in
general. The world kept walking by.
