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-----Original Message-----
From: Dilip D'Souza -- Sarai <dilip.sarai at gmail.com>
To: reader-list at sarai.net
Sent: Sat, 25 Feb 2006 15:25:31 +0530
Subject: [Reader-list] Dilip D'Souza, 2nd post


I'm a few days late with this. I don't feel I have truly got into my
project yet -- I find I always take a little longer than I anticipate
to get into the flow of these things. Nevertheless, this is a short
piece about a man from the fishing village nearby. I've always found
him interesting because he used to be one of the few people there who
don't fish for a living. (There are more now).

I hope to have more about him as I move ahead with this. This much, for now.

cheers,
dilip.

---

Twice a Day Paper Route
-----------------------
Dilip D'Souza


The thing that strikes me is the mention of 60 kg. 60 kg, carried to
Dadar. 60 kg, carried to Dadar on a bicycle. 60 kg, carried to Dadar
on a bicycle twice a day, for some 20 years.

I noticed Ramdas's strong and sinewy wrists when he first started
coming to our home, especially when he would easily lift big bundles
of papers hung from his spring balance to show me how much they
weighed. We called him "paperwala" -- so much that I am ashamed to
admit that's what I thought his name was -- because he would take away
our old newspapers once a month. But it wasn't until he retired
recently, and I sat him down for a chat about his life, that I really
comprehended the physical magnitude of his work. That I really
understood what gave him those sinewy wrists.

The mathematics is simple. He had about 250 clients like me, he says.
I would give him about 15 kg of paper every month. If I was typical,
that meant he handled about 3800 kg of paper every month. Divide by
30, that's about 125 kg every day. Indeed: two trips to Dadar a day,
60 kg each time. And you cart that kind of load around -- not just to
Dadar twice a day, but from the 250 homes to yours -- and you do it
over two decades, you develop some serious muscles.

>From Chimbai, the small Bandra fishing village where Ramdas lives, to
Dadar is easily 5-6 km. That Ramdas biked that distance and back,
twice a day with large loads, impressed me greatly. But listening to
him, I was more struck by the other, the smaller, details of his life.

Chimbai is known as an old fishing village. By now, it is just another
part of Bandra, if a more crowded and downscale part of this upscale
suburb. But even so, you'll find women every day, sitting on either
side of the lane through Chimbai, calling out from behind little
makeshift tables piled high with fresh, dripping, aromatic fish.

The tables make the lane even narrower than it already is. Walking
down the lane is difficult, let alone driving along it. When I do
either, I invariably remember the time a few years ago when a kid was
run over on one of Bandra's main roads during rush hour. This led to
an impromptu and angry "rasta-roko" there. The traffic police had the
presence of mind to quickly divert traffic through Bandra's leafy
lanes. One was the lane through Chimbai. I remember watching bus after
BEST bus emerge from the lane, drivers sweaty and exasperated with the
effort of maneuvring their giant red beasts past the fish vendors.

The women, of course, were unfazed. Some even tried selling fish to
the passengers in the slow-moving buses.

That kind of place, Chimbai. Fishermen, houses nearly on top of each other.

And somewhere in there, a dealer in waste paper.

Ramdas's family left Porbandar, Gujarat, in 1941. His father settled
in Chimbai, where Ramdas himself was born in September 1947.
Midnight's child? Ramdas seems hardly to think of it that way. To hear
him speak, Independence was just a little blip of history. But Chimbai
was Bombay, the big city, teeming even then with opportunity that
Porbandar could not match. Of course, there was very little in Chimbai
at the time, certainly not the narrow lane. But Ramdas's family
settled in a one-room tenement on the ground floor of a two-storey
chawl, owned by a Kolhapur-based landlord. They have been there since,
now paying a rent of Rs 63 a month.

Expectedly, Ramdas is nostalgic about the early days. "There was
nothing here," he says again. The only people in Chimbai were the Koli
fishermen, and for those who catalogue these things, they were of two
kinds. The Christian Kolis lived at the southern end of the village,
the Hindus at the northern end. Ramdas's home was bang in between the
two communities. It remains that way today: turn left (south) out of
his home and about the first establishment you come across is a
Catholic undertaker. Turn right and there's a small Hindu shrine. The
languages you hear are different, the general "feel" of the two areas
are different; all this, along one short street.

Ramdas speaks glowingly about both kinds of neighbours. "Very good
people," he says, "very good people." And as if to drive home that
point, he says nobody has ever come to ask for money when the Ganesh
festival rolls around. "In other parts of Bombay," he says, "Shiv Sena
people come and extort money for Ganesh. Not here."

Ramdas's first job was in Mahim in the early '60s, from where he moved
on to Marine Lines. He sold purses. He earned Rs 25 a month and his
railway pass cost him all of Rs 3.75. As always, numbers like those
leave me astonished. Passes are about 20 times as expensive as that
today: has the price index gone up to that extent?

But starting in 1969, Ramdas was a rice smuggler like a lot of others
were at the time. He would travel beyond the city limits, to Vasai,
and bring back bags of rice. This was a worthwhile way of earning
because rice sold legitimately in Bombay attracted taxes. So a man who
was willing to bring it in on the quiet from outside could both
undercut the city retailers and make a small profit. Ramdas was such a
man. He would make five or six trips a day, bringing in 10 kg of rice
each time. After deducting his weekly bribe of Rs 20 or 25, he made
two rupees on each kg. Not a bad salary increment. It must have also
been good preparation physically for the work he would turn to next,
when the rice route became unprofitable.

Waste paper, that is.

And it is via his paper business, 120 kg a day, that Ramdas put his
two sons through English-medium schools and colleges. Do they work
with you now, I ask. He gives me a withering look that I've never seen
on him before. He doesn't have to say what I know he means: would he
have worked this hard just to put them to the waste paper grindstone
too? What he does say is, with a hint of acerbity: "No, both are
educated!"

That they are. One works in a cargo shipping firm, the other in an
online stock-trading firm.

And now that they are both educated, Ramdas has retired. Did you get
tired of the work, I ask. "No, no, it's not that. There was no place
in the house for us! We only have one 10 by 10 room. Papers piled to
the ceiling, no brightness in the room, I was working every day till 2
am. Eating at 130 in the morning!" So he stopped, late last year.

"I'm happy," he says, "but I've become lazy."

He laughs. But I get the sense the laugh hasn't reached his eyes.
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