Narayanan Hariharasastry
Every day, a little before daybreak, I would amble towards the front door of my house and pick up the newspaper flung slick on the doormat by the paperboy. Sitting on a sofa and sipping a tumbler of hot coffee, I would hardly have taken a cursory glance at the topical events when a series of street cries of hawkers and peddlers would draw my attention.
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The first of all of them would be the milk vendor who would call me from outside the gate to pick up the bag hanging from the grills of the gate and containing three packets, (one and a half litres) of milk, a quantity quite meeting the case for me and my missus.
As I started leafing through the pages, the next one to perturb me from concentrating on the news events would be the vegetable vendor whose familiar shouts of the variety of vegetables on his barrow, would draw a crowd of housewives from the houses around.
He would not stir from the spot until the last of his customers finished her purchase. The next visitor, a comparatively frequent one than others would be a man – with his mode of conveyance graduated to moped from bicycle, – his contraption fixed tight on the backseat of his vehicle parked at a prominent road cross.
His very presence itself would draw a number of residents from the vicinity with their culinary cutting tools such as knifes, vegetable cutters, coconut graters and what not and get them honed, all at nominal charges.
Wont to catnapping every day after my lunch, I would take a lie-down on a sofa in the main hall when a hawker making his rounds on a moped proclaimed his merchandise as ‘aeiou’ that would sound as if he were reminding us of the five vowels in English.
His cry sounded as nothing other than that, my five-year- endeavours to understand it notwithstanding. His face could scarcely be seen with the stack of readymade garments kept tied before him on the floor of the vehicle almost obscuring the lower half of his face.
Compelled by vicissitudes in our family, I had to shift to a flat in an apartment within the neck of the woods where – my missus and I, the only occupants of the house – could neither see nor hear the street cries of hawkers and peddlers since there were vegetable shops, salons and all that jazz substituting them and accessible to dwellers by lift or staircase. The absolute absence of hawkers, the trend of our neighbours remaining mewed up to the four walls of their flats most of the time without mingling with us kept us tied down no end.
If at all we chanced upon our neighbours, it was in the lift or the shops on the ground floor, and that too for only a brief time. They would even after years of their stay in the neighbouring flats be unaware of the identities of others in the apartments as they lamentably lack the trend of hobnobbing with the occupants of the other flats in the same condominium.
The essential vitamins, obtained from sunlight are well nigh denied to residents of flats unlike that enjoyed by those living in independent houses.
