Heads or Tails ?

When I was a toddler, my parents, like yours, made me babble alphabets and numbers. It started off by connecting fruits and toys to mere sounds, followed by mugging up nursery rhymes about how glowing gas giants blink in the dark, or how an overly obese man fell off a wall (who in all possibility was drunk - how else can you imagine a man that heavy sitting atop a wall ?) and fractured his bones. Soon I became a copycat - mimicking songs on television adverts and dances on the celluloid - and even sooner, a walking exhibit of wonder for my relatives and neighbours.

When our maid's son was a toddler, he, unlike you and me, learnt to speak random, scattered words that he heard around. None in his family could sign their name, none could read, none could write. So he picked up clauses and half sentences here and there, a couple or two of nice ones though, and a whole lot of unspeakable slangs. Soon he too became a copycat, and followed his sibling into spraying leaded paints on cheap chairs and tables at the local furniture store every morning.

I, however, went to a school every morning, and the day I learnt that a correct answer and a teacher's correct answer might not always be the same, I grew up. I quickly graduated from half pants and tightened ties to trousers and tucked out shirts. In a wink, I passed out of secondary school, pushed my way through the higher secondary traffic and chalked out my plans for getting a monthly paycheck. Bingo !

On a few lucky mornings, our maid's son, on the other hand, went to an impoverished municipal school that taught him the basic skills to write a receipt, in case he decided not to remain unemployed. His father, a rickshaw puller, died all of a sudden from methanol toxicity. His mother, our maid, desperately tried to increase the number of houses at which she could do chores, but was thrashed by washing machines, dishwashers and vacuum cleaners. So he and his brother dropped out of schools and started spending more hours at the furniture shop. Inhaled more toxins. Got cancer. Both of them. They waited for long hours in serpentine queues at government hospitals. After months, he got operated on, got a pipe fixed to his intestine (while his brother was sent for chemo), loaned a small tea shop with the last penny left to earn a little more to buy his medicines, and survived. 

I lived.

I enjoyed. 

I partied hard. 

Because I always knew what I wanted when the coin was flipping in mid-air. 

He did not. 

Because, for one, he did not have the coin itself.

Post Script : Both the picture and the story are real, but do not talk of the same people. The story is rooted in Calcutta, while the picture was taken in Bangalore - the kid in the shot works as a daily labour in a potter's workshop and had left school by the third standard.

Everywhere, it's the same goddamn story.