The wallet owner warns that “there is nothing in my batua, except two thousand rupees.” It does however contains a sheaf of visiting cards. “Oh these… they are of shopkeepers for whom I routinely work.” He is usually hired by the market’s grain merchants.
Take out the content of your wallet, lay it on the table, and in a single sweep of the eye you may get the texture of your daily life.
Then there’s a folded paper scrawled with a phone number. The gentleman fails to remember whose number it is “but I have no use of it… I lost my mobile phone some months ago.”
Such is the case, at least, with Piramal. In his sixties, the cart puller hauls merchandise in Gurugram’s Sadar Bazar. Taking out his wallet from the kurta’s breast pocket, he recalls getting it about five years ago. The wallet’s fabric resembles leather. It has discoloured to a shade of rust, and patches of it have blackened. “It was red when I bought it.”
The wallet owner warns that “there is nothing in my batua, except two thousand rupees.” It does however contains a sheaf of visiting cards. “Oh these… they are of shopkeepers for whom I routinely work.” He is usually hired by the market’s grain merchants. “The bazar have a few shops selling steel trunks, and their owners also call me for delivery.”
Then there’s a folded paper scrawled with a phone number.
The gentleman fails to remember whose number it is “but I have no use of it… I lost my mobile phone some months ago.” He says he feels no need to call his family in the village. “What can you talk… if there is something really important to talk about, I go home.” His village is in neighbouring Mewat.
Finally, he digs out two more visiting cards kept inside a secretive space in the wallet. These are the contacts of the local correspondents of two newspapers. “Very important people... they gave me this (cards) to contact them if there is any ghatna (event) to share.” He has never called them.
The wallet doesn’t have any picture of a wife or child.
The elderly labourer says, “Those people cannot be in my batua. They are in my ghar (home).” While he has been working in the Millennium City for forty years, he doesn’t consider the city his home.
“My family doesn’t live here, I wasn’t born here, this place just gives me money,” he says nonchalantly.
After a brief interlude of silence, he goes back to talking about the phone number saved in the wallet. “Maybe it is my number… but I no longer have the phone.” He looks amused by the irony. Slapping the wallet, he observes, responding to a query, “No, no, one can live without a mobile… one cannot live without a wallet.”
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