Resident Hag: Connaught Place

An uneven paved lane connects the Statesman House to the KG Marg, just one block shy of the American Centre. It teems with office executives and peddlers of wares even on weekends. The narrow lane snakes through office blocks, it's perimeter choked with crazily parked cars and scooters. Stalls selling second-hand clothes and vendors displaying cheap baubles line the way.

Right where it draws to an end, is a cluster of fruit sellers, aluminium lemonade stalls on wheels and toadstool fashioned seats on which menial clerks take a lunch break and munch on pakoras. This corner of the lane has the sweet and sad smell of decadence. Rotting strawberries and grape fruit, jet black jamuns and the immensly suckable varieties of bright yellow mangoes contribute to the unusual flavour in the air. It's as if this corner,with it's mustachioed fruit sellers in long Kurtas, a clutch of peddling Afghans and a splattering of omnipresent barbers and shoe-shiners is clawing at time in fear of being left behind.

Transactions are speedy, even hasty. The stampeding office executives are always in a hurry, and so are the vendors.

An old woman sits in a desolate indentation, wedged between a vendor of lemonade and a seller of soft drinks. She sells lemons on a stained kercheif which is spread out on the damp ground. She sits with her knees drawn up. Her chin, which sprouts a fine beard which hags often do sprout; rests on her knees. The tobacco stained fingers work feverishly on the prayer beads.

She often relapses into mumbling sessions; debates with the inner soul. Sometimes she admonishes herself, at other times she laughs a silent toothless laugh. She cocks her heads at these times, listening to the echos.

She is the platform 91/2 from Harry Potter; there, but invisible. Existent, but non-interfering.

Her ware is misreable. In the heart of Delhi, where each second churns millions, the old and bent hag sits with six lemons. The lemons stare at her impudently, from 9am till sunset. A wrinkled pet bottle half-full lies besides her.

It's 8pm, hordes rush out of the office, lemmings out from one hole to another.

The old hag stretches her legs in the dappled shadows of the corner. Four lemons remain. She gathers them like if they were gold guldens, tying a knot in the muddied kercheif. A tubercular cough escapes the battered lungs.

She is on her way back. She walks at a slow place alongside congested traffic in sweet smelling petrol fumes. Her bare feet grip the warm asphalt. Mercedes merge into Skodas, Skodas into Auto Rickshaws into rickshaws into pedestrians; until, it doesn't matter who or what you are or belong to.

Where does she go? I don't know. But she will be there tomorrow.