Paving corners is useful

The panchayat bench is rough concrete. Not so rough that one cannot sit. It has a nice feel to it. One sits easy on it, turns his neck left, pause and then to right - notices that the wide four to six lanes on either sides of this cross roads has traffic building up. Evening has set in and so has the rush. People are making to their way home from work.

A small orange temple sits next to the bench. It looks nicer than before, perhaps because more people came to visit it during the recent famous recession. The temple has big new orange flags, bigger than the temple itself, and repainted walls. The in-vicinity neighborhood is flourishing. In between the bench and temple is a temporarily built home, otherwise known as shack - houses a family with few kids. There are other neighbouring shacks too, with their one wall belonging to the boundary wall of India’s self congratulatory premier Management institute. Well, all make use of the well done paving. Toddlers and not-more-than five or maybe ten years old are playing in front of the bench on which One is sitting, and are safe on this futpath. Ma is cooking evening food, dealing with fumes of the collected firewood, blowing it through a half inch steel pipe. All this thanks to the corner-side paving.

One, sitting on the bench likes the smell of this freshly cooked home food, so his mood lightens and brightens up. The rising traffic means more fumes, gasoline ones to rise in a few hours to stay about for a few more hours. Enjoying the comforts of this panchayat bench, he notices the owner of the shack, with part curiosity and part pity. The owner appears busy with some important work of his.

“Hey – why don’t you put your kids in school? They are roaming about in this dirt dust doing nothing!”

The owner, a little startled at the question, looks back at One and replies, “Sahib, his leg broke, he'd slipped – injured - so, that’s why he's at home not in school.” continues staring at One with an innocent grin.