A sad little story.
Tony was a an ordinary labor. He would go in the morning and dig the ground or help mix
concrete from 8 in the morning to 5 in the evening. His wages was meager, just one hundred rupees. But he had no complaint. He saved half of that very day and the rest he gave tot his poor
parents who had
brought him up.
The contractor’s representatives liked this hard worker and they employed him every day. They even hiked his pay
When he was 25 he married a lady selected by his parents. She was from a poor family- an unassuming, illiterate woman. But Tony loved her very much. There was something in her which he did not see in the other women he had met in the workplace. She never took any interest in anyone. She was all his.
When his parents died he could save more. In five years, with the money he had saved he bought five cents of land and built a small house of mud and brick which he thatched with hay. By this time they had a boy and they moved to the new house.
Tony never sent his wife for work but always provided for her and brought her nice saris and some ornaments. He loved taking her and his boy to the festivals of the village and occasionally to the town for a movie. When Tony went to work, she would cook his simple delicacies, looked after the boy and waited for him. When the boy was five they enrolled him in the local school and he brought for him new trousers and shoes and a new sari for his mother. Every birth day of his was celebrated and their friends were invited.
The mother and the son had everything they could dream of. But their joy was to be short lived. One day Tony slipped and fell from a platform temporarily erected for concreting and his skull was broken as he fell on to a rock piece down. The death was instant.
Everything change in that little house. Whatever money he had saved vanished soon. She went to work as a domestic servant after sending the boy to the school. But as the men folk tried to molest her she stopped going. But seeing her son going hungry she started going to the construction site. There again she had to endure a lot of pressure to succumb her body to the supervisors and to the owner. She lived in his memories and worked to bring him up.
She came home and cried many a day and her boy would come to her side and wipe of her tears saying,
“ when I grow up and have a job I will not send you to work any more. “
He graduated when he was 22. He started attending a number of interviews. One day he did not return by the evening as promised.
The poor, haggard woman went to the roadside and stood looking along the road he had walked off that morning. But there was no sign of him. It was getting very late.
There was the shuffle of people approaching. They were carrying the dead body of her boy killed in a bus accident..