Photo © Subir Ghosh

The first time that I set my eyes on her, she managed to steal my undivided attention. As she flitted from person to another, I sat there a bit mesmerised, a bit intrigued. Not like a dead leaf of the fall, yet she almost went by the wind with gay abandon, virtually rudderless. Presently, she landed up within hugging distance of me, looked me up and down of as much as she could see, and without even waiting for me to react, scampered away.

She was all of four feet nothing, not a day more than ten years in age. She was what you would call an urchin, a beggar. I could see her only as a child.

Seated, of course, I was – in the driver’s seat of my car. This was a busy crossing I had to negotiate every day of that seasonal phase of my life. And every day, at that same hour, I saw her. Without fail.

Like all children, she seemed not to have a care. Not a worry in the world. Yet, she was lost in a world of her own, in sync with the life that she had been borne to. Singing along loud as she fluttered from one car to another, asking for alms. Food. Money.

We, the lucky ones to have been born to the right people at the right time in the right place, are inured to such sights. Callous as we are, there is never any reason why should we at all remember any of these street children.

But, a couple of incidents gave me a couple of reasons to do that.

That sultry forenoon, at the same crossing, as I exasperatedly puffed away waiting for the red light to turn green, I noticed an autorickshaw driver to my left gazing intently at the same girl. Greying, frazzled, and beads of perspiration rolling down his face, this was a man close to his sixties who was giving the girl his undivided attention. But he was not mesmerised as I had been; he was not intrigued either.

A closer look and you would know there was nothing fatherly the way he was gawking at her. The predatory look was writ stark on his face. The vexation of being stuck in that crossing turned in a flash into boiling rage. Trust me, it was not because of the short-tempered disposation that I am notorious for.

I might have been thinking of ramming my car into his rickety auto, when the girl disappeared behind another vehicle. Out of sight, and the girl seemed to have gone out of his mind too. The light turned green and soon I was speeding away, avoiding bumping into other streaming vehicles whose owners seemed to be in more of a tearing hurry than I was. The incident, need I say, left me a bit disturbed.

It must have been another week or so later, that I had a 100-rupee note that I wanted to dispose of. I had found this note lying on some road, and had picked it up. My cardinal rule is always to hand it to the next needy person I see on the streets. So when I had found this 100-er, I had made it a point to give it to that little girl the next time I saw her.

See her I did, soon enough. Coincidence or whatever, this girl had never come over to my car after that first time. Maybe, I don’t look like one who gives alms, assuming of course that she remembered. I had to wait for a while till her eyes shifted towards me. I beckoned her, and she was by me in the twinkling of an eye.

I fished out that 100-rupee note and was about to fork it out to her. She looked at it, then at me. More intrigued, than I was with her when I saw her first. Not a word, and she took it from me. As she did, my hand brushed over hers.

The intrigued look instantly turned into one that was hurtful and hateful at the same time. It took me a moment to realise what might have been crossing her mind. But she had reacted faster, used to that she must have been to preying hands. For that fleeting moment, I did not know how to react. I managed to salvage a reassuring look, and hissed out, “Take it, and go!”

She did, and in a flash was out of my sight again. That was the last I saw of her.

The girl remained in my conscious memory, for right reason and wrong. I still crossed that stretch, but never saw her again. Finally, curiousity got the better of me, and I called over another of those street children who were active at this crossing. This was a lad, possibly twice that girl’s age.

There used to be a girl around here. Don’t see her here anymore, I told him. Which girl, he asked and then seemed to have realised in context.

In a tone as callous as can be and with a visage as blank as can be, he blurted out, “Oh, there was only one girl with us…. Yes… She got run over long back.”