A trail of unexpected encounters
LIFE is stranger than fiction. A few years ago, I was in Kolhapur (Maharashtra), where there was an eatery near Shivaji University. A woman in her early seventies ran that joint. The lineaments of her face suggested that she may have been good-looking, if not strikingly beautiful, when she was young. Since I would frequently visit the place to have snacks, she became friendly with me.
One day, I was carrying a coffee-table book The Feminine Beauty Drawn by the Old Masters. It had photos of paintings by masters like Raphael, Titian, Leonardo da Vinci, Boticelli, Hans Holbein and Modigliani. “Which book is this?” she asked. Before I replied, she began to turn the pages and said, “Great paintings”. I was bemused. How could a woman leading such a humdrum existence be genuinely appreciative of classical paintings, I wondered. The next day, when I went to her restaurant, I asked her this question. She feebly smiled and said that when she was in Bombay in the early 1960s, she would go to JJ School of Art every Friday. There, she would shed her clothes for aspiring artists/painters to familiarise them with the female anatomy. She was their muse!
This episode made me all the more interested, if not unnecessarily inquisitive, in people’s lives. There’s so much in every person’s life that not one but many tomes can be written. English poet Alexander Pope aptly wrote, “The proper study of mankind is man” (An Essay on Man, 1734). With empathy and genuine interest, we can peep into the lives of those we regularly or occasionally interact with and get ennobled as well as humbled by the gamut of experiences they have gone through in their lives. When we sit back and introspect, we are moved by the impact of other people’s colourful lives on our own.
Many years ago, I was on a BEST bus in Bombay. There was an old and poor-looking passenger. No one offered a seat to her. No one recognised her either. I got up and offered my seat to her. She thanked me and blessed me profusely. We got down at the same stop.
I approached her and asked, “Maaf keejiye, aap Mubarak Begum hain na?” (Excuse me, are you Mubarak Begum?). Tears rolled down her cheeks. “Ji, main wahi hoon” (Yes, I’m that person), she said, wiping her tears. I was face to face with the singer who sang “Kabhi tanhaiyon mein humari yaad aayegi...” and that immortal duet with Mohammad Rafi, “Mujh ko apne gale laga lo...” She had been forgotten. I offered her a few bucks without any condescension; she accepted the money with gratitude. She lived in a chawl and died there unsung. What an irony!
“Tis Fate that flings the dice/ And as she flings/ Of kings makes peasants/ And of peasants kings,” as Dryden aptly said.
