The sad story of a house painter

A smooth, shining, spotless coat of whitewash would invariably make people say that it was the dexterous work of Raju. His name had become synonymous with the art of whitewashing.

Allah Ditta, popularly known as Raju, was a native of Haryana, but he had settled in Punjab. As a child, I saw him in his late twenties, living in a small room with bare minimum belongings. He was a man of medium height, large ears, a long and pointed nose, sunken eyes, a craggy and furrowed face, a wrinkled forehead and thin eyebrows. He walked at a brisk pace, taking big strides, and spoke with a gravelly voice. He liked to crack jokes and would let out belly laughs and guffaws.

Dressed in a kurta-pyjama speckled with splotches of paint, holding a pail with a couple of brushes in the left hand and smoking a bidi — the poor man’s cigar — tucked between the middle and index fingers of his right hand, he was a sight to behold when he left his abode to earn his daily bread.

Raju was fond of listening to the radio. He enjoyed BBC’s Urdu and Hindi service, running commentary of cricket matches and the programme Tameel-e-Irshad; he kept the volume very high to enjoy the songs to the fullest.

He filled the void of his loneliness by feeding stray dogs. Perhaps he found better company in them than in the selfish and ungrateful human world.

Excessive bidi smoking had made him very frail. When an artist can no longer wield his brush, nobody offers him a canvas to paint. Almost three decades of an active life in whitewashing couldn’t even make him save a little amount to have a simple supper in his last days. This is the hard truth of the life of every daily-wager. But still, the world is not without kind people. A neighbour provided him meals daily. Even then he didn’t forget to feed the street dogs — his constant companions.

One day, someone broke the sad news that Raju had passed away at the age of 55. A man whose paint brush brightened dull walls of countless houses lived his own life in the shadows. His was not a solitude of choice but a forced hermitage. He lived unseen, unknown and died unlamented with no epitaph on his grave.

I pay a tribute to him with these lines by poet Ishaq Sajid: Marne waley tujhe mubarak ho/ Zindagi ka azaab khatm hua/ Khwahishon ki kitaab bund hui/ Hasraton ka nisaab khatm hua (Blessed are the dear departed/ The torments of life are over/ The book of desires is closed / And the chapter of unfulfilled wishes has come to an end).