The broom seller appeared first. He passes by the front gate shouting out “plastic brooms, handmade coconut brooms, soft grass brooms for indoors, and cobweb brooms with handle” He modulates his tone with an interesting pitch and I come out to the veranda. His bicycle is hardly visible, decked up with colourful merchandise, largely recycled plastic brooms. He keeps looking at the rows of houses on either side of the road expectantly.
A day later comes the knife-sharpener with his grinding wheel. He stops on the residential road and neighbourhood women gather around him with dull blades. I hear the screech of his spinning wheel and watch the spray of sparks.
Next is the turn of Mahalakshmi. She is the waste-picker who used to frequent our locality. She knocks on our gate, adjusts her mask, and my wife lets her in.
These folks are unmistakeable signs of a slow return to normalcy; harbingers of good old orderly days. Daily COVID-19 cases in Kerala have dropped below 10,000 after a long time. These faceless men and women earlier used to hang around the locality, doing yeoman service to keep the colony clean and dispensing petty utilities. However, every time when there was a surge in the COVID cases, they were the ones who were first shooed away.
The rag-picker woman was rummaging through heaps of old newspapers, empty bottles, and plastic trash. I ask Mahalakshmi how she managed herself during the pandemic. She says she had left for her village near Thanjavur. I am tempted to query more about her pandemic life but stopped short; why rake up uncomfortable memories! What mattered now is that she has survived the hard times, back again and going about her routines!
I enquire if she had got the COVID vaccine. Her face instantly brightens up and she nods her head in affirmative. She beams as if she got equal treatment in an otherwise unequal world, for the first time ever. Receiving two doses of vaccine is the easiest thing she can relate with me, a privileged compatriot in her eyes. At least for now, simply being alive is important to each of us, irrespective of the difference in our lifestyles.
There is something strange about all these people. They don’t blame anyone for their plight. No one knows where they come from and where they go. But they do appear once in a while. They exist unnoticed. But for the pandemic blues, I would have hardly spotted their presence. In fact, it is their long absence from the scene that made them conspicuous. Their arrival signals to me that life is being pieced together again, back into its old patterns.
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