THE DARK CORNER
-Roel Hangsing
“Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute”. Proverb 31:8
When the train halted, after nightfall, at that station the coach was once again filled with all sorts of filth emanating from the sun-backed human waste on the rail track below. My coach was at the extreme end of the platform. After a minute or so I venture out on the platform to stuff myself with anything labeled as food. The irritating noise of a group of people shouting slogans was heard from the other extreme of the platform. All attentions were drawn to that direction, except a group of people, probably daily wage workers. Under the roof of an unlighted huge shade that looks like an extension of the platform, they were seated on their fouled and stained makeshift beds. They were looking at the much darker corner of the shade that shelters them and I could hear their women folk talking in a high pitched and accented Hindi about the brutality of men in ‘Vardi’ while the men, probably their husbands, repeatedly told them to shut up. This makes me more curious about what they were talking and watching with uninterrupted attention. I listen more attentively in an attempt to figure it out but most of what they said was drowned in the slogans of a group of ungrateful agitating railway workers.
Determined to make sense of what drew their attention to that dark corner, I saw two policemen, one of them forcefully dragging an unwilling figure towards the darker side of the corner from a make-shift bed separately laid far from the rest. The third policeman was shoving, beating, and at times kicking a much smaller and sloppy figure out into the open. They were forcing a small child, who appears to me like a three years old girl, away from the unwilling mother. Though it was dark, I can make out another figure, probably their officer, waiting for the other two to drag in the helpless victim of their lustful designs. Her occasional cries could be overheard faintly but nobody heard her well due to the commotion created by the noisy slogans. While they were forcing them apart, the mother and child desperately hold on to each other. The child, apparently too scared to cry out loud, for a moment manage to cling to her mother but only to be snatched apart.
By now the group of people who were watching them started blaming their ‘Thikadar’ for putting them in such an unholy place, a railway platform but none of them appears bold enough to raise alarm or try helping the hapless mother and child. Judging by their makeshift bed, separated far from the rest, the mother and child must be an outcast or born low caste who somehow tags along with the group they originally belong for mere company or security that they found wanting when needed. The train moves again and I realize I am no different from the people nearby. I could do nothing for those who are forced to the dark corner by criminals and corrupted systems of administrations. In most cases, the society with all its inherent restraints and norms also remains a mute spectator.
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