Tales of one village-Street Entertainers

Tales of One Village
Street Entertainers
(1)

The postman rang. I heard my mother say it is a letter from Canada. 

Nisha has not written to me for some time. I wondered what news she has for me this time.

I was finishing up my daily laundry work before the water was turned off. The rainless monsoon created usual shortage of water. It made it difficult for the municipality to supply water for more than four hours in the mornings and four hours in the evenings. In this country water is money and must be used like money, frugally and stringently.

Nisha and I became friends when her bank manager father was transferred to our village and they rented the empty house opposite ours. They were four; the father, the mother, a brother and Nisha. We were of the same age; fifteen. We took to each other in spite of our class differences. We walked holding hands to the same school; same grades. We enjoyed each others’ company and shared teen agers’ games, giggles and gossips. Often she recommended some books for me to read.

As is usually the case with bankers her father got transferred once again after three years in our village to another part of the country. We grew up and we grew apart until I received an invitation for her wedding six years later. I was pleasantly surprised. I wrote to her with a small gift that I was happy to receive the invitation, that it was kind of her to remember me and that I am very sorry not to be able to attend and that I sincerely wish her blissful married life.

After marriage I had heard she moved to Toronto, Canada. Once there she started to write to me glowingly about her more than comfortable life there.

I tore open the envelope my mother handed me and with it too the postage stamp. My kid brother looked glaringly at me. I ruined his stamp in spite of his repeated reminders not to do so. He is the philatelist in the family. He will now have one less stamp for his collection which did not sit very well with him. I will appease him later. For now I must read this letter.

Nisha wrote that she is sorry not to have written in a long while because her just turned five year old son, had taken ill; nothing serious just common chicken pox. He is better now. For his fifth birthday parents decided to treat him to an outing to “Cirque de Soleil”. She described how thoroughly he enjoyed the circus. His favorite was the clown act. He was amazed at the trapeze artists clad in all glitters scaling up and gliding down effortlessly from great heights with the help of colorful silken cloths. He grimaced when he saw petit Asian girls contorting their bodies into pretzels.

She added that the outing was not exactly a cheap affair.  But for their son nothing was too expensive. Parents can never overdo things for their children; she wisdom-ized.

I suppose that must be so. Or is it?

Have you ever seen such a show, she asked perhaps, rhetorically. She wished I was there with them, she added again fancifully.

She ended sincerely with the thought that all was well with her family and she will anxiously wait for my response.

I needed few days to formulate and organize my thoughts on how to respond. Finally, I replied that it was so good of her to write even if it was after a long time. I am glad to read that her son is better and that they had grand time with him at the circus.

I wrote that I have never seen a circus such as she described and perhaps never will. I was sure she had seen, with me, what I was about to describe. What we had seen years ago, I wrote, was a troupe of all male cast, some of whom took on female roles, while putting on a street show of our mythological stories, usually at nights. Acting, dialogue, costume and make up all too cheap to be considered a high class entertainment. I reminded her that they were gypsies eking out a living from the few coins thrown reluctantly into their tin cups by the spectators.

If she remembered, once we saw a family of four, I wrote; a mother, a father, a very young boy of a son and a teenage daughter putting on a similar but not quite so similar a show on the street where we lived. The man beat his drum to invite the passers by to stop and watch, in his words, a hitherto unseen show. When enough of a crowd had gathered he began. They had two leashed monkeys and one scrawny little black bear. All underfed and most likely inhumanely trained to jump at the man’s command. Bear danced as the man’s baton moved. The father officiated a mock wedding between the male and the female monkeys. The crowd clapped and laughed when the female monkey acted coy, on cue, toward male monkey’s romantic advances.

The mother sang folk songs and the son ran around collecting coins if any of the spectators were willing to part with them. The daughter danced to mother’s singing. The father was giving a running commentary on, while still drumming, the difficult feat his courageous son was about to undertake while walking on tight rope high up above. The rope was tightly held up by four rickety posts tied together at the top creating a tent-ish look on either side. The boy was ready. The audience fell silent. The father helped the boy up and handed him a pole to balance himself with. This perilous task was being undertaken, the father said, just to entertain his esteemed and discerning audience. There was no safety net under the rope to catch the boy if he fell.

As careful and cautious a performer he was, on this day the boy lost his balance and fell on concrete ground. He suffered a fracture in his right forearm. Instantaneously the arm looked misaligned. Now it was beginning to swell. Neither an ambulance nor a doctor was requested or called. The man wrapped the boy’s arm in a piece of rag and concluded the show without really finishing. The mother was in tears. The daughter began to cringe. Crowd unwilling to fling coins to help let alone for the fun they had began to disperse. Quickly. Nobody cared.

I asked Nisha if she remembered the scene. Perhaps not, I assumed on her behalf.

Few months later, I continued, I saw the same family putting on the same show again. This time the boy’s arm looked grotesquely deformed. This time it was his sister who walked the tight rope instead of the boy. He no longer could perform the same feats he did before. The broken bone had healed but had not set well. Obviously, he did not receive medical care; only because the man could not afford it. He may have, possibly, also seen this as blessing in disguise. He may have thought, perhaps the audience will fling extra coins out of pity looking at the boy’s ugly arm. He was using his son to his own ends.

I concluded the reply with an assurance to her that she is fortunate and that she should clutch on to her luck. But it may not always be possible for all parents to say that nothing is too good for their children.

I ended lovingly with a request and a promise that if she wrote I will reply.