You are ready to go to office in the morning and have come out of the house. Your mother comes out too to convey some message. A woman in her mid to late thirties who is passing by-who you wouldn't have noticed had she not stopped opposite your compound-notices your mother and stops. She says something. Or she asks. "I have some new clothes that I had bought. I want to sell them. I need money to pay school fees of my kids. Help me out. I am ready to sell them for half price." You start wishing that this hadn't happened. The tone is a mix of one who's pleading and one who's trying to strike a deal, and it progressively moves from the latter to the former. And you know it. You have seen it before. "It is embarrassing to ask people like this. But I just asked you since you were outside", she adds. Your mother is not too keen, but she doesn't want to be abrupt and impolite. She too wants a graceful exit like you. The other woman senses a chance and comes up to your mother.

Asking help to pay the school fees to a mother who's kid-not satisfied with school, and even engineering college-is getting a scholarship to do a PhD is such a poignant theatrical moment! Evidently the woman is unaware of any such possibility. And anyway, it's a boolean world. She's either genuine or she's a crook. And it doesn't matter either way.

You recollect all those previous ocassions when you had lost a few moderate sized notes "even when I knew that they were all crooks". In Hubli railway station, in Electronics City and elsewhere. You were amused when the very same guys had to come back to you with the very same stories, more than once! Obviously, they had forgotten your facem though you had not. You absolve yourself and start drifting away, leaving the situation to your non PhD mother. You hear a few words of the conversation as you heat up your bike. Slight sympathy, slight confusion, slight fear, for your mother. But soon you discover that the amount of collective sympathy you and mother can afford is much less than the deal the woman offers. "She is showing a receipt of Rs.1800!", your mother explains to a curious neighbour, as the woman retreats with slight indignance, and you throttle away.
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On the way you think of the binary possibility again. You tell yourself, "either way she hasn't had even a chance encounter with 'life'; she has her eternal tryst with 'survival'." You use quotes italics semicolons even while thinking! "And here are we. Wanting to trivialise survival. Wanting to outsource it. Wanting to quantify our success".
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You are disturbed sincerely. For various reasons that are unclear. You sit down on your chair and stream Dhrupad incessantly. After an hour or two you are better. You feel like writing about it, but you restrain. Hypocrisy it is, you think. You write anyway. It will be a truckload of highly romanticised pretence to others, today. Tomorrow it will be a truckload of highly romanticised pretense to you. You will delete it tomorrow, and rightly so. Indulgence is someone else's business cannot last a life time. It just lasts for a split moment. It is hidden somewhere deep in that split moment which is lost. Which will have to be lost.