Creative Challenge #124 - Trickle Down.

Ria is glad to be home.  There is something about the country of birth that she cant quite put her finger on.  She wonders why the phrase has always been "put a finger on" cant it be "put a toe on" or any other appendage? Never mind, She was glad to be home. 

Early next morning she takes her camera and goes out for a walk.  Its been five years since she was last here.  Five years since she walked these streets or saw so many people of the same hair, eye and skin colour as her own. Five years since she walked to get milk or groceries. Five years since she heard the Koyal's call or saw street dogs and cows roam free.  Five years since she saw autorickshaws, heard the temple bells ring or the call to Azaan.  She soaked all the sounds and sights to her minds saturation as she clicked what she knows she maynot see again once she leaves here.  It felt so good. The roads, the stores, the vegetables, fruits and people seem to have shrunk.  She smiles as it occurs to her that she now has a new frame of reference through which she is viewing what she once knew. She titles it "The US lens".  In the past five years, she got accustomed to 4-6 laned roads with traffic following the rules, people who are on an average taller and bigger than the puny Indian she is, stores that are huge that she needed a map to navigate through, grocery just left for our picking, a life lived Kingsize or in her instance, Queensize.

She looks across the Main road that marks the boundary of the neighbourhood where she lives and notices the small make shift cardboard and tarp shelters that have cropped up. "Oh a Slum so close?"  She wonders if no Minister of the Parliament lived close by. If he/she did, slums wouldnt dare crop up in the locality.  She sees that the Old Fair Price Depot has moved to a bigger lot, yet the queue is long for kerosene.  She remembers her childhood when she stood in those queues waiting in line for the ration of sugar, rice, palm-oil and wheat. It felt like so long ago yet the sight brought back the same sense of lack she felt as a child, a sense of inadequacy, of knowing only the lower rungs of the ladder of wealth and a sense of Having Not. Ironic she thinks...when you read about all the "progress and industry" , "India Shining" slogans, the "Emerging Superpowers of India and China" headlines along with the "trickle down" effects of economy that the media outside India, churns out. Yes she thinks as she returns from her walk, whatever Trickled Down probably never touched the ones who lived on the Floor.

Tour the Creative Challenge #124