The Urchin In Dr Radhakrishnan Road - Part One

Part One Still the din dashes about in his dreams now louder in the spacedout quiet: an occasional auto-rickshaw backfiring revving spluttering too close for chancy comfort some blaring tv hoisted above craning necks Over the squeezed out crackling mud sidewalk his head buried in the crook of his charred bony arm his right elbow crusted in a masked-eye pattern his left spindly leg knotted at the knee jauntily splayed in a triangle on his right the mud-soaked sole inturned at the angle as if to cushion the prickly grains on bare scorched skin a defensive gesture against cold dust wind noise pain the slight lukewarm breeze lifting from Marina Beach teasing the settled dust the strangled pores he had for a blanket Through the dropped jaw rosy-pink at the bled bitten lips his breath wheezed through stained craggy teeth his broken nose stopped by blobs of bloody phlegm a hovering fly or two keeping undisturbed guard His hair streaked in plaited dusty strands lost in the sidewalk's trampled mud On his loins some tortured rags bound at the hips bulged at the dryblown stomach the navel unfurled like a budding ear to where the hardly heaving contorted ribs held the will to awaken the evaporating carcase of a steamy engine at the works He woke to the mocking streaking laughter of the magpie calling out to its mate across the slipping concave-tiled roofs across the dense mango green weighted clusters where they had slumbered for the night to the mangy scavenger dog digging its nozzle in the splodges of decomposing leaves paper and tins larded with leavings: turds dung urine phlegm and menstrual foam that the parched earth gulped during the day to the bluebottles festering on the peeled shin-bone to the hordes of tinkling bicycles piercing his unquiet drums to the buses and taxis top-heavy creaking and near toppling and the sharp clipped voices of servants urgently preparing the exit of their master in a polished limousine through laundered lawns Some fifty yards away across the road a low saffron roofed-box of a stone shrine lay crushed and sagging on the tarmac against the mud-sidetable from which sprawled the scaly frame of a dust-throttled tree the garland of mallikai on the dark stubby slippery shrine of a squat Ganesha