Geetanjali Krishna: The summer of his discontent

Yesterday morning, I awoke to the nasty sounds of loud retching outside my window. It was Dhani Ram, the man who cleans cars down our lane. “What happened?” I asked, after he’d settled down. “It’s a terrible time to eat outside food,” he said gloomily, “but that’s exactly what I did…” It seemed that that the dubious delights offered by an itinerant chaat seller had been his undoing. I gave him some water, commenting that it was really asking for trouble to eat spicy golgappas in this heat. He shrugged: “normally my wife gives me packed lunch, so I never have to eat all this junk. But these two summer months are very hard on me, because she takes the children to our village in Kumaon. I sometimes manage to go to drop them there, but then have to return to work and make do with whatever I can manage to eat.”

He gloomily sipped some water and said, “I really can’t afford to be sick right now, as I just can’t take off from work…” Tickets, presents (to assure people back home that they were doing better than they actually were) and other travelling expenses being what they were, Dhani Ram invariably had to take a small loan to send his family home. “So invariably, I spend the summer in Delhi, working two jobs to pay them off. But it’s eating all this outside food that I dislike the most. I don’t have the money to go to good places, and these hawkers are just so dodgy.” Last year, he was even hospitalised for severe food poisoning, he said. Did he not have the option of cooking his own food, I asked. Surely that would be better. He laughed bitterly and said, “I clean 12 cars in the morning to repay the loan I take to send my family to the village. Then I go for my day job as a peon. Where’s the time to cut and chop and cook and clean?”

Dhani Ram clearly didn’t have much choice but to try his luck with cheap food off the streets. But the government ought to try and straighten things out by conducting stringent checks on the food being sold on streets, especially in summer.

Later that day, I realised that this would be one massive task, and given the extent of the itinerant food vendor market, practically impossible. When I heard a local kulfiwala shout his familiar shout on the street, I decided to find out where he made the kulfi. “Oh I don’t make it!” he said, “I buy it from a wholesaler. But he’s really very good — I can bet you that this is the tastiest kulfi you’ve had. Would you like to try one?” I resisted his seductive offer, and instead asked him where the wholesaler lived. Did he have hygienic and refrigeration facilities? Did he actually maintain the quality of the milk he used? The ice cream seller hurriedly began to backtrack. “Look here,” he said, “these are traditional foods, we don’t use these western standards to judge them. They are cheap and they taste good. That’s all. But tell me something — when you go to a large sweetshop and pay Rs 40 for what you think is a really hygienically made kulfi, do you really know if the sweetshop owner has done all these things?”

He picked up his tripod stand and walked off. As for me, for the next few days I watched poor Dhani Ram limping about, washing all his 12 cars before rushing off for his real job. Was he wondering when the summer of his discontent would end? I would, if I were him.