Pritam's Blog
An Unforgettable Smile
As I was standing on the footpath outside my office today, smoking, I saw a man coming out of the ATM, counting the notes he had just withdrawn. There were many five hundred rupee notes and five hundred rupee notes.
He put all the five hundred rupee notes inside the hidden pocket of his pants and the hundred rupee notes in his wallet. As he was coming down the stairs, an old woman, a beggar whose legs were so thin that she couldn’t walk and she dragged her body with the help of her hands, held her hands out to the man.
The good man gave her a folded ten rupee note. Then he touched over his hidden pocket as if the bundle of notes would have magically vanished somehow.
The woman spread the ten rupee note on the road and stared at it for a moment.
She kept the ten rupee note in one of the pockets deep inside her tattered hand bag…
Then she started dragging her body again… a smile dangling from her lips… a smile that will haunt me for the rest of my life.