Pritam's Blog
The Little Girl Who Sells Pen At Brigade Road And Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata
I had just come out of Blossom Book House at Brigade Road with a bagful of books when this little girl caught hold of me.
Barely 9-10 years old, she’s one of those kids you come across at traffic junctions and shopping areas in Bangalore, the ones who sell pens, that are not worth 2 bucks, for 10 bucks.
I had tried to find out who exactly use these helpless poor kids and their emotional appeals to run these business a couple of times during my college days but I failed. Probably, I didn’t try hard. Doing an investigation all by myself wasn’t a convenient thing to do.
And these kids, they never say (read ‘disclose’) anything. All they want is to sell whatever they are selling. And it kills me to see those tiny hands which should hold pencils to write the alphabet are holding a bundle of pens to sell that doesn’t even fit in properly…
Anyway, she wanted me to buy a pen. I gave her a 10 rupee note and told her that I don’t need the pen. What reaction would you expect if it were a grown up who had been corrupted by the sad realities of life? That he or she would take the money happily?
But this was a kid; despite all the hardship she was enduring, her heart and mind was still a clean slate, and she believed in a fair deal.
“No, no,” she said. “You have to take the pen.”
She put the pen in my pocket, took the money from my hand and ran away…
And I kept on wondering what would she become a couple of years from now? She will probably start working at a construction site and get exploited in every possible way. If she’s lucky enough, she will probably start working as a maid in some houses - not that sexual or any other kind of exploitations doesn’t happen in the life of a maid but I hoped she would get some good families to work for. But then the worst fear slipped in; what if she has to become a sex worker?
I felt depressed. And yet I didn’t do anything. It was too much of a hard work. And like I always say, it’s all about convenience. Either that or you act only when it’s something personal.
I came back home and to lift my mood, I, like any other elite armchair activist, began to write about it. I gave up after writing a few lines.
Then the wannabe artist in me resorted to music to distract my mind from all these awful thoughts. I tried to play “Moonlight Sonata” on the keyboard.
I had always believed in the predominant idea that this particular piece by Beethoven has a romantic mood to it.
Anyway, I couldn’t bring myself to play the keyboard too. So, I listened to the Moonlight Sonata on YouTube…
This time, it didn’t sound romantic at all. Instead, it sounded more like the other interpretation many critics had come up with - that this musical piece has the character of a funeral march…