Trespassers on Dreamland

We are allowed entry…they are not.

On my way out of the adorned main gate of the City-Centre mall, SaltLake, I chanced upon this bunch of rag pickers loitering lazily beside the polished shops. Nothing except their eyes looked bright as they searched for an uninhibited entry into the unknown that lay beyond that gate. They felt beckoned by it. A little girl stood beside the gate, picking her nose, and eyeing another girl walking smartly with her mother by her side. The dirty rag picker girl dropped her hand to her side, craning her neck to gaze at the other girl walk in and mingle with the colourful world inside. Her group suddenly started moving away unwillingly. The security guard was shouting abuses at them and shooing them away. They looked positively frightened but took their steps hesitantly. Smiling and talking amongst themselves, they seemed unperturbed by the guard's constant complaints. Perhaps they were used to a reception like this at the gates of all such cosmopolitan dreamlands. Their soiled clothes wore testimony to it. They stopped a little near the huge glass-paneled Sony showroom screaming 21st century sophistication with a number of LCD TVs showing hues of an untarnished rosy life. They peered in, their noses flattened against the cool glass. Another stream of abuses came from the guard and they were off, chattering away happily. These fragile glass walls...the impenetrable walls of the fortress of dreams…But they had found a way to pierce its opacity, peering through it with their bright black eyes. As they left, their freshly blown breath and their hand prints remained on the otherwise clear surface of the glass door. But I knew they would be wiped away sooner or later.

--Jayeeta Mazumder