Prashant's Solace

The picture below is one of many disappearing stories. What is a story? The one which is told or the one which is written, the one which is sung or the one which is enacted. What about those which are neither told nor written, simply play out there and cease to exist? But one hot day... The water cans in this picture were provided to these labourers by my house. These are not people employed by us but construction workers on a road site. Meaning a government contractor brought them in my lane for work and left them there for good. It is the end of the day; you can see life and work partners are getting into the auto rickshaw, after a hard day's labour. Their kids are already lodged behind the seat in semi-dazed condition. The woman folk are getting in, well-aware their day's work is not yet over. They have to go back to their ramshackle existence, cook and feed all, service the elders and later maybe their husbands. But the cans. They had come running on being told by my passin...