This is the story of Krishna. He isn’t special in the
conventional sense of the term, and has not received any distinctions in the
way society describes them. But there is something which attracted me towards
knowing more of the person who has been cooking meals for me for the past two
months. He’s the cook at the paying guest house where I’ve been staying since my
summer internship began a couple of months ago.
Krishna is from Nepal, the only Hindu kingdom in the world
today (and his name is so apt, isn’t it?). He has an elder brother who runs his
own restaurant in the closest big town near his home. He says he always has an
option to go back and work there. In fact, his family and his brother keep
asking him to come back to Nepal and work with him.
Krishna says he wanted to join the army. He applied for
Nepal army and cleared all the tests, he tells me proudly. But he was left out
in the written exam. Not left out exactly, but they were willing to secure his
seat only if he gave them six months of his salary. Yes, I know you read that
statement again. It’s true, though. They asked him for a bribe, shamelessly
hidden in a verbal cloak of “salary”! I guess the obvious irony escaped them
that they are asking him money so that they can give him money for his
services. “I had gone there with only money enough for travel expenses, so I
did not have that kind of money on me then. So I called my dad. But we lived
far off, and by the time dad arrived, they had given the seat to someone else”.
His chest automatically juts out slightly and chin turns
upwards when he says that his dad was in the Indian Army, and bravely served in
the Assam Rifles regiment until retirement. Krishna’s application and interest
in the Indian army meant that he dropped out of school after 10th
standard – he looks down and admits this with a slightly ashamed laughter,
enough to put across the impression that he regrets it somewhat, but not so
much that he dislikes his life right now. Oh yes, he likes it here.
Though he misses home and nostalgia floats up to the surface
of his eyes when he says that he had not been home for one year now. He
normally visits home every 5 to 6 months for atleast a month at a time, but
this time Dilip, Krishna’s deputy cook and cleaner in this apartment, wanted to
go home as he had not been there since long. So Krishna skipped a trip home and
decided to be magnanimous and endure the hot summers of Indore. “I’m at home
during this time every year. I always spend summers at home, where it is cool
and nice”. Krishna speaks in an understandable Hindi, and seems quite comfortable
with it. “I did not know any Hindi when I first started working in Noida, but
learned it within 2 weeks. It’s almost same as Nepali, not very different”.
When I ask him if there’s any sort of problem while crossing
the border, Krishna answers, “No absolutely not! Even you can go there any time
you want”. He says his younger brother is studying commerce in a college in
Nepal. “He shall be easily able to get a good job somewhere,” he says quite
confidently. Then Krishna goes on to explain me the process through which “big”
companies located out of India normally conduct their interviews of Nepali candidates.
“It mostly happens over the phone. And if they select you, you can easily go
across the border to work”.
I ask him if he was always good at cooking. He looks meditatively
towards the now blackish bulb of Brinjal that simmered, enveloped by the flames
of the cooking gas, before answering: “I used to wash dishes for a 5-star hotel
in Nepal when I was 18. I washed those dishes from morning 9 to evening 9,
without halting. I did it for six months, before one day I was promoted in the
same hotel as deputy cook. I spent some time at that place, but I had some
misunderstanding with my employers. But I walked out because I did not want to
make a scene out of it. My father is a very reputed man in that area, and I did
not want to let down his name by being involved with something unsavoury and
worthless. So I left that place myself before the situation got out of hand”.
He regretfully says that he
could have joined Indian army too, but it’s a bit late now, since he’s 24. He
plans to go back to Nepal after working here for 18 more months. It would be
good then. He earns Rs 8500 each month here, and it’s enough as he gets to save
almost all of it, considering he has a place to live and eat. He plans to go
back and do “bijiness”, like his elder brother. To go home he has to go to
Kanpur first, from where he gets a ride to the border. It takes a total of almost
24 hours to get to the border. From there he can ride a taxi or a bus to his
place.
His is a simple and uncomplicated life. Or seemingly so. I
don’t know why I wrote about him. I just have a feeling there’s something
special in his simplicity, something that I’m not yet able to put my finger on.
I just thought his story needed to be told. If we look closer, maybe there are
lessons to be learned from Krishna’s life, like there are from everything and
everybody around us. We need to be humble enough to not just look, but take
notice.