It is not a confabulation that the lower middle class people lived wretched within themselves. Even after so many years, the picture remains more or less the same. The country has progressed, the economy has advanced, but the anguish in the lower-middle is not likely that it is ever going to die.
We’ve outstripped the pity of 80s and to some extent 90s as we speak of the economy, but we have not surpassed the price of peace then sat in the people’s mind.
It is heavenly so, because this class has always loved to live by a certain self-pride, which means they have some glorious distinction not to be miscible with others. The preoccupation of this self-pride has to be honored.
Because, this self-pride has held them back from taking anything they do not think equal up to their mark even though they may have to cut down on every means of their already worse living. Because, otherwise, they themselves would hurt their most secretly, lovably reared up self-esteem. It is because of this self-pride that a mother cuts down on her belly to feed her child from her tray of boiled-over rice and she herself goes starving. But, never ask for something. Because, something is not anything. Because, one day her child will win over everything, every impediment will be yielding to the insistence and diligence of that child. This child one day will bring happiness to the parents, fighting against all odds. He does not need to seek help of anybody. Therefore, there is this austerity, this self-affliction. And, her immediate neighbor never knows that his immediate neighbor family has been suffering from the bite of this self-pride.
– The little boy, Sabu is eleven years old. He goes to the grocery shop, just a few steps off their house by the village road. He brings sugar, spices, pulses, salt, cooking oil, candles and a lot many items home as his mother tells him. The grocery is visible from the door of their house. It is not a big shop, rather a room in the household made out to be a grocery shop by its owner.
The man who ran the grocery shop used to wear a sleeveless cotton shirt over a ‘loongi’ (a legless, roundabout lower cotton wear used by many Bengali people even today). His name was Bakul. He was 40. He bore a strap of black beard across his rectangular jaws, an unfashionable moustache and a turf of curly black hair all over his head like the nest of a bird. All untrimmed, uncared. A noticeable number of white threads of hair would peep from here and there. His face was hardly visible. His brown skin was helpless to make his face stand out. But, his teeth were. He would politely smile, and move his limbs very slowly, with equal politeness.
To Sabu, the grocer appeared to be a lazy person. Seemed like he idled away time by taking 5 minutes for a 2 minutes’ work. In those days, a shopkeeper did not have to employ his tricky mind to show off a gathering before his shop as we may see nowadays. He was by his nature so.
There used to be small, thin, ruled notebooks for some customers who could not afford to buy everything by paying the grocer instantly. They preferred to pay half and the grocer would write down the dues between the narrow blue lines of the notebooks with a slender, metal pen the end of which was tied up in a long thread around a hook on the wall. Bakul had his shop crowded mostly with this kind of buyers.
