A scummy India

Her hair was shabby, unkempt. She wore an ill-fitting dress that almost reached her ankle. The string of colourful beads in different shapes that she wore around her neck revealed more of the red discoloured string. I could hear a faint jingle of coins in her tightly closed fist as she was loitering around the biscuit counter in a supermarket, her tiny frame barely reaching till the beginning of the second lower shelf.
I was contemplating whether to stock more of those low-calorie oats crackers, of which I already had two packets in my grocery shelf when I saw this little girl looking blankly at the variety of biscuits. Do I help her out? I asked myself, but somehow restrained myself as I did not want to scare her away. She might want to check out for herself, rather than be treated patronisingly. I hesitated again. I wanted to help her, lost as she was craning her neck to see the stack of biscuits kept on top.
“Ei, kya chahiye (what do you want)?” the somewhat suspicious employee of the supermarket hollered down the narrow corridor amid the shelves stacked with biscuits on one side and high-calorie snacks on the opposite side. The little girl, who might not have crossed eight years, dropped the two two-rupee coins in fright. She scampered under the shelves for her two coins and fished them out. She then dusted the two coins on her dirty frock and held them into her tight fist. I later saw her near the counter nervously waiting in the side for her small packet of the four-rupee biscuit to be billed.
So she finally managed to find the biscuit, I thought.
She was not in the queue; she did not know she had to be in queue. Just then a woman walked in from the other side and tried elbowing me out to get her two-litre Bisleri water bottle to be billed. I politely asked her to follow the queue and went closer to the counter. The little girl still patiently waited near the counter, clasping her biscuit in one hand and her coins in her right fist. It seemed the man behind the counter, too, pretended he had not seen the little girl. When my turn came, I requested him to get the little girl’s bill done. She looked at me, her blank eyes not conveying anything, but just happy that she would finally get her biscuit billed. She could now settle for what could be her evening snack, or even dinner. I realised she might have been checking out the biscuit that would suit her budget.
“Here take,” the man behind the counter almost flung the bill at her. Her eyes sparkled as she held on to the tiny glucose biscuit packet and ran down the steps, as if celebrating her victory.
The man then billed all that I had placed in my shopping basket and handed me the bill in my hand with a polite “Thank you”.
I walked down the same flight of steps that the girl had just danced down a few minutes back, but there was a difference: there was no spring in my strides. I walked down, deep in thought, about this India, about this little girl’s India, about the people who are part of this India, and about the people who treat this India. The same man behind the counter had shown two distinctly different ways of handing over the bills; his conditioned politeness obviously tilting towards the credit card holders, and a natural disdain for shabbily dressed people with loose change.
I looked into my grocery bag filled with so-called “healthy” cookies, slim milk tetra packs, the rather expensive red and yellow bell peppers, Haldiram’s oil-soaked chota samosas, Amul butter and what I believed was whole wheat bread. The little girl’s eyes disturbed me; it haunted me throughout my walk back home. I kept peeping into my grocery bag. Do I really need all this? Or was it just a passing fancy of buying the sundries attractively stocked in supermarket shelves? A want fuelled by the fact that I could afford it, that I had a credit card that could take care in case I fell short of liquid cash.
I have still not found an answer to that.