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ShareIt's money that would have possibly saved some jobs that were taken away from employees. But who cares!
All day long, their heads covered with their pallus to save them from the summer sun, the women crouch with jhadoos in their hand, sweeping out the mud that lines the joints between the tiles.
When they go back to their homes, across the black iron gate, it is a world far removed from the one they are creating.
Should the children who run about the place now, while their mothers toil want to come in to see the fairy lights and see their playground transformed into fairyland, the watchman will shake his stick at them. So what if they have lived and played on the muddy ground from the day they were born.
No one cares.
Tankers will drive up early evening to fill the artificial pool with many hundreds of litres of water. Guests will perhaps unthinkingly drop soiled paper napkins that the breeze will take to dump into the pool, making the water too dirty for use.
On the other side of the gate, the lone tap that the makeshift slum uses is the focus point where tempers rage and violence often erupts. Children wash their faces in the same water that elders have used to wash theirs, and even in the heat, baths are, well, uncommon luxuries.
But who cares?
Cuisines from every part of the world -- Mexican, Chinese, Indian of course, perhaps
Italian and Lebanese too... delicacies to please jaded palates, for people who will pile their plates unthinkingly, as they talk to those in front or behind them in the queue and then waste much of what they find too rich or too sweet, or too heavy, yaar.
The leftovers might feed the stray dogs the next morning, if the crows do not get it first at the dustbins.
It could feed the army of children who must go to bed half hungry, surely. The recession that hit the middle class cannot but have affected the pavement dwellers.
But who cares?
At a sale at a five star hotel, women queue up... all the way to the main door, to fill the lift car each time it comes down. They rush into the room and grab shoes and bags with the same greed a child starved for food would show at a buffet.
When they leave, their arms are laden with bags that weigh more than the combined weight of their bodies and the jewellery that adorns it. A sale is a sale and cannot be ignored. So what if there is a recession!
Just outside the hotel, children are collecting plastic bags from the garbage. They will exchange them for a few rupees, that they can take back to their mothers.
The price of one of the handbags bought at sale price will feed them for a month; but the women don't see that. They don't see the children, they don't see the disharmony that surrounds their lives. They are admiring their purchases, and feeling bad about the one someone else grabbed first. The children scrounging about?
Who cares!
