On Leaving Kolkata

The auto rickshaw driver and I made our way through the twilight and tight traffic on the bridge into a tighter matrix of vehicles that had turned off the main road so as to reach the Howdah railway station. We moved slowly, a half a foot, a foot and a half. To the left of traffic and between this flow and the next, there stood a concrete block, which supported a pair of poles, which in turned supported a large sign. I would never have paid attention to it except for a little boy of about two years old who sat on the block, legs dangling down. He wept from as deeply in his gut as you can bring up a cry. His clothes were dirty, his hair closely cropped, and he was very much alone, something I had not seen before. Babies ride on their mother’s hip. What was this kid doing out here alone?
At the time I decided that the mother had stepped away for some reason but the answer wasn’t good enough. If it were, I’d probably forgotten the boy by now. The question comes back in the quiet time, when emergencies have emerged and been dealt with, when another “something new” has become part of the fabric of memory. What was this kid doing out there, sitting on a block of concrete in the last minutes of a faded day?
When I was small, my parents left me to run an errand, to do this or that. I remember that the longest time you could put into words was, “She’ll be back in a little while.” Once my grandmother thought I was old enough to sit in a barber chair while she took care of some other business. Mother took me to be photo studio and left me there with the photographer. He told me, “She’ll be back in a little while.”
If this boy was the sympathy half of a begging team, he might have been left because he had grown old enough to walk and not be carried. He might have been replaced by a younger brother or sister. If that were so, what must the mother be going through at that moment. The baby was left on a concrete block between two steel poles in place of bulrushes. A pharos’s daughter might not be along for a while, if ever.
The idea that the mother had just stepped away lodged in my head and we drove on but the memory of tears falling makes the question restless and come again for an answer. Somewhere out there in the always-in-motion sea of bobbing heads, there was a woman, who was dieing while she kept in step with the crowd.
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