A water heater in my kitchen
Wives don’t like kitchens without a water heater, especially when you live in a relatively colder place. A dishwasher, on the other hand, was out of my budget. “I’ll do it as soon as I can,” I’d retort to my wife. Her demand to install one in the kitchen was nevertheless long overdue and frankly speaking, I’d been a little lazy.
Delay is one such word wives abhor, and most of them have totally erased it from their vocab. With no excuse for any further delay, I had no choice but to give in. I hit a nearby market one day to buy the much-needed gadget.
After securing the merchandise, I waited for a pickup van for about half an hour but found none. A passenger auto rickshaw whizzed past so fast that I could hardly flag it down. Equipped with eagle-like eyesight, autorickshaw drivers in India have some sort of an inbuilt motion sensor that can often catch you by surprise. This driver was no exception. He swirled his tiny machine incredibly swiftly, took a U-turn and parked it right at my feet.
Neatly dressed, the driver greeted me with a warm smile and asked me my destination. “I’ve a small box containing a heater,” I asked if that would fit into his tuk-tuk. He was more helpful than I expected as he got down, picked the package and stowed it carefully on the back seat. In less than a minute, I was in his autorickshaw and with the prized possession by my side I started a chat with the driver as we set off.
National award winner
To begin with, I asked him his name. “Ajaz,” he replied with a melancholic tone. “I’m not an autorickshaw driver but a national award winner in papier-mâché.”
“A national award winner,” I shot back in all my bewilderment.
“Yes, a national award winner,” he reiterated, intriguing me to dig more into his story.
Ajaz is undoubtedly a national award winner in the exquisite craft of papier-mâché — a trade that provides livelihood to hundreds of families in India. It was a small jewellery box that had won Ajaz the honour, he told me.
The award comprised a cash prize of Rs1,00,000 (Dh4,984), a tamrapatra (ceremonial copper plaque) and angawastram (shawl). He had received it from the hands of none other than the then president of India, Pratibha Patil.
The same box had won him a state award previously. The president had returned the box to Ajaz, and he decided to keep it forever. But things didn’t work out the way he had thought they would.
Misfortune descended upon the family when his father was diagnosed with cancer. With no support from any quarter, Ajaz was left with no option but to sell the awardwinning artefact for a paltry sum of Rs30,000 (Dh1,496) to meet the treatment expenses of his father. The buyer took from him the certificate as well.
“My father didn’t survive long and with him, I buried the aspirations of keeping the torch of this craft burning. Every last penny in my pocket went into his treatment,” he rued. The day his father died, Ajaz made up his mind to bid an adieu to papier-mâché. “Driving autorickshaw fetches me more than what I’d earn from papier-mâché,” he said.
Just before dropping me, he asked me if I could highlight his story after I told him that I was a journalist.
“If you’re serious about saving the art, you’ve got to save the artist,” he said as he turned his autorickshaw and disappeared out of my sight.
Every time I look at the heater in the kitchen, it reminds me of Ajaz — the artist, and his autorickshaw.