It was a perfect summer day in Delhi - just out of the clutches of the cloaked up, villainous winter chill and still not in the throes of the frying pan that the city becomes for most of the year. Early March it was - when the world had still not dreamt up what would change the very fabric of the reality we collectively imagine - in the form of a pandemic. Yeah, it was one such breezy afternoon when many a housewife, a handful of husbands (no?) and a few single men and women would have thrown a few grains of jeera or garlic into their channe ki daal ka tadka while thoughtlessly sipping on a glass of cool lassi or chaach while watching their favourite news show. It was on one such afternoon that Ahmad was working under a car with his toolbox and his head sticking out from under the front bumper of an old 2011 Swift - his forehead glistening with the perspiration of an hour's work, around the black mark where his forehead had touched the ground a million times so far in awe of his maker.
Ahmad's shop was right next to Bablu's. You could tell the difference quite clearly even with your eyes closed - from the fragrance of the agarbatti that lit up a miniature statue of the goddess Laxmi and an even tinier idol of Lord Ganesh - the two gods taxed with the duty of bringing in good fortune. Today, they had done quite a good job, as it was the third customer who had picked up his Baleno and paid for the services in full, while a fourth car, a Scorpio, was waiting to enter the work area even as the Baleno was just about to move out, and the only thing preventing this manoeuvre from happening was Ahmad's toolbox.
There are a few things that could have happened that day and this story might never have been written, but to put things in context, Delhi had just witnessed one of the largest incidents of violence created by the polarization of the radical extremists in the fringes of society coupled with the visit of arguably the most accomplished buffoon of our times. I could have said that it was an era of buffoons, but alas!, our own buffoon wasn't as successful, because the gods play a much bigger role in our version of democracy and he was more a mama's boy than a bappa's man, but then I digress.
Ah, yeah! what followed was that flying tempers sent the toolbox flying, after which some abuses flew by, followed by some Rafale Jets. That last one didn't happen until a few months later of course, but blows were exchanged and some bouncers were summarily summoned from the nearby Kishangarh village, with what followed being a thorough beating up of the Ahmed clan - the father and his two sons. Things were tense in the market for a few days, with all the shops shut and no one taking up work as all the gods took shelter indoors - quite a harbinger for times to follow. Since then, while a virus trended and became more feared than Shri Ram and his foreign adversaries, Ahmad still limps a bit and Bablu was locked up in Tihar Jail for a while. I'm not sure where he is now, but while Ahmad's toolbox is still in action in that market, there are many other toolboxes that may have been shut down forever, only for a few drops of adrenaline, a few moments of so-called glory, for some gods that needed defending? Meanwhile, the galaxies churn themselves in oblivion.
