Fiction: Tea at the Shack by Lalit Wankhade
- Lalit Wankhade
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
Photo Source: Unsplash
She hastened to drive back home from the office as soon as she saw the sky darkened to look scary that late afternoon. Rain was pouring down. For the first time, she witnessed the intense Mumbai monsoon she’d heard so much about.
Jyothi, joined the Mumbai office about a month back. Fearing the rain, she left the crucial workload unfinished that day, despite needing to report on its progress at the evening meeting. As she strutted away, her boss observed her from his office window, and his face became red and wrinkled.
The road was flooded. She thought of taking shelter for a while. Pulling over, she parked her car on the roadside. She was on the fringe of a slum area. She walked towards the slum to search for shelter in an alley. In the distance, children played barefoot with a worn football in the rain, their mismatched clothes dripping, unseen. Their laughter was making melody after it mingled with the pattering of rain.
She kept walking, slowly though, through narrow alleys. Next door, women, seated in a row, hunched over piles of colorful fabric, were stitching together similar garments in a lot. Their hands were moving swiftly, undeterred by the rain. Beside a rain-swollen nallah, the foundry owner, drenched in sweat, smelted iron and poured it into molds. She forgot about the shelter she was seeking. Then she heard a Bollywood song echoing from somewhere, competing with the rhythm of the rain.
As the rain subsided, her desire to wander increased. In a small workshop, a man was trimming some leather, his coworker was hammering it, and another was busy processing it on a machine. She peeped inside. There was a floor above connected by a metal ladder: a minimal but sturdy structure created by adjusting both floors in the limited space. Tall workers were to duck their heads to enter the floor upstairs.
Her ears toward the gabbling, she stopped at a shack in an alleyway. Workers were sipping tea and eating vadapav and chit chatting, after taking a break from their work. Silence prevailed as their mouths fell open upon her coming. Seeing her soaked, they politely offered help.
“I am fine!” she mumbled frigidly.
Still, a woman in her forties, who seemed to be the owner of the tea stall, handed her a dupatta. Jyothi briefly wiped her face, hands, and hair and asked for a cup of tea.
While serving her a cup of steaming tea, the lady murmured, “You froze. Why didn’t you take shelter early?”
An elderly man from the troupe nodded his head and muttered, “Hmm, you are right. Will she not suffer from the cold?"
“No! I will be fine. Thank you for being so kind to me,” grappling with the words Jyothi uttered.
She put the cup of tea to her lips. The sips brought heat to her cheeks. She asked for another cup of tea. Then the sips spread warmth from cheeks to the whole body and energized her to talk with the people there.
She learned: Slum dwellers were active from dawn to dusk, and a few worked further up to midnight. Their engaged life kept confronting issues in abeyance—subsequently vanishing—leading to social harmony. And every day was a perfect day for them.
The next morning, she reached the office sooner and started working on the abandoned task, listening to background music running in low volume. The boss entered, annoyed, his gaze falling on her through the glass. He plodded along—something gleamed on his desk. The beautiful card from her read: Sorry.
Lalit Wankhade is an associate professor at the SGGS Institute of Engineering and Technology, Nanded, India. He had published widely in international journals. His flash fiction has appeared in Twenty-two Twenty-eight.