A Fine Balance

Today as I was returning home after a meeting, we stopped at a light and three people approached the car, asking for money. The first, a blind man led by a younger, able-bodied fellow, the second, a man with withered and twisted legs, expertly wheeling himself around on a plank, his legs crossed neatly in front of him. Dressed as a captain, hat and all, his head barely reached the level of the car door handles. Although I frequently stop at this light, today’s characters were new to me.

The corner outside my house is home to a fellow who only has one leg. While he normally uses a skateboard to move about, he also has a wooden crutch which helps him get around. He waves when he sees me in the mornings. Tudo bom? Tudo bom? Some mornings I find him sleeping on a piece of cardboard.

A few blocks away from my apartment is one of Recife’s fancier hotels. Not usually a spot for panhandlers, a few weeks ago, a man with stiff, withered legs was working the light in front of the building. His legs too stiff to use a plank or skateboard, he pulled himself around using his arms, protecting his hands with blocks of wood, his body making an equilateral triangle with the ground.

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My Recife Bookclub recently finished reading Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance. Set during the turbulent times of Indira Ghandi’s India, it’s a book that stays with you. All 600+ pages of it.

One of the book’s main secondary characters is Beggarmaster. Beggarmaster is Master of the Streets, Master of the little tin cups the beggars shake as pedestrians hurry past, and Master of the transformations that render the beggars more pitiful, more hopeless, more hideous, and, more profitable. More than anything though, Beggarmaster is an enigma. He develops true affection for his beggars, affection and concern which unsettle the reader’s mind. One of his favourite beggars is Shankar, a legless man who uses a small gaadi, or custom-made skateboard. He wheels himself around using his bandaged, fingerless, hands.

Beggarmaster’s hobby, when he is not following up on his beggars or harassing the police, is sketching new and profitable beggar combinations. Imagine two men, one blind, the other cripple. To survive, the blindman hoists the cripple upon his shoulders, the cripple thus becoming the eyes and the blindman, the feet. Co-dependent, they become one. The trick was to find a blindman strong enough and a cripple man light enough to make the combination work. In another sketch, Beggarmaster sketches himself, a man with four legs, two noses, and ten fingers on each hand, into a freakish triangle which includes Shankar and Nosey, Shankar’s noseless beggar mother.

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Brazil is no India. The streets are not awash in beggars or children that have been sent off for mutilation. But sometimes, as I turn the corner on the way home or cross the street on my way to work, I wonder.