Had it not been for the thick mist the strewn rubbish and ugly look of the buildings would have been revealed. They say the place has now been christened as “LA City”, and they are right to say that the place indeed has become one with the lean-on buildings and the exploding population which makes the place bustling.
There are plenty of restaurants but one among is particular. “Heaven’s supper” run by a young man with greasy face and mouth issuing betel-nut juice over the steps of his restaurant only to add his own share of colour to the place, and inside the his popular place are the young Bihari and Bengali boys in extra-large shirts and colourless-patch-covered trousers rolled up till their thin shins, and they scurry their ways inside the greasy man’s place in dug-in rubber slippers with little success in hiding the cracked heels filled up by black dirt. When the place’s shutter is pushed up with loud noise the manager is treated with the sight of bony Bihari men in checked lungris leaning against their push-carts waiting for orders from the any of the shopkeepers.
In this mist-concealed place the Biharis and Bengali stand out in their thin clothing and the common ash colour rough blankets wrapping their bony bodies, while the Marwaris business people are hardly visible though they are the people behind the commercial activities in this city where they have no political power. The locals reckon the successful Marwaris always lock themselves up in their towers hugging their sacks stuffed with cash.
This jealousy of there is soothed when their jungle-trained-now-settled in one camp show up in their India-made cars only to show how anti-Indian they could be and who actually run the place. Those sack-huggers greet them with visible courtesy to tame those jungle-trained stern faces and they run up and reappear with some bundles then those stern faces are transformed to some faces with mouths stuffed with sweets.
Opposite the greasy man’s restaurant and the tall buildings occupied by the sack-huggers is one old warehouse roofed with rusted corrugated iron sheets, the front part of the place is partly blocked by an iron gate with torn iron sheets which bear “Property of Kangleipak.” The sheet bearing Kangleipak both in Roman and Meetei scripts is torn in the middle and the torn and sometime slapping sheets are riddled by bullets.
Those jungle-trained men in India-made cars simply hate the sight of such a place in the heart of their domain, so they pick on the people and the things in this place like some nasty kids who pick on defenseless kids in a school; sometimes in their intoxicated state they bang the gate at midnight and ask the people there to pay them tax, and when they are told it was paid only a week ago , then they just barge in to piss against the walls, spit on the sacks of rice ,and when these don’t please them they parade the people in charge to bestow them with verbal abuses and showers of punches as an act of conclusion.
The place, however cannot be abandoned , for it supplies an abyssal place from rice to socks, and the vanity-soaked people of that place need this place because they have become a people who cannot even grow enough potatoes and rice.
Every week lorries from the last terminal of Indian railway in the region stream out and return with loads and are deposited them in this place, for each lorry entering the place a thousand is paid to the jungle-trained people and when a new line of lorries come from other direction to transport the loads to the land of the vanity-soaked people more wads from each lorry is again handed out. But this is just the beginning of a long feed.
To be continued......
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