He was overconfident. And laughed at my request of asking jhunjhuna, a musical instrument for my child. “Do you want a jhunjhuna?” he laughed.
“Yes,” I said. “What there to laugh about?”
“Nothing. I just…”
“No, tell me.”
“Come on, brother. Who asks for jhunjhuna nowadays?”
“Really?”
“I don’t mean to say that they don’t ask for this. But they ask it with an English name like baby rattle. You don’t seem that uneducated to me.”
“Can you judge a person’s educational status by how he asks certain things?”
“I don’t. But in this case, I couldn’t resist.”
“I asked for a jhunjhuna because I think if I use the word rattle, you may not understand me.”
“Brother, your understanding of education is kind of outdated.”
“Maybe you are right.”
“But I didn’t expect a person who wears official clothes like you to ask for a jhunjhuna. Please don’t mind me.”
“Can I get a jhunjhuna?”
“You will get a jhunjhuna for sure. Brother, you are cracking me. But I’m not going to laugh anymore at you.”
He went through the piles of kids’ toys, pulled out a jhunjhuna and handed it to me, laughing. Then, he put his hand over his face. When he couldn’t resist laughing, he said sorry to me.
I knew he was making fun of me and my education, without even having slightest idea about my education. My wife watched all this happen and stared at me, as if to tell me why aren’t you saying something to him. I could’ve said something to him or thrashed him in front of others. The owner of the shop would have supported me on this for his misbehavior as customers aren’t easy to come by and he was just a temporary worker here. I could have pulled out some judgemental shit from inside of me and might have belittled him.
But then, my eyes fell on the elbows of his shirt. There was a cloth logo there, which was an unusual place for a cloth logo to be. It was more like this shirt had been torn due to overuse and it was mended with a cloth logo. I could have probably made fun of his mended shirt and his chatterbox nature. Instead, I took the jhunjhuna, paid the amount, which my wife thought was a little too much and returned home. As I walked back home, I heard my mother telling me something about poverty and people working to make ends meet.