Rajeev Khanna, Solan
He cannot be called a hero. He never looked like one. I just came across him in the most unlikely of places. It was the first week of a hot May in 2006. He stood by his water carriage next to the curfew bound Mandavi Gate in Baroda. The place had seen large scale rioting and killing of two people in the Police firing over the last few days.
A look at him from a distance and one could see that he made a living out of selling water at the rate of 50 paise or one rupee per glass. But on a day when there was curfew and the arches of Mandavi Gate housed only a handful of policemen taking stock of the situation on their wireless sets, there was no possibility of any business.
Yet Usman Gani sat on a stool near his water cart. I could not suppress the curiosity to have a word with him and walked over to his carriage. How his eyes reacted to me approaching him I cannot say because he wore dark glasses. A bit of chit chat and he told me that he had held his ground at the spot in all situations. He could not give an exact figure but he had seen the area under curfew on numerous occasions for more than thirty years and he had never shut his water carriage.
I asked him about what he did on days when there was curfew and no chance of a customer coming up for purchasing a glass of cold water. His reply was, “On days like these I serve water free of charge to the policemen doing their duty and the likes of you who come here to report the happenings to the rest of the world.’’
He went on to recount various occasions when the place had witnessed communal violence. The most interesting facet of his tenure at the spot was that he had remembered trouble erupting in the area in terms of years. He had remembered violence in terms of the tenure of Police chiefs posted in the city. He could easily recount who handled the situation and how.
Had he been a good communicator, I would have carried a radio interview with him. But he just preferred talking in monosyllables and very short sentences. So I left him as a subject for a story. I got my friends to report on him. Maybe he is still there today selling water or maybe life took him to another place or world.
(Rajeev Khanna is a veteran journalist with over thirty years of experience across print, broadcast and digital media. He has worked with leading media organisations, including BBC, Asian Age, Indian Express, Times of India and Tribune, and has contributed to digital platforms such as The Citizen, The Wire, Scroll, National Herald and Down To Earth. An avid reader since his student days in Solan and Shimla, he maintains a deep interest in literature and occasionally ventures into fiction writing. His other passions include cinema, music, travel and sports, reflecting his wide-ranging intellectual and cultural interests.)
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