After getting the medicine from the salesman, when I reached the counter to pay, there were two people in the queue ahead of me. An old woman in the front, a young boy behind her. My medicines were placed on the counter in front of me and the receipt was buried under them. Also, there were two more piles that belonged to the people standing before me. I was in a hurry because my family was sitting in the car waiting for me. But it was getting late because the old lady was standing quietly at the counter.
I saw, repeatedly, with her thin, trembling hands, she held the sheet over her head and wrapped it around her body. His cloak would once have been white, but now it had faded to a light gray. He had ordinary air slippers on his feet and a bag of vegetables in his hand. The medical store man automatically picked up the woman’s medicine bill and said.
‘Rs 980’. He held out his hand for the money without looking at the woman. The woman took out her hand from the cloak and placed two notes of 50 rupees on the counter. Then he bowed his head. The shopkeeper’s voice suddenly dropped to a whisper. He looked at the woman. The old woman kept her head down and fixed her cloak. There must have been a two-second silence. In those two seconds, we all realized that the woman either had little or no money for the medicine and was at a loss as to what to do. But the shopkeeper, without wasting a moment, quickly put his pile of medicines into the bag and moved forward.
The old woman’s head was still down. She grabbed the bag with trembling hands and walked out of the shop without looking at anyone. We all watched him go. I was surprised that medicines worth Rs.980 were given by this shopkeeper for only Rs.100. I was impressed by his generosity. As soon as she went out, the shopkeeper first smiled at us. Then picked up a transparent plastic bottle placed on the counter with ‘Donations for Medicines’ written on it. There were many notes in this bottle. Most were ten and fifty notes. The shopkeeper quickly opened the bottle and took out a handful of money. Then he started counting all the money he got on the counter. I wondered what it had started but kept watching.
The shopkeeper quickly counted all the notes and there were three and a half hundred rupees. He then put his hand in the bottle and took out the rest of the money. Now the bottle was completely empty. He closed the cap of the bottle and started counting the money again. This time the total was five and a half hundred rupees. He mixed the two fifty notes given by the old woman with the money coming out of the bottle and then took all the money and put it in his drawer. Then he turned to the customer standing in front of me. ‘Yes, brother’. The young man, who was silently watching all this, held out a 1000 note. The shopkeeper saw his bill and put it in the note drawer and counted and returned three hundred and thirty rupees.
Without pausing for a moment, the young man grabbed the outstanding notes and folded them. Then he opened the lid of the bottle and put all the notes in it and closed the lid. Now in the empty bottle again, three notes of hundreds and three notes of ten were visible. The young man picked up his bag, greeted loudly, and left the shop. This action of barely a minute made me cringe. Before me, silently, a strange story was completed and the characters of that story, having played their part, disappeared from the screen of life. Only I was left there who was a spectator of this story.