Lalaji to Balaji, the link of kindness

MR Anand

IN the early 1990s, I was working in Kochi. I used to have breakfast from a roadside shop run by one Sethu. He used to send to my place of work daily in the morning a parcel of four idlis and a vada through his help named Balaji, aged about 14.

Balaji was a smart boy. One day, I asked him to tell me about his home, parents and the place he came from. He was from a small town in Tamil Nadu. His father died when he was eight, bringing his schooling to a premature end. To help his mother, who toiled as a house maid to bring him up and his four siblings, he came to Kochi and joined Sethu’s pavement shop as his help.

The small boy opened his heart to me and revealed his intense longing to have a ‘tiny hotel’ of his own. ‘If only I have Rs 3,000, I will go to my hometown and start an eatery. But from where and whom will I get this big amount?’ he said.

The sadness in his eyes which carried this distant dream touched my heart and I decided to help him. The following morning, I readied the amount and waited for Balaji. He came and handed me my breakfast and was about to leave when I thrust a sealed cover containing six Rs 500 notes into his hand. The boy was speechless when he opened the envelope. The very next day, he left Kochi for his hometown to turn over a new leaf in his life.

The man who inspired me to help the boy was Jim Corbett. In his book My India, he dedicated a chapter to one Lalaji. Corbett found Lalaji lying on the banks of the Ganga, literally dying of cholera at a place called Mokameh Ghat in Bihar. He took the hopelessly sick person to his house and nursed him back to health. When he recovered, Lalaji narrated to Corbett how since his grain business failed, he was wandering from town to town like a beggar.

When the time came for Lalaji to leave, Corbett placed in his hand Rs 500 and asked him to restart his business. Rupees 500 in the 1920s was not a small sum. Lalaji took the amount, promising to repay it in a year, revived his business, became well-to-do again and returned the amount to Corbett within a year.

Though I never met Balaji again, I came to know that he started his own tea-and-snacks shop and came up in life. I was also told by his ex-employer that he married, had children, built his own house and that his mother was leading a cool retired life.

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