At the mall with my mother, a saint Sinchan Chatterjee
Today I tried to lift a few lozenges: very cleverly watched both ways before I put my bag on the trolley, then grabbed the chocolates from the shelf and flicked them into the bag. They weren’t much, probably around thirty rupees and it would be a small win, a pyrrhic victory against the towering world of lozenges and wrappers and malls and markets that sold colourless crap in dazzling wrappers and charged skyscraping prices for piles of shit shat out of factories where they flog children and brown men leaving maroon streams running down their backs. When I returned to the billing desk my mother had taken out the Mentos from the bag and surrendered them for billing. Smiling, correct, decent, the perfect doing-as-I-was-told saint carrying out commandments, keeping her conscience clear. And I thought so many people wouldn’t be able to look into the eyes of god if they did a wrong thing— wrong by someone else’s law, by dictates that are alien to the human mind and body—even if they liked it laws that eventually close in and strangle you until liking anything too much is a crime.
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