(MENAFN- Khaleej Times) Summer or winter, he wakes up at the crack of dawn, day after day, month after month. That has been his regimen for the last 35 years.
At 60, P.R. Bhaskar has not been as sharp as in his salad days, so his wake-up call comes from a hamlet in India. First a short miss call from his wife at 4.30, followed up with a long, decisive one at 5 that would see him pedal to Ajman town centre to pick up his newspaper bundles.
Bhaskar was on air on Club FM, a Malayalam radio channel, last week, dusting out memories, and sharing his experiences and philosophies. He laughed through the programme, with an innate innocence frothing in his words. His listeners, however, were left wiping their tears.
Khaleej Times traced the newspaper boy to a dingy place hard to call home in one of the dusty back lanes of Ajman's powerhouse area. Bhaskar is perma-tanned by his profession. He is unpretentious, transparent but reluctant to discuss his finances. 'I did not mean to publicise my woebegone days. But it's OK as long as it makes a story for you.'
The former taxi driver from Kerala's Punnayurkulam village, the birth place of the late poet Kamala Surayya, came to Ajman on a visa given by his brother-in-law. A couple of odd jobs later, he picked up his first bundle and has never looked back since. Bhaskar went on to become the man who smells newspaper.
The world has moved past; so have Ajman, its businesses, its people, including newspaper boys who now race from point to point on motorbikes. Dubai has the world's tallest building but Bhaskar still wasn't able to set his sights on it. Ajman is his universe; the subscription area his shaikhdom. He has not been to any other emirate except when he transited them on the way to airports in Sharjah and Dubai.
The kaleidoscopic cityscapes all around never beckoned him. Nor did they bother him. He was lonely in the crowd. Back home, he was lonely in a crowd of 11 siblings. No one helped.
He never had a place to call home in Ajman. He has been a perpetual guest in a company quarter whose inmates choke him with their love and benevolence. He is their Elappa, which in Malayalam translates to younger paternal uncle.
That's a name he worked hard to earn. He never troubled people; never waited for charities. People loved him. Groceries and restaurants refuse to charge him for short eats. He pays back to society in whichever way he can. At the stroke of midnight, he is handed bags full of foods by an Arab restaurant, which needs to dump them - by law - at the end of the day. Bhaskar takes them to distribute in his neighbourhood. His beneficiaries include families, bachelors and even roommates.
'I hate to generalise. We read about lots of bad things happening. But the world is still full of good people. Humanitarianism is not dead yet. I believe that giving is the noblest deed,' he said.
Police cars stop by to say hello and order supermarkets to give him whatever he needs. These are the toddlers of the eighties in the neighbourhood who aged along with him.
Bhaskar, who married late from a 'very poor family', wasn't able to build a roof over his wife, after 35 years in the land of petrodollars. The house his brothers had built for the joint family is so dilapidated that he says the sky, the stars and the elements peeping through the gaping roof are all family members.
One of his benefactors recently removed his slippers to beat him with for not building a house for himself. That's was a gesture of love and empathy. One or two missteps here and there in the early days as well as the luck factor are to blame. He had resigned from a hotel job he landed in 1981 thinking it holds no future. He was about to get an Ajman port job when an untoward incident that happened inside the port stalled the recruitment.
Newspaper turned out to be his natural - and final - port of call. Bhaskar, who was initially paid a pathetically low commission of Dh12 a day by his supermarket boss, never galloped with the time. It's this job that took the wind out of his sail. He blames the former boss's greed for his present predicament. He could never save money to buy a bike, so he still bicycles around, slipping in his last newspaper at 10.45am.
10.45am? Isn't it too late? His clients, mostly expatriates subscribing to newspapers from back home, are so accommodative they would patiently wait for him. In between he would not miss any chance to debate with his subscribers on issues of mutual interests, like cricket, politics etc.
The growth of newspapers in the UAE and the takeover of the supermarket by one of his colleagues brought him some relief. There were months when he could collect commission as high as Dh2,000 a month. But the Internet and smartphones suddenly put a spoke in his wheel. Twenty-four hours on the phone seem to be not enough for the millennials, he said. They don't have the time to read the print. Bhaskar, who reads the newspaper from cover to cover, laments the intellectual crisis the world faces.
'Reading is on the decline. The print is facing the sunset,' he prophesied. 'Even if it survives, the purpose will be different. Newspapers will be more like a carrier of flyers than news.'
The print may or may not survive, but Bhaskar is moving on. He would return home when his visa expires next December. He plans to pick up where his father had left, trading in coconuts in a small way.
A sense of failure is the last thing he wants to stuff inside his travel bag. 'I never want to feel regretful so I bridle my mind - just in case in the dead of night it attempts to calculate next month's commission. I close my eyes tight and let the sleep hug me. It is always another day, another dollar.'
'There are lessons learnt and imparted; hearts won and lost. No regrets, for I have lived straight from my heart. News is my passion. I love being part of a system delivering knowledge to people every morning. I never took leave except when I went to India occasionally.
'Even if someone had given me a better job, I would not have taken it up. This is what I wanted to do. It is my pleasure serving the community.'
'One thing I realised in life and want to pass on is that optimism alone won't take you anywhere. You need the motivation to fire up the engine.'
At the end of the interview, a tear hang loose from the corner of his eye, glowing in an all-familiar shade. It was as dark as the newspaper ink.
Honeymoon vow made to wife haunts for 18 long years
As he gets ready to wind up his life in Ajman in less than a year, there is something that haunts Bhaskar. It creeps into his conscience like a worm. It's wasn't a pledge; it wasn't an offer but a dream that he shared with his wife when she told him in the good old days of honeymoon that she wants to make just one visit to Ajman before he retires. Bhaskar and Jayaprasanna have been married for 18 years - but minus kids. By Malayali standards, it was certainly a late marriage as the groom had crossed 36, when they got married. 'I too have the dream,' he assured Jayaprasanna, whom he has met only 10 times in 18 years of marriage.Passport was taken - and renewed - but their dream never materialised.Looking back in anguish, he said: 'It's a job unfinished. She lived through all our difficulties riding on the Ajman dream. A sorry may not match her despair, still I am so sorry.'
'I am not greedy, so I am happy'
Thirty six years of nothingness have not dampened Bhaskar's love for life. He never frets and fumes about his predicament. Bhaskar has learned to laugh through all his miseries. 'I am at peace with my worthlessness. I am not tensed because I am not on a mis-sion to mint money,' Bhaskar said, recollecting an incredible incident in his life.He was throwing a paper into a villa as its owner, a Pakistani-American businessman, beckoned him. A shabby, smelly Bhaskar was aghast when the businessman hugged him and said: 'You seem to be perennially content. You ooze happiness despite your menial job. I have wealth but I am in search of peace and happiness.' 'I am not greedy, so I am happy,' Bhaskar thought to himself.
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