People refer to her by the names of burimai, buri or thakuma. She occupies the same corner of the make-shift vegetable market everyday by the filthy culvert. Her sparse white hair is gathered in a small bun at the nape of her neck, and a shroud-like sari wraps her reed-thin frame.
She sits with her wicker basket of vegetables with a tattered umbrella over her head as a shield from the sun or the rain, the latter being aplenty in Guwahati. Old age is etched over her Mongoloid features, and her sun-burnt skin stretches like a shriveled, dried parchment over her body. She comes every morning with a sparse supply of odd mix of vegetables and fruits, and leaves in the evening by the tracker cars that go towards Lokhra.
Bent double by age and with limbs that trembled always, she waits patiently whole day till the last of her drumsticks or bananas has been brought. Though her fare does not match up to the quality of the stock available with the other vegetable vendors, kind buyers who have seen her by the culvert for years, buy her garden’s produce.
Sometimes, burimai’s patrons try to engage her in a conversation and ask about her whereabouts. They ask her about her family and why she works at such an old age. Burimai gives different replies to everyone, as if she takes pleasure in spinning a new story around herself every day. She was a loving, lone grandmother on certain days burdened with the responsibility of half a dozen grandchildren on her frail shoulders.
On a few other days, she was all alone in the world with only a patch of vegetable garden as her own. Sometimes, she was a bereaved mother whose son worked as a security guard in Hyderabad and never came to visit her. Burimai tells these stories with equal enthusiasm to all her listeners, conveniently ignoring the fact that she has told a different story to another listener the same day. Her face undergoes varying emotions as she speaks, and sometimes lights up with a smile revealing a few tobacco-stained teeth.
People have assumed that she is senile, and very often talk about the day when they would find her dead by her wicker basket , her umbrella shading her lifeless body. However, burimai continues to occupy her place by the culvert day by day, occasionally shooing away the stray dog that might take her place at night. She is now immune to the stench that emanates from the filthy culvert, or the army of mosquitoes that feed on her famished body all day. On certain days, a few urchins run away with her money, or a cow blissfully munches away on her vegetables when she inadvertently closes her eyes due to fatigue and old age.
On such days, burimai’s fellow vendors and patrons offer her money or food, but she stoically declines them all. She comes with a fresh stock the next day, and accepts money only in exchange of her goods. When one of her patrons asked her the reason for her impractical obtuseness when she was plainly in need of money, she replied, “I am a hero, you see! Heroes are not those people alone who are praised in textbooks and whose busts are installed in city squares. Heroes are those who rise above the daily grind of lives, and those who preserve dignity in their tattered clothes. I will make my only granddaughter a hero, too. She is very pretty and has such a melodious voice…”
