A Million-Dollars

It was a sunny evening in my hometown, and I was walking on the roads of the nearest neighbourhood next to mine. I observed an old lady, aged 70+, walking around the street and collecting papers. I thought she was mad.

Since that was the only way out of my street into the market, I saw her almost every day doing the same thing - collecting papers and storing them in her house, which was also on the side of the road I passed daily.

One day, I asked my mom why she was collecting papers from the road, and my mom said she had been seeing the same thing since her childhood.

I was curious, so I asked my grandfather the same question. He said that the old lady was once a fisherwoman, just like her neighbours, but her kids and husband had left to different places in search of money and never came back for her. She cried and wept for years about them to everyone and started collecting papers on the road, thinking that they were money. She would shout at people who threw them on the road, saying that they didn't respect or care.

The local tea shop owner, just next to her house, would leave a small steel glass of tea and a bun on her doorstep each morning. I guess that was the only source of food she could get.

Sometimes, I have seen children making paper airplanes and throwing them toward her to watch her run after them.

After many years, one day, while passing through the same road, I saw a group of men, around 3 PM in the noon, at her house, holding her hands and legs, and placing her on a coconut mat. It was just her body; she was dead. All I could see on the mat was a pile of papers she had collected and her body. They took her body, along with the papers she had collected all these years.

Since I was not from the same neighbourhood as she was, I passed by silently.

After many years, when I walked the same road, I saw a vacant spot where her house used to be. Someone had demolished her house and was building something over it.

All this happened when I was 24 years old. I'm 32 now. I don't know her name, and I don't know anything about her. All I could relate to was the tragic loneliness she felt when everyone left her in search of money. It must have devastated her mentally in many ways. She started collecting papers, believing that they were money. She wanted to get her family back by earning more than what they could all earn. She wanted to make an effort all her life. It felt so heartbreaking for me to see that, with all the money she had collected in her house, she used to sleep on the veranda because there was no more space inside to sleep. She was cremated with all the papers she had collected, 30 years of her tragic life.

For her, it was millions of dollars. For the people around, they were just newspapers.

At the end of the day, the million-dollar papers and she were both mixed into a pile of greyish ash, inseparable and indistinguishable.

Sometimes, when I see paper blowing along the street, I think of her hands reaching to catch it.