Two phones or the story or an eternal migration

It was a long day at Keshiary, Kaleidoscope's new workplace. The upcoming university visit, two hours of student seminar and the previous nughta extravaganza made him tired. Yet, the call of fallen sal leaves their yellow colour, and smell made him rethink the straight back home. The Kushgeria haat has this irristible call that is too difficult to ignore he thought just when two of his partners decided to answer the call. A toto - the electric rickshaw, the last resort of employment was carrying a lone passenger answered their waving hands. Would you take us to Kushgeria haat? Yes, the old man driving the toto replied, kaleidoscope took the front seat beside the old man. The gentle breeze of late January, fallen leaves of sal tree, forests, lateritic dusty country road was everything that an otherwise urban eye would have looked for. The yellow greenish forest border from a distance had and irristible call just as the old man whispered the stories of garam than with an ever sceptical and yet submissive words as he touched his forehead and whispered a prayer crossing one of the groves - the garam than. "What is a God? Any stone with a bright vermillion becomes a God, God is the one we have never seen but is the one we are taught to believe by our forefathers." He continued to narrate how little he has, little home, little farm land that lays fallow most of the year, a little toto with a very little savings, that makes him live. 

Kushgeria haat arrived, Kaleidoscope got down, he too wanted to do some marketing before calling off a day. The haat is smaller than the one before Makar Sangkranti but as colourful as it was. Kaleidoscope wanted to go back to the sweet vendor where last time they ventured. Porks, with chopped heads of pigs was spectacular, and profound and it was not there during the Makar haat, or was it something Kaleidoscope missed? 

The return journey was even more spectacular as they took an unusual Auto - something that doesn't ply here! It stopped, and it was carrying two ladies. One, younger than the other, visibly sick because of motion sickness and the other married, skinny and visibly poor. The sister in law was taking her brother's wife to Tamilnadu where she works now. The elder lady, her brother's wife looked tensed, holding two phones. One with a rubberband and other a smartphone. She will join in the ever increasing number of migrant labourers to work at school site down south. Perhaps a smartphone next time, replacing the phone with rubber band? Did they see homebound, the movie? Will they know that Kushgeria haat, fallen sal leaves are romance for another migrant, an elite one? As they get down, a pair of parrots shouted, on a dead tree trunk, the smell of fallen sal leaves was intoxicating and an evening of a different migrant life started to emerge with a promise, not quite the way it is going to happen to the Tamilnadu goers in a general compartment with cramped and sqeezed bodies.