Revathi is cooking a hurried lunch for the family as her 8
year old daughter struggles with the makeshift trolley they use to ferry water
to their makeshift dwelling. Revathi works as a sweeper at an International
Bank and her mandate is to flush the toilet once again after each user has
flushed it. Wasting away her entire month’s water needs every day. She feels
she has slapped her daughter each time she pressed the lever. The fact that she
isn’t even worth a chair to the organization, for she sits on an inverted
bucket, doesn’t rub it in as much as the water that pulls at her entire
existence, ravaging and raping her mentally a thousand times a month. Shouldn’t
she get used to it? She would as a person but not as a mother.
Saavant has had a difficult month. His mother has taken ill
and his wife is nursing their newborn and cannot go to work. Tired as he was
after the double shift, he gratefully took up the temporary job of serving
drinks at a Charity Event for the night. The money was respectable and he would
be given transportation. Little did he know that the bitterness he would bring
back home with him that night is going to stay with him forever. The Scotch,
the dresses, the food, he had seen before. What he hadn’t seen was
incapacitated drunk men throwing away money at paintings in one-upmanship and
calling it charity. Their claiming to be doing it for the needy almost made him
throw up. Unknown to Saavant, these experiences are taking down his moral
structure one brick at a time.
It is not the affluence of others that affects a person of a
decent enough moral fiber, it is the vulgarity with which at times some of the
fortunate ones treat the less privileged. Treating someone as non-existent is
tolerable, a folly but a tolerable one, as long as you do not spit in the space
they occupy.
This disregard of sensitivities and ‘have it, flaunt it’
attitude can not only be catalytic to petty crimes like mugging but at times to
more heinous crimes like murders, robberies and rapes. 
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