....he said. [Son has gpay sir, I don't get all this].
We have an Iron Man we usually go to. Not the Avengers wala, but the guy who irons clothes. An Istry wala. I guess "presser" is the right term for it.
He operates from a small room which is also his home. He presses clothes outside the home on a table and his brother presses them on a table inside. There is a bed on which his son ( 20 something ) is usually seen sitting on. Next to it, his wife (in a ghoonghat) is seen sitting on the floor and cooking (I usually go to pick up clothes late in the evening).
Everytime I visit him, I am fascinated by the son and the wife. The son looks like a model. Always working on a high-end Dell laptop. The way he is built (well toned body), groomed & dressed usually - he'd make most onlookers admire him. Proper model/actor material. The wife is entrusted with the responsibility of maintaining the cash. Everytime one pays, the Ironman outside passes the money to his brother, who hands it over to the lady, who in turn keeps the money in a box and returns change, if any, while she continues cooking. The aroma of her cooking is always enticing & often reminds me of a prose from my primary school English textbook titled "Tit for Tat" (where a poor man with just a piece of bread smells something cooking nearby & puts his bread over the steaming food hoping that the steam entering his bread would make it tasty).
The other day I went to collect ironed clothes in a hurry and forgot to carry cash. I asked him if it would be okay to pay online via Paytm or Googlepay. That's when he called his son out with his phone so that I could pay. The handsome hunk came out and requested me to scan the barcode from his phone very courteously and thanked me for the payment. "What do you do?'' I asked him. "Sir, I work as a software development engineer,'' he replied swiftly, in a very polished tone, before heading back in to continue working on his laptop.
It is always heartwarming to know that the sons & daughters of most of today's maids, cooks, drivers, garbage pickers, auto drivers, pressers and other similar workers are ( or will ) progressing to the next level by means of proper education, thereby setting up a strong base for pivoting the lives of their family members for the better. Only apt to call all these parents who enable them to do so as Iron Men/Women.
Very apt description of the presser and his family. We all have seen them but you have described it just the way it is. I must admit. The young presser in my building is also quite good looking. ☺️ I suppose the signs of a country developing is when you see next generations with better education and better jobs.
ReplyDeleteYes true. That coupled with steadily increasing diginity of labour also means all jobs pay well are respected too.
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