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One at a Time
“WANT TO BUY some papaya?” Late that evening, the fruit man brings a bagful across the road. “Sweet and nice, guaranteed.”
“Not right now,” I say, “but wait till you hear this.” And I tell him about Mayor SLY and the wedding and the guests who will be staying at the Palm Tree Hotel.
The fruit man listens carefully. He wiggles and waggles his head to show me that he gets it.
“See that cart?” He points across the road. The fruit on his cart is arranged in perfect pyramids — guavas, sapotas, oranges, papayas. Each pyramid has many at the bottom, many more in between and one on the very, very top.
“How do you think you make a pile like that?” he demands.
“Carefully?” says Reeni.
The fruit man laughs. “One at a time,” he says. “One at a time. It’s the only way. Come on. Get busy. Start piling up your fruit.”
“What do you mean?” I ask. “What fruit?” He’s speaking in riddles now, just like my parents.
“I mean you need people on your side,” he says. “So you must tell as many people as you can. We don’t have much time left.”
He may be a riddle-talker, but the fruit man is right.
I get busy. I talk to Anil and Reeni. The people we know are kids, so that is who we tell. All day long in school, we tell-tell-tell. We tell our friends and classmates to tell their parents and their aunties and uncles and grandparents and friends and the people next door. Tell them that the only reason the mayor wants Book Uncle off the pavement is to clean up the road for his daughter’s wedding.
How fair is that? Does the mayor think he owns every street corner? Is Book Uncle no more than debris? Clutter? Tell-tell-tell, we urge them. Keep up the telling.
In the next two days, we set out again and again, up and down St. Mary’s Road.
“Don’t vote for Mayor SLY,” we tell people. “Vote for Karate Samuel. He cares about Book Uncle. Didn’t he say so on TV?”
By Sunday evening when the parrots have settled down to sleep in the raintree branches, we drag ourselves back to Horizon Apartment Flats. My feet hurt. Reeni has a blister on her heel. But we are wearing big smiles, because we have done good work and maybe, just maybe, Mayor SLY will lose this election, and Book Uncle will be back on the pavement with his books.