# (7) 30 Nov 2010, 05:56PM GMT+5:30: Charity:
Today my mom again made me some churrimurri -- a light snack mix of puffed rice, freshly grated carrot, diced onion, masala, etc., etc. It's delicious. As we ate she said it reminded her of my dad, and told me --
My dad grew up very poor. His dad made five rupees a month as an electrician (this is in the 1930s and 1940s). Every day the churrimurri guy went by with his cart and gave everyone in his family a serving. He never asked them for money. They gave him a rupee a month. And every night, the restaurant near them gave them some leftover soup.
When my dad was 20, in engineering college, staying in a free room by the grace of someone's charity, he knew seven families who would give him some dinner, so he had a set schedule to visit each of them on different nights of the week. Five of them just gave him a helping of whatever the family was having. Two gave him food that had gone off, stuff they wouldn't eat.
One day he was leaving one of those latter houses. His stomach seized up. He vomited. He dragged himself to his room and lay down. He couldn't get up.
He didn't eat for three days.
A friend of his came by on the third day and knocked. Dad was too weak to get up and open the door, so his friend got a pole so he could go around to the open window and poke the pole through to open the door. He got Dad a meal, and gave him his voucher for a month's worth of meals at his dorm...
I looked at my churrimurri, suddenly ill.
I will be writing more about how hard my mom and dad worked to get out of poverty, to get the financial power to help people and pay forward the generosity they'd received. Right now I just feel ill with unearned privilege.
Cogito, Ergo Sumana by Sumana Harihareswara is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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