___________________I was stuck on the same flavour of icecream since december, but I was licking away anyways--actually, because I had made a variation on the almond chocolate--viennese coffee sundae. What I had wanted was one scoop of viennese, one of peanut butter crunch and one of viennese again--and of course the hot chocolate and the nuts. But they told me peanut butter crunch was not a big sell and so it was not being made anymore. So I varied my usual with a scoop of thai coconut cream, in between. It tasted real delicate, almost not there flavour in between my cinamonny coffee licks and thick chocolate slurps.

I was still scooping out the nuts wetting them in chocolate and ice cream as the auto I sat in started its bumpy ride down Kasturba Gandhi. This was my twice weekly trip, which I always began with my sundae lunch in hand. It kept me busy on the road and unmindful of the drivers lurching forward and back.

Within a few minutes, right by Bharitya Vidya Bhavan , we invariably and fairly comfortably got sandwiched in a traffic jam. And beggars scampered through the little bit of road space and put their faces into every window they could. Two little girls were in mine and I sat there a little dazed wondering whether or not I should, why I should. And then why not.

Then also why had I not earlier. and would I then have to each time I passed……? And finally, how to. How to open the bag and begin to remove a coin. I am not certain why it should be embarrassing but it was.

I looked sidewise at the girl, in her ragged shirt down to her bony brown knee wrapped totteringly round the other, looking insistently up at me. Her hair I thought looked not too different than my untidy thatch, a dusty bunch of sun gold curls upon her tiny bony, quite vacant face.

By now my hand was reaching into my bag and fishing blindly for the feel of a coin and the traffic started to move on when a fat five slid under my groping finger, my auto was screeching away. The girl hung on at my side , followed by another tinier girl--when I flung the coin out, it reached neither her fingers nor hers. There was plenty of screeching all around in the noon day and I sat back to finish my trip. I wondered if anyone got the coin and who? what if the latecomer got it? The thought of whether it fell to the ground, and of whether one of them had to bend to get it quibbled at each other in my mind. I quit this runaround ponder and decided that She would nail the bit of a metal coin with her Owners eye, the traffic flow out, and she would claim the piece.

Frequently, by the time I get comfortable parting with my penny, the pause in the atmosphere has lifted and something rushed and desperate has filled it. The moment does not share, it rips apart and lays bare--business. Of life, of being left alone.Of demanding, and getting one's own. There is power in the asking eyes .