The sight of homelessness
I’ve been walking on these new-to-me streets of Toronto and it brings some of the images from television shows but it is an entirely unknown feeling. They say Canadians are polite and niceness flows through every part of this country but that is a bullshit cliche. It’s not that people are impolite but it seems that everyone is trapped in the ideal of polite success but terrified of getting deprived of material comfort. And you can’t blame them — it is an uncomfortable place to be in if you don’t have the means to take care of yourself. The cold weather, the long stretches of roads, the expensive prices of everything, the mirage of health care system, the political correctness that prevents you from calling a spade a spade and leaves you guessing. Nothing about this place is bearable if you don’t have the means to live comfortably.
I was walking from some part of the city back to my condo. The city is beautiful in parts. Mostly the old parts. We still have rulers — The banks, The Church, The companies with their smiley posters of unrealistic lives making people burry further down into the expectation of appearing in order, happy. Anyway, during my walks I’ve been noticing quite a lot of homeless people. They are not a lot relative to how many I used to see back in Delhi. But the ones here create a starker image against the backdrop in which they exist, not co-exist. They just exist here. They just live amongst us. Like bugs in a video game, like glitches in the matrix. They are an extremely discomforting sight, a disturbance against the pure image of striving towards perfection. Tall buildings, old and new, imperial glory interspersed with wannabe New York-ism, sound of sports cars, middle aged fit white people (immigrants included) jogging and cycling, smell of scrumptious food, glass after glass of luxury teasing you from the pathway, people dressed smartly, smelling sweet, sipping coffee, there is no dearth of coffee, you can get one within five minutes of wherever you are, and against all this a sight of a woman sitting on the pavement, a young man hovering mindlessly in circles, an old black man with a broken back holding on to a shopping cart, a crippled old woman with a sign board asking for help, stench of cigarettes and cannabis mixed with the sight of complete hopelessness, the sound of a sports car competing against the sound of a crazed man yelling at the red light carrying a sign that says ‘I am your worker’ or ‘Believe in Jesus’. This society is so free that it gives the freedom to these people to freely exist in a form worse than death. I will not survive one day on these streets. Not one god damn day. I really wish all of them should be accorded the option of death by morphine. A just society can at least consider this much. And then at least the rest of us won’t have to suffer the sight of them anymore. We would just have our silent misery to deal with, everyone will just have to contain their suffering to themselves.
I was walking back and I heard a very loud shout of one man abuse another. I thought it must be a crazy, homeless person and it was. But the sound didn’t come from him. It was from a man who was confronted by a homeless person, not even confronted, rather shocked and couldn’t handle it. The homeless person probably lurched up to his face and asked for change. The well dressed man lost it and yelled out ‘what the fuck!’. What the fuck…? Really! The arrogance. The homeless person started towards this man and it seemed like a nasty fight could break out. The homeless person was a large, lean man. He could have easily been utilized somewhere in society. Or maybe not, how do I know? Maybe he has a bad back like mine but is also unlucky in a way I can’t imagine. Anyway, I think he could have killed the smart mouth punk. As this homeless man approached him, instead of sticking to his arrogance, the shit started retreating, stepping backwards, but still kept yelling at the homeless man. He was performing for the streets. He couldn’t hold the disturbance in him any longer, he couldn’t handle the misplaced existence of that homeless man.
After a few seconds of drama the homeless man went on his way. He switched back to an earnest style of asking literally everyone he saw for change. He asked me as well. I just shook my head. He asked the next person then. It was the same question — ‘do you have change?’
