Gender Gap

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Palanniappam Veenda bowed his head and tried to meditate as he walked to Siva Settlement. Instead he saw only a woman’s face. His gentle, patient mother had steadfastly refused to leave her family for the Settlement, even after she had almost been kidnapped. But she had been the last. Since she had died three years ago, Pala had not been alone with a woman except in his dreams.

Sometimes, in one of his many moods of self-doubt, he worried about his unattractiveness. He had pleasing features that could have been designed by a sculptor, but his beauty was of a fine-boned sort not much admired in men, and he was rather thin and short. He was too intelligent, however, to really believe that lack of size or muscle made him uninteresting. He knew what the problem was. It was lack of money.

Dry grasses jostled in a faint breeze, as if they were elbowing each other to get to a place with rain and flowers. Pala raised his eyes and idly wondered why the breeze couldn’t make itself useful in the stifling heat. The breeze finally brought him the smell of cooking fires near the stream where he could see beggars setting up camp. They were burning aromatic branches of neem and acacia, and anything else they could pick up. The overtones of burning garbage were not so pleasant. Pala sighed.

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