In the muddy construction site of a soaked monsoon, lakhi in her dirty, filthy and wet saree was walking down from the top floor of the building for which she carried the processed cement from the floor beneath.
The free bird that Lakhi is, climbing down the stairs, hardly realizes the happenings around her and enjoys singing the rajasthani songs which her Mai taught her when she was very young. Now at 19 it seems she has left her childhood way back. Suddenly, a voice from within one of the flats which is getting plastered came :
“Ae Jaafar, sala tum logo se itna kaam bhi dhang se hota nahi hai. Tere ko andar wali room ko ghisne ke lie bheja tha idhar bahar kya kar raha hai.”
Lakhi looks at the site supervisor who is scolding Jaafar for reasons that are out of Jaafar’s control. A love lost look in the eyes of a man wooing a woman is the same whether it is in the dirty inroads of a messy slum or in the posh gardens of a Kingly palace.
Jaafar not even looking at the person bullying him was watching Lakhi climb down the stairs to fetch another lot of the cement. Supervisor Nilesh was trying to avoid Lakhi who was giving him piercing looks for all that had gone unsaid before. Jaafar Oblivious to this, standing on the 12th floor of the building which in its coarse cemented look appeared as bad as the looks in Nilesh’s eyes, was just looking at a girl whom he so dearly loved.
After Lakhi was out of site Jaafar went in to plaster the walls in the rooms of the flat but could not get Lakhi out of his mind even for a second.
Jaafar wanted to express his love and desire of Lakhi to her but the hardworking rustic hardly knew how to talk to girls. Jaafar had been looking at her for the last 5 months and now the construction was going to get over in a month’s time and he knew not when would he meet Lakhi again. Lakhi silently watched all this as she flirted with half the men working there.
Jaafar at last could not resist expressing his feelings and on the wall that he was plastering, taking the broken piece of a red brick wrote “Jaafar Mia ki Aashiki”, a thing that all the other workers were to mock at in the month to come. Lakhi came to know about Jaafar’s writing on the wall and was sure for whom was it written.
Mr. Mehta stays on the 12th floor of the most elegant building in the city “Hirani Palms” with his wife and kids. The company that he owns is located in the best part of the city but it hardly gives him the time to go and enjoy the beauty of the world. He generally leaves for the office at 8 in the morning gets back by the time his children are fast asleep. Children generally spend with him their weekends. Today after coming back his house at an exceptionally late time of midnight, he went in the rooms of nisha and nidhi, his 2 sweet daughters, saw the wall which read some scrambled alphabets saying “Ni – Ni Loves Daddy” which brought a glimmer of fatherly love in the eyes of this rich man.
The wall made two people feel loved, Lakhi before a year felt equally touched with the writings of Jaafar on the same wall which was neither colored nor polished.
(This blog is inspired from a building which i visited yesterday while searching a home for myself. There was a wall on the top floor that read "jaafar mia ki aashiki")
