Four Indian Men One Saturday Afternoon

One was sleeping on a marble-coated bench, and two eating lunch right next to him. Right by a quiet river where I was relaxing and spending my quiet time and reviewing verses.

The oldest came first on foot and lay down to sleep. Then came the two lunch-ers; the older of them who looked like he was in his sixties and having HBP or high blood pressure, for short, came along on bicycle, followed by the younger one, probably about half his age, who cycled toward the older man.

The older lunch-er took out a bottle hidden in a little nook. Lots of rubbish, I found out later, were beside that water bottle inside that nook. I believe the bottle was deliberately kept from view between a steel twin-girder bridge that supports a 300mm-diameter painted steel water-pipe that spans across the river.

The older of the two lunch-ers who looked older than he actually was (I thought to myself) and overweight with a huge beer-belly, drained off a green soft plastic bag containing water that was hanging from the left handle of his bicycle into the empty 1.5L coke bottle. The younger man's bike was carelessly left lying flat on the ground. My thoughts were this young man would most likely end up overweight with similar medical conditions years down the track like the older guy. (Indians, at least in Singapore, have been reported to die at a younger age than the other races; they are also more prone to heart disease and hypertension than other races)

Both men sat down under the cooling shade provided by the trees that early afternoon when the sun was blazing hot. Each of them opened up their three Singapore-dollar lunch which included:

• 2 big plastic-coated packets of white rice with a minute amount of curried mutton inside. The rice portion was three times what I would eat at lunch!
• 2 plastic bags of meshed green vegetables
• 2 plastic bags of very watery vegetable soup
• 2 plastic bags of 3 to 4 small pieces of pappadam crackers
• 1 plastic bag of red curry gravy
• 1 plastic carton (80mm x 80mm x 35mm deep) plain yoghurt ($1 worth)

Everything was wrapped in plastic!

I tried conversing with them but to little or no avail. So I only prayed for them.

As construction workers, their daily wages were about S$3.50-4.00 per head. The younger man complained, "Singapore no good!" "Why?" I asked. Next thing was, he rambled away in an Indian-accented language. I could not figure out anything that he said as both guys spoke neither English nor Malay since they were from India.

Both lunch-ers ate with unwashed hands (most unhygienic, I reckoned to myself). The younger guy gobbled up his lunch very quickly, interspersed with a few mouthful of water from another filled 1.5L coke bottle which he had filled beforehand. I saw him picking up the plastic bags and putting them on top of the emptied plastic coated paper wrapper. Before I could see him he had thrown the lot away; I later discovered to my horror, he had conveniently chucked them over the river bank. The plastic bags sank almost immediately but the paper wrapper was still afloat; the latter would eventually also sink to the bottom of the river.

A fourth Indian man on a bike stopped by and starting conversing with the older of the two men; he spoke in Tamil, I believe. The older guy was just finishing off his food when the former rode away.

Drinking from the coke bottle at least a couple of times during his eating, the older man finished his lunch in twice the amount of time. He too did exactly the same thing with the rubbish he had created as did the younger man, i.e., he threw the garbage he has created right over the hand rail into the river!

“Wow!” I thought to myself. Here were the polluters and extremely careless people who lived from hand to mouth from day to day. They have no idea that they were polluting the environment and, also indirectly, themselves. This disgusting thing they did (throwing rubbish anyhow they like) despite the fact that a regularly-emptied rubbish bin was only about 10 meters away, a fact that I was certain they knew about since I'd seen the older man and the fourth man several times before.

The kind of food they ate and the way they ate it is reflective of the kind that most foreign workers take during their stint in Singapore. Although sufficient to satisfy their hunger needs, they are in a way not building long-term health, I envisaged. But then, how else can the poor really eat? Well, with the right knowledge and of course desire, I think that they can still eat quite healthily and hygienically on a shoe-stringed budget!