The day shimmered in the April heat. Vehicles of all shapes and sizes whizzed or trundled past, making the service road shudder at regular intervals. This made for a slightly unsteady walk. The big double road (to borrow a Bangalore phrase), was at its busiest. Walking at four o’ clock gives a perspective which is very different from driving on the same road, where one is vigilant and needs to remain focused ahead.

I had to rush to keep pace with the lady who walked beside me. She was the community organizer deputed to guide me and knew the neighborhood very well. I was on my way to interacting with women who were associated with an economic empowerment program. As a development worker and social researcher, I was looking forward to understanding the world of these women who struggle to make a living while trying to make the most of their capacity, which has been limited, often severely, by circumstance. The world of the underprivileged is an alternate reality. The usual paradigms and matrices we are accustomed to, often fail us here. What we see as observers becomes but a hazy trailer when one actually enters the spaces which never fail to surprise and sober.

“What do these women do for a living?”, I asked casually.

“Garlic”, came the answer.

“They clean garlic?” I asked further.

“Yes, they deal in garlic..” my companion replied, a tad wearily.

“Oh, so they peel it and pack it for sale..?” I persisted, as I still wasn’t sure what she meant.

“Why don’t you see and ask for yourself? It may surprise you when you do find out…” She smiled. A smile that spread from her mouth to her eyes, crinkling them up. Suddenly, the plain, sunburnt face looked pretty..

We entered a narrow lane which could have been easily missed between the row of shops huddled close together. These were shops where scrap was bought and sold, as were old newspapers and plastic for recycling. Scrunched together in a monotony of translucent plastic and vivid blue, they assumed the appearance of never-ending humdrum episodes of a boring story, were it to assume a concrete form.

Dodging children carrying pieces of wood and water in containers, I tried to make my way into the lane without attracting too much attention. My new shoes were slipping and some water did make its way into the skin-colored bellies, which looked ridiculous in their attempt to skirt stones, sharp-edged tiles and the narrow and sloshy, mud-drenched route. It felt like a trek I was undertaking but with party footwear.

We reached our destination. A cool, dark room filled with the strong aroma of garlic. Garlic pods were everywhere, in white plastic bags stored under the bed, in the corners, on the bed and in the kitchen. I also recollect some lying outside the room and some more stacked up in the lane which led to this house.

My interview over, I rushed to ask the question which was not properly answered in the course of my interview as I was keener to establish other details more relevant to the narrative I was seeking from the lady.

“What exactly do you do with this garlic ?”, I finally demanded of her, as soon as I switched off my voice recorder.

“We buy this garlic in the wholesale market and clean it at home. Every morning, we take it with us, and go from one building to another and ask each tenement for the unwanted plastic that they wish to dispose off. The old oil containers, cola bottles, plastic sheets and milk pouches are handed over to us and we give them an equivalent of garlic in return. We sell the plastic to the shops around here, all of which buy it for recycling.”

This a barter system in place. Garlic is a necessity for household cooking. Dry garlic has a long shelf life and it makes good sense to exchange useless plastic in the house for something that is not very cheap if one buys it at the greengrocer’s. This system also ensures that the plastic used at home is not disposed where it cannot be retrieved and an economic value is attached to it, thereby bringing it under the possibility of being recycled.

Impressed as I was with the lady’s life story, which was revealed to me in disjointed glimpses when we spoke about economic empowerment, this little known fact added to the respect I felt toward her for her contribution to the sustenance of this fragile ecology. The way an ancient system was aiding the perpetuation of a now-urgent need for the recycling of plastic was also a revelation.

There is much that is going wrong in the world today. The environment we live in is severely threatened by careless human activities. There is a lot happening around that leaves one feeling that we may be hurtling toward a point of no-return. It is a scary scenario that confronts us when we read and hear about the degradation that continues unabashedly and seems to be on the rise.

In this backdrop of chaos, a little fact that was stumbled upon by serene circumstance makes for a reason to smile. There are some things which render the entire situation if not overtly optimistic, at least not entirely without hope.

A middle-aged, reticent and hardworking woman became for me, a symbol of the precious corner of the world that makes this sometimes-burdensome reality, a little more bearable. All in the course of a hot, humid and tiring mid-April afternoon.