Balaji and Lalaji : A Kindness Story

Years ago, in the early nineteen nineties, I was working in Kochi. A bachelor then, I used to have my breakfast from a roadside shop run by a person from Madurai named Sethu. This Sethu used to send to my place of work a parcel of four idlis and a vada every morning through his helper boy named Balaji, aged then about 14.

Balaji was a smart, active boy. One day I asked him to tell me about his home, parents, and the place he came from. He said he was from a small town in South Tamilnadu.

His father died when he was eight, bringing his schooling to a premature end. To help his mother, who toiled as a house maid, to bring up him and his four siblings, he came to Kochi and joined Sethu's pavement idly shop as his assistant.

The small boy opened his small heart to me and revealed his intense longing to have a ‘tiny hotel’ of his own. “If only I have three thousand rupees, I will go to my hometown and start an eatery on a push cart. But from where and whom will I get this big amount?" he said and went away. The sadness in his eyes, which carried this distant dream, touched my heart, and I decided to help him.

The following morning I readied the amount and waited for Balaji. He came and handed me my breakfast and was about to leave when I thrust a sealed cover containing six five-hundred-rupee notes into his hand.

The boy was speechless when he opened the envelope. The very next day he left his job and went home to turn a new leaf—tea-leaf—in his life. The person who inspired me to help the boy Balaji was Mr. Jim Corbett. In his book ‘My India,’ he dedicated a chapter to one named Lalaji.

Jim Corbett found this person Lalaji lying on the banks of Ganga, literally dying of cholera at a place called Mohameh Ghat in Bihar. He took the hopelessly sick person to his home and nursed him back to health.

When he fully recovered, Lalaji narrated to Mr. Corbett how, since his grain business failed, he was wandering from town to town like a beggar. When the time came for Lalaji to leave, Jim Corbett placed in his hand five hundred rupees and asked him to restart his business. Five hundred rupees in nineteen twenties was not a small sum.

Lalaji took the amount and left after touching the feet of his benefactor with his head, promising to repay the amount in a year. Lalaji revived his business, became well-to-do again, and returned the amount to Mr. Corbett within a year.

Though I never met Balaji again, I came to know that he started his own tea-cum-snack shop, (as he dreamed as a teenage boy) and came up in life. I was also told that he built his own house and his mother was having a cool retired life in his care.