Deepavali is a good time for counting one’s blessings. The blessings of those whom we love and have loved and who have blessed us with their love, the love timeless, joyful, eternal as Light…

And so, O Gentle Reader, in this mood sentimental on this Deepavali day of 8 November 2026,  here’s a small anecdote of a blessing I was blessed to receive way back in early 1992, when in Mumbai. (It was published in Indian Express on 25th May 1993).

Happy Deepavali!

We were tired, it was raining cats and dogs, and late in the night; ample reason, therefore, to take a taxi to drive back to Malad from Nariman Point. We stopped for the traffic lights at the Marine Drive junction. The windows were up, the rain drummed on furiously… and suddenly I realized that for some time there had been an added rhythm, an over-beat, to the rain’s staccato complexities.

I looked out the window and saw her: a small wet figure, stringy hair pasted to her scalp, her cheeks glistening an unreal red in the signal’s light. The rest of her was lost in shades of grey and black, though a flash of headlamps revealed, for an instant, a tiny, elfin face. She was rapping on the glass with her knuckles. The driver looked around briefly and then turned away, disinterested.

I was about to turn away myself when the girl beat a frantic tattoo with her palm. Irritated, I began to wave her away, when she raised her right hand and I saw she held a great big bouquet of roses.  The stalks were bound together with twine, the buds shielded from the rain by an inverted plastic bag.

And suddenly I remembered: I wanted roses. I needed roses! It was Her birthday.

I quickly unwound the window and asked: “How much?”

“Two rupees each, thirty for the bunch!” she replied, a trace of the South in her soft Hindi.

“Tchah! Call it fifteen for the bunch and I’ll have them all.”

“No!” she wailed. And then she stuck her head in through the window and said: “Just for you, only for you, I’ll sell the bunch for twenty-five.”

“Twenty, then, not a paisa more,” I said firmly, sensing, if not victory, honourable compromise.

And the traffic lights chose that moment to turn green, and suddenly we were hurtling through and turning right and speeding down Marine Drive, and her despairing cry of acceptance rang in my ears. I turned and peered through the rear window, but couldn’t see a thing in the dissolving red-yellow glare.

“Can’t be helped,” said my friend quietly, sensing my anguish. “I know,” I said, feeling no better for it.

And then I saw her: a racing figure on the treacherous sidewalk, she was dodging round people, scampering across intersections, leaping over puddles…and now she was on the main road itself, darting between vehicles amidst screeching brakes and blaring horns.

I turned around and yelled at the driver to stop. “I know! I see her!” he yelled back, but there was no way we could have stopped in that traffic.

I looked back. She had fallen back, tiring. She must already have run half-a-kilometre; yet, incredibly, she kept moving, her eyes never swerving from our taxi, the bouquet held aloft like an Olympic torch.

And then, at the very last moment, the traffic lights ahead turned to red, and even as we screeched to a halt, I stuck my foolish head out of the window. There she was, putting on a final burst of speed, for she had seen the lights too. And then she was at the window, her gasps audible even above the thunder of revving engines.

Triumphantly, she held out the bouquet. Wordlessly, I accepted the flowers, and she looked down at the notes I had placed in her little palm.

She looked up, eyes shining, and smiled at us, just a flash of teeth in that tiny dark face in the red-yellow rain, and it was like seeing the sun emerge from behind monsoon clouds.

“God bless you, sir,” she whispered.

And then she was gone.