I placed my order and was given a token. The token read, 17. I ran my eyes across the stuffy room and made up my mind to wait outside in the open air until my turn would come. I walked out to the lounge and sat on a bench. I sat facing the entrance of the burger corner. I saw the girl was still lingering about carrying a few rose stalks as she pleaded a young couple to buy her roses. Though I couldn't hear her but could only figure it out from her gestures. After nodding his head in "No" the boy whipped out a Rupee 10 note from the side pocket of his trousers and extended it to her. Initially she appeared to refuse. Perhaps she wanted the money in exchange of her roses and not in charity but soon I noticed that she had accepted that charity of Rupees 10 offered to her as the boy didn’t take any rose stalk from her and he scurried away. The next moment, she was hovering over the lounge-like a butterfly until she found for herself another flower to sit upon. This time another pair of a boy and a girl! The flower girl lifted her hand that she held the rose stalk in. But, the girl from the pair gestured her hand in the way of shooing her away but, the flower girl persisted, paced up and down the lounge as the pair did and finally she murmured something.
The boy took out a Rupee 10 note from his wallet and thrust it into the girl’s hand. This time the girl took the money with resignation and moved on. She soon stumbled into the two teenage boys to whom she held out her hand full of roses and the boys stopped short as the roses touched one of the boys on his chest who was holding a cold drink glass in his hand. He handed his glass to the boy walking with him, fumbled out a few coins from his pocket and placed them on the girl's palm. The girl gave a look at her palm as if counted the coins and then skittered away with her rose stalks whose number always remained the same.
I rose from my seat realizing that my turn would have come by then. As I walked towards the burger corner I was thinking about what I had just seen - it was how a florist was made to turn into a beggar which she accepted out of her innocence.