It was six in the morning, we left Hyderabad and had a long distance ahead to go until we reached Nagpur.
On the outskirts the first fires of the tea vendors lit next to the road appeared. Around those fires, several men, almost all of them Rickshaw Walhs- bicitaxi-newly raised drivers, talked while they heated their hands.
I asked the driver of my car that we stop to have a tea and talk with those men. It was very cold and the fog was so thick that the rising sun still could not penetrate the forms of things, which were weak and distant to my eyes.
Emerging from the center of the fog suddenly appeared a dark spot that advanced towards us. Little by little the silhouette of a Rickshaw pushed by a man was formed. The man greeted us and I approached to return the greeting. The Rickshaw had the capota thrown to protect its occupant from the cold. But I could see that who occupied him, was a beautiful girl, who ate a sweet and was comfortably sitting in the passenger armchair.
That girl, as beautiful as poor, seemed to me a little queen who was traveling inside her magical float to some remote place outside the maps and time. A girl-real girl who had decided to leave her distant and mysterious kingdom behind that morning.
I praised the beauty of the girl and the man who had arrived by pushing the Rickshaw thanked me telling me that it was one of her three daughters. He added that all of them were beautiful and asked me not to move from that place because I would bring them all to know them.
Meanwhile around us the Rickshaw Walhs had been grouped together who were before being surrounding the morning fire waiting to have their first tea. They looked at the girl, who was happy because she knew them and told her things that made her smile.
They all had their home very close to there, in a small town located next to the road where their children lived. To show it, one after another, they took their rickshaws and went to look for them. While I waited for them to return, I took this photograph to the girl-reew that smiled at me and looked timidly.
Soon, headed by the girl's father, all the Rickshaw Wallahs appeared with their children. They were loaded in their arms, they showed them, photograph them and thanked me. We were all happy and, before saying goodbye, we wish ourselves more happiness.
And once again, while I was moving away with the car in the north direction, I was thinking that it has always fascinated me the simplicity with which the poor live their poverty. A thousand times he has amazed me his joy. A thousand times I have seen in them beauty gestures only within the reach of the humblest, of the most intimately faithful to their lives, of the least resentful.
Between both thought the fog was opened and on the road the sunlight appeared.
Pepe Navarro
