The doorbell rang, and it’s an hour and a half too early for Fahim to be coming home from work.
The way our gate works, it can either be bolted from the inside or locked from the outside, but if it’s locked from the outside, someone on the inside can’t get out, and vice versa. The gate and wall are a full six feet high, and of course they can be jumped over by someone who’s really ambitious, but hell, there’s always a way to do anything, depending on how determined a person is. Anyway, our front door opens at the top of our steps, and the steps lead to the front gate.
This is pretty convenient from the perspective of security. Someone rings the bell, and I can have a full face to face conversation with them before I ever decide to let anyone in.
The bell rings, I grab my glasses – I don’t usually wear them during the day – I’m nearsighted and don’t need them for the vast majority of what I do – and I go outside. It’s a stranger, a man wearing a burgundy button shirt and a blue sarong. He says something in a language I don’t understand, which is typical for me, I say "What? Can I help you with something?" It’s possible he’s the meter reader, but he has no clipboard and no uniform, so I strongly doubt it. He uses his hands to gesture that he wants food. I say no, he’s rather insistent he wants food, and I say no equally as insistently. I turn around and shut my door, thereby ending all conversation with him.
Fahim had warned me that this would happen – beggars coming to the door. Now it’s happened, and again, I have something of note to put in my blog.
Granted, something sort of similar, I suppose, happened while I was living in Vancouver. Keep in mind that there are a lot of beggars and homeless people in Vancouver. One evening, our doorbell rang, and a man was at the door begging for bus fare to get him and his child home to his wife and her mother. Uh, where was the child then? And besides that, NO AND PISS OFF! It’s true, I’m impatient and intolerant. It’s my home, I don’t know you, I don’t owe you anything, so leave me alone.
This guy today, though, had none of that dangerous calculated edge of the guy in Vancouver. This guy was merely pathetic. Yes, I feel sorry for him, but no, I’m not going to give something to everyone who begs.
