The wanderer was an old man. Omnipresent. Walking about in Old Downtown, up and down the broken-up sidewalk and rubble. Ambling through New Downtown, past white-collared foreigners and cool glass-paneled skyscrapers. He could be seen about the Red Light District during the day, the Music District in the evenings. The times in between, the wanderer could be found in the Muslim Quarter, the Twelfth District, People’s Square, Memorial Park, College District and Riverside. East, west, north, south and all places in between was the land of the wanderer. The wanderer was the one and only king of the city.
The wanderer was a short man. His face the color and texture of lumpy porridge gone cold and dry. He had a full head of hair, white as light, sparsely covering his head. He wore a thin jacket, faded and covered in dirt, mud, ash and dust. His slacks were two sizes too big for him and his burlap shoes were riddled with holes.
He carried in front of him a woven basket—much bigger than he was—strapped to the front of his chest. In it were round sweets. A hard shell made of puffed rice and covered in sugar that was filled with a mixture of syrup and grain alcohol. The sweets were filed in rows. Skewers, each with four sweets, were shelved like stalks of corn, and the sharp end of each skewer pointed to the sky.
The wanderer did not say a word. He did not announce what he was selling. He simply walked the streets and people came to the wanderer—the few that ever had.
The expression he wore was blank. But the skin on his face was sagging, worn from the decades of wind, water, sand, snow, and smog lashing his skin. Worn from witnessing the city grow from a one-lane town with no cars or foreigners, when the slaughtering of donkeys and chickens happened out in the open—and when the world wasn’t so loud. Yet as the mighty world spun, he walked and walked. And spun it did for all around him wildly grew into a lush glass-and-tar-and-concrete jungle. The expression he wore was blank because he seemed (I assume) unsure of how to feel. In this new world, was a smile still a gesture of happiness? Did people still cry or feel upset even though they are richer than a king like himself could fathom?
And so he continued to straggle along in silence, as he had for decades. For walking was the only human-like action he could recognize when he saw others pass him by.
Ravi Venkataraman is a Peace Corps Volunteer teacher in Chengdu, China, managing editor of MaLa – the China Bookworm Literary Journal and a member of the public relations team for Newfound Journal. He writes—sometimes.
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