Bhova Pagla & Bruce Springsteen (A 6-Sentence “Earth Day” Flash/Micro Fiction)

It’s Bhova Pagla’s duty to keep the street in our neighbor clean–as he thinks of. Thus, after a function or special day he can be seen collecting scraps and all; like on 16th August, he can be seen picking up the National Flags fallen on the street. This comes with his abusive curse–ranging from a son of a bitch to cruder most that I cannot write.

This noon, when I was returning from office, I saw him collecting dried dead tree leaves and humming Bruce Springsteen’s Working On a Dream; elders say he is a Gold Medalist in Bio-Chemistry; it was the divorce that made him pagla, lunatic.

I asked him, we share a cordial relation somehow, of his mission. Bhava Pagla smiled, exposing his gapped teeth set behind the heavy grey-bearded chin, “alright! That’s professional whistling right there…am working on a dream…to build a tree in this concrete jungle…”

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#Pagla means Lunatic, eccentric person.