Coin Baba

Reluctant to brave the cold, I decided to spend a few more minutes in the warmth of my quilt. As I lay quite in my bed, I heard someone make a jarring sound with our iron gate outside. My mum calmly but quickly attended to her visitor and was back to her kitchen within seconds. It was a Saturday.

Every Saturday of our childhood, a man dressed like a baba - long hair, rudrakshed neck, overgrown beard, kajaled eyes, orange robes (or so I think) - used to come to our colony, to each and every doorstep on the ground floor, and scream 'Jai Shani Dev!!!'. My brother and I would promptly get up, borrow coins from our grandfather and run outside to meet our visitor. We would climb on to our grilled iron gate, careful to never open it, and pass our tiny hands through the narrow black grills to drop the silver coins in an open container he held out at us. It was filled with yellow-mustard oil. We would stare fascinated as the coins cut through the oil and settled at the bottom to join other coins and distorted figures with vermilion marks all over them. He would then chant some mantras in a cryptic language and move to the next door.

We did this every single Saturday. We never waited for him. But we always knew he'd come. He did. For years. I always wondered if he went back home and spent an afternoon cleaning the coins to give to his children. I also wondered if he reused the  mustard oil week after week.

Its been soon many years since I saw him. 

So when I heard the iron gate beat again this Saturday. I asked my mother if it was the same baba. She told me his daughter comes to collect the coins these days.
Coin baba died.