On seeing two young tradesmen in a bus

Neither of them looked as if they had ever shaved. Both were wearing thick, very workmansy jeans (of the type -- I still keep searching for, but fail to find in the brand showrooms -- that prospectors, cowboys and bikers favour for durability and ruggedness) and full-sleeved shirts and were well groomed and looking more or less like any urban 15-16 year old's would.

Both were also wearing boyish expressions of delight, as if they were going to a circus, cinema or cricket match. But immaterial of the boyish looks and their "holidayish" mein, these two were evidently headed for work and holding the tools of their trade in their hands.

One had an axe (the axehead comprising of a piece of a metal rib plate turned into an "O" at one end and sharpened at the other, with a still green and uncured handle of wood passing through the "O") and the other had a rudimentary machete -- a curved work knife of the kind used to cut open green coconuts or slice firewood, solidly fitted onto a handle; again of still green and uncured wood.

While I watched them -- standing in the bus with one shoulder tensed up by the grip of my arm on the grab rail and the other weighed down by the pendulum swing of the bag that carries what could be another tool of trade for me -- my DSLR -- I let me eyes do a surreptitious crawl of their faces, looking at them as subjects for my photographic eye. And noted that one of them had slightly brown hair with curls so fine he could have passed off for a Hasidic Jew and the other had a well shaped, almost aquiline nose and big wide-spaced eyes. Naturally, I started mentally calculating camera angles, aperture and shutter settings while thinking that both of them made eminent subjects and were worth working on for a day in a studio or outdoors with the sun blazing in resplendence.

Meanwhile the bus stopped and the boys got down, carefully making their way through the throng in the bus -- headed for a day's work -- at some site overgrown with Lantana and other scrub, in all probability; hands on each others shoulders.

I continued on in the bus, with the DSLR doing its pendulum swing on my shoulder.

Onto another day at work.

Part tradesman, part logophile, I work with my hands, labour with words -- I write.