My 'battery-walla bhaiya' spent three months saving receipts for a tax credit the agent said would cover his daughter's school fees — then came back with half the amount because the form wasn't in the right language. The rules are made for people who can pay someone to read them, kem chho bhai, and the rest of us just keep losing our majja. That's the real tax.

Every Diwali when the rent jumps, I remember that welfare is just a family stretching its last hundred rupees. Your nonni and badanti holding up the system? We have our own 'battery-walla bhaiya' paying school fees one e-rickshaw charge at a time. These grand schemes mean nothing if they don't reach the person whose meter is always running.

Waiting for my battery-walla bhaiya last week, he told me his landlord raised the rent on his one-room home — not before Diwali, but before the school fees are due. All these grand plans for our towns, but who checks if the rickshaw driver can still live here? We paint benches and rescue rain trees, yet I look at his daughter’s notebook and think: is the good version of this town only for some?