Conversations with Mahadev, a Banana Seller
There is a banana seller on my morning walk route in Mumbai.
For months, we exchanged little more than smiles and the occasional pleasantry while I bought bananas. Until recently, I had never thought to ask his name. I had no idea that one of those brief conversations would leave me reflecting on Descartes, the Buddha, Kabir and Guru Nanak.
It was still relatively early in the morning, and I waited while he carefully arranged his fruit with the patience of someone who took quiet pride in his work.
I asked him casually why the small shops across the road had been demolished.
“They were unauthorised,” he replied simply. “So one day they had to go.”
Then he paused.
“But it is sad. Those shops were there for twenty years. People built their livelihoods there. They raised their children because of those shops. No one stopped them then.”
I was struck not by the legality of his answer, but by its humanity.
He did not question the law. He simply refused to let the law erase the people.
In many middle-class drawing rooms, conversations rage about politics, the economy, or whatever else the news channels choose to amplify. Opinions are delivered with remarkable confidence. Everyone seems to know who is right, who is wrong, who is patriotic and who is not. Anyone who asks an inconvenient question is quickly labelled. Anyone who hesitates before joining the chorus is viewed with suspicion.
We seem to have confused certainty with wisdom.
René Descartes began modern philosophy not with certainty but with doubt. Before declaring Cogito, ergo sum—“I think, therefore I am”—he questioned every assumption he had inherited. Doubt, for him, was not an obstacle to truth; it was the path towards it.
Centuries earlier, the Buddha urged his followers not to accept a teaching merely because it came from tradition, scripture or authority. Test it instead in the light of reason and experience.
Kabir questioned both priest and cleric with equal courage. His poetry distrusted ritual without understanding and belief without reflection.
Guru Nanak challenged empty orthodoxy wherever he encountered it and reminded people that truth without compassion becomes little more than self-righteousness.
None of these teachers celebrated doubt for its own sake. They valued it because it kept the mind open and the heart humble.
Perhaps that was what I had glimpsed in the banana seller.
He held two ideas together without feeling compelled to sacrifice one for the other. The demolition, he believed, was inevitable. Yet he never allowed the inevitability of the law to diminish his compassion for those who suffered because of it.
That is a surprisingly difficult balance to achieve.
The easiest thing in the world is to choose a side. Once we do, every fact becomes evidence that we were right all along. Doubt disappears. Curiosity follows. Before long, compassion quietly slips away as well.
The conversation stayed with me all day.
So I went back the next morning—not because I needed more bananas, but because I wanted to talk to him again.
This time, before we spoke of anything else, I asked him his name.
“Mahadev,” he said with a smile.
The name seemed strangely apt.
Only days later, I learnt that, as a teenager, he had run away from his village in Uttar Pradesh and spent some time working in Shiva temples.
Life, however, had other plans.
His elder brother died unexpectedly, and the responsibilities he had once tried to escape came looking for him. He eventually found his way to Mumbai, where selling bananas became less an occupation than a means of supporting the family that depended on him back home.
He told his story without self-pity or drama. There was no complaint against fate, no attempt to make his life sound extraordinary. He narrated it with the same quiet energy with which he arranged his bananas every morning.
I thanked Mahadev, picked up my bananas and began walking home.
As I walked, it struck me that wisdom seldom announces itself. It usually wears ordinary clothes, earns a modest living and asks for no audience.
I had gone looking for bananas.
I returned with a philosophy.
Perhaps Descartes was right to begin with doubt.
Mahadev reminded me where doubt should lead.
Not to cynicism.
Not to certainty.
But to compassion.
I doubt, therefore I remain human.
