Today was a bad morning. The heavy rain had woken me up twice during the night, and I had a hard time keeping my eyes open during breakfast. I was in no condition to drive. So I asked my mother if I could hitch with Richard (the driver) and the janitor—who comes by every week to do cleaning work, as both my mother and I are too busy to maintain the house by ourselves—to the office. She agreed.

On the way to the university, I fell in and out of sleep, and finally decided to stay awake at the last major stoplight before entering university property. We had stopped because the light turned orange right before we could drive through the pedestrian lane, and Richard felt it prudent not to rush given the weather.

A few minutes after we stopped, I noticed a young girl about the age of ten or eleven run from the sidewalk to the car. It was no ordinary street urchin. It was a street urchin with a bucket^[1]. Richard started to frantically knock^[2] on the door’s windows to ward her off, but it was ineffectual: this one was particularly desperate. As soon as she reached the car, she let out a grimy rag with soap and started wiping at the windows. By this time Richard was already getting visibly upset^[3], telling her loudly to stop, and knocking even louder.

And then she covered the front windshield with soap.

And then, she took her bucket full of tea-colored water and started rinsing the car.

With her job done, she walked to the driver-side window and held out a hand. When Richard politely refused, she started knocking on the window with a ringed finger. When Richard started raising his voice, she began shouting at him and cursing. Convinced that she could not get any money from him, she dipped her rag into the bucket and ran the rag along Richard’s window and ran away^[4].

After that, the stoplight turned green, and we went on our way.

As we neared the university, we saw a whole section of the road submerged in water that suspiciously had the same color as the water in the girl’s bucket. Bad morning indeed.

[1] Street urchins during rainy days are far more dangerous and cocky than during sunny days. This is because of their almighty buckets, which grant them the power to block a driver’s windshield with dirt and then rinse it with dirt. And if the driver doesn’t pay up, well… there’s more where the dirt came from.

[2] Knocking is an unspoken rule between motorists and urchins. It means “no, you aren’t getting money from me, so move along.”

[3] Would you like it if someone washed your windows/windshields with dirty soapy water?

[4] Okay, I am aware that street urchins are urchins because they don’t have money/family/love/candy so they do what they do to get by. But see, what they don’t get (and I really really sincerely wish they did) is that when you’re asking another person to take pity on you, the best way to do that is to not piss them off. And the best way to earn anybody’s ill will is to try to pull extortion on them.