As a little girl Ill at ease with the tenderness of her age ran across the road I saw in her running into me a rage of perplexity. A bag she carried clung to her frail bones, eyes had sunk deeper into the underfed face and the palms faced me in the crotch. Left to wonder if she was trying to avoid being run over or running into a stranger, I reciprocated with a gesture. The older woman behind her made note of the conversation and pretended being indifferent and preoccupied with her own errands she was out for.
I met the girl again later in the evening in my moment of recollecting all that had transpired through the day. She reappeared as the same malnourished bony creature bereft of a sense of health and affluence. This time around, her hair browning in the sun, the logo on the shirt she wore and the pleats on her skirt too rose in my thought. Mindless as it was thinking of her, I found myself ruminating aloud of education, abdication and adoption. What would the city, the school and the books do to her? Leave her alone or drag her into the grind. Will she be the older woman walking at ease behind her or will she grow into a caged sparrow always in need of unneeded attention and artificial affection?
It has been a while that I crossed a road. Had crossed a railway track as a child on my way to school. That was an initiation for me into the belief that one is ultimately left to fend for oneself. I wish to preach. Preach to the little girl. Preach health, reading and a lot of freedom. It would be difficult to find her at the moment. If I do later, I might just be busy crossing another path. Roads choking with vehicles are quite easy to walk through. Sparsely sprinkled with little girls are not. Vehicles don’t come home with you. Little girls do.
Doesn’t matter. The blistering sun outside or the thunderous rain. Surpassing the season of the day is the weather of the heart. When gloom and dark surround one’s soul, no luminosity of lightning can be bright enough. At the end of it we must accept, we face it all by ourselves. The human capacity and it’s predisposition to anxiety and worry are not merely states of the mind that can be dealt with in counseling sessions or through anti-depressant capsules. The fear of the bad and the unpleasant is many a times a fear of the real. It is not an imagination rooted somewhere in the crevices of the brain and is not always a result of a series of chemical reactions that take place within that curious organ. The proneness to rejoice and to be arrogant in times of success and riches is precisely the human way of balancing out on the tragic moments that life offers to all of us- I would not say in varying measures, rather I would say equally. A life that is lived is always a life replete with a complete set of emotions, memorable, not so memorable and despicable experiences. Look at the fate of the happiest seeming and of the most destitute and downtrodden. Both groups of people always have a lot to envy each other for. The man on the street and the king are both privy at the same time to their own sets of possessions as well as deprivations. What the haves refer to as stress and as ignominious is nothing but a fragment of the lived reality of the have-nots. Our worries and fears and our leaps of exuberance can not be traded for worthier things. Hence the formula that the wise have devised. Do good and expect good to happen to you. If it does not turn out to be like that, just accept it and be brave in the face of hardships. I think we need to own up and live free. Nothing really helps!
Personal Concerns 