WREAKING HAVOC WITH WORDS

To

A ten-years old child

You drew an astounding portrait at your age. Sketching a replica of Mother Teresa in art class was not easy, what with the hawk-eyed teacher lurking in the shadows behind us. She kept a watch over us, smudging a line here, erasing one there. I couldn’t find the courage to improve upon my sketch. But you managed to impress her. You were good.

A few months later at the P.T.A. Meeting: your father at the desk, you by his side, and in front of you sat the teacher admiring your masterpiece. Every parent with glistening eyes admired it then, and how they wished their child too could draw like you. Every parent, that is, except your father. 

“It’s okay-okay. What more can you expect from a child of ten, only a few broken pencil lines...” he said and dissolved into laughter. The laughter still echoes in my ears.

I knew it then and I remember now that those were not just ‘a few broken pencil lines’ to you. They were the result of toiling away for hours with perspiration on your brows in a never ending class, where everybody, including the teacher, had given up the hope of seeing a decent Mother Teresa portrait made by a ten-year old. I can see the bruised, reddened fingers refusing to give way under pressure, the tiny hands smeared with grey pencil marks, and a determination etched clearly in the bulging blue veins of your temple.

This was what those ‘pencil lines’ were worth. It may not have been perfect in itself, but it was remarkable for the effort you made. And that’s why I remember your face in the end, when the illusions of a little girl got shattered like a glass house in the barrage of her own father’s words, pouring on her like hailstones on fire. It was an unexpected assault on the fragile senses. 

I wonder what happened to that girl afterwards.

Did she ever draw again?

I too hit someone very hard once, unthinkingly, and left a bruise where there had been none before. But the person did not hit me back immediately. This person, so tangible, was constructed of real flesh, blood, bones and sinews. Yet I had not even touched the flesh. But the bruise was very visible. After all, I had only hurled at him a smattering of red hot, abusive ‘words’. How bad could it be? Little did I know how large a festering wound created by mean words can be. No amount of love or time can fill that gaping hole. I realised it much later, when he threw the same scalding words of harshness back at me.

Physical brawls do hurt. Yet how can they ever rival the intensity of an insult, of a mental scar? It takes but a few words of meaningless hatred to completely destroy a soul from within. As human beings, it is but second nature to us to hang onto each others’ words—promises never meant to be kept, lies dipped and coated in truth and abuses disguised as compliments. We don’t seem to be able to escape our own selves, our own nature, anytime soon. Then why do we only make matters worse by saying what we never meant?

Every time I hurt a person with unintentional words, I remember the face of that broken little child within each one of us. And I hope to never make the same mistake twice—to not scald someone’s memory with acrid words, or worse still, use words like the weapons I never meant to unleash...

Yours truly

GOING AWAY

To

A dead man lying on the road

I’ve seen beggars sitting by the pavements, impatiently tapping their bowls and muttering incoherently, as I make my way home. Helpless mothers, straddling an infant and begging for food have passed me by at traffic signals. And I’ve observed the homeless too, they sleep under the thinnest, most threadbare of blankets on the chilliest winter nights. No one bats an eyelid. 

They’re the discarded, the useless, a pileup of humanity that the society does not need but cannot find a way to do away with, either. Yet life continues. Somehow, it refuses to cease. It keeps pumping through their veins remorselessly.

I had come across the poor so many times, but never a dead man. Never a man so irreversibly barren of life, sprawled across the tarmac, while onlookers wondered—should we bury him, burn him, or leave him here... 

For two days in a row he lay at the entrance of a busy marketplace. Minimal dirty clothes and hair matted with dust. Was he drunk, or dead? No wife, no children? Did he even have a job to call his own? I don’t know what to call him, how to describe that man. He looked like every one of us will do when we are quite dead and forgotten too. His eyes were shut as if he had let go, as if letting go was the most logical thing to do. And that tiny smirk playing out on his face—he knew exactly what was going on in our minds.

I wonder how he died and why. But more than that, I wonder if he was at least the master of his own life, when alive. I hope he held the keys to that door. I hope he was not a slave to misery and debts. I hope someone somewhere out there misses him, now that he is gone. I hope they are not like these onlookers, wondering and wondering but doing nothing.

My biggest hope is that no one may clamor upon his possessions, no matter how little he possessed. Like a beast he died, but let the memory of a ‘man’, a human being at least be kept alive. As I looked at him I could not see any chances of his last rites being performed. And God knows what he wished to be done to his body once he had departed. 

The truth is, at some point of time, the corpse will have to be identified. If they do, they may still not come to know what the man had wished for. It is possible that his wishes, unspoken, died on his lips as the last breath also gave way. 

Looking at the man was like standing close to the precipice. Death is so close, none of us knows exactly when and how we will depart, but we are staring at death every moment. Rich or poor, I don’t know a single person who wants to die unknown and uncared for. Who wants to go without leaving their mark? But that man, who probably had nothing, left anyway. 

He left just the same. And he left with many words unsaid, clasped to his chest, lost forever and decaying with his corpse. One fine morning, he vanished from that tarmac too. 

But now that you are gone and for all that it is worth, all I can say is ‘rest in peace’.

Yours truly 

TO BE OR NOT TO BE...

If the all the men-hating misandrists of the world gathered around a bubbling cauldron under the guise of ‘feminism’ and took an oath, it would probably go like this: 

We solemnly swear by the following...

A woman is much, much superior to men. A woman is so much more than a rag doll, not to be tossed around and played with as men may fancy. A woman is more than just ordinary, even if she is a housewife and does not eke out a living. A woman is more than the worth of her anatomy. 

A woman is this, a woman is that... 

But here’s where they missed—a woman is definitely not both. 

She is not everything. In fact, she cannot be. 

She is only fifty percent and it’s time she acknowledged the other half, just as it should acknowledge her.

There are men who detest daughters and in an equal ratio, teenage girls who detest old men (because they might be lecherous?). I don’t ask men to vacate a seat for me in buses or trains because I have legit, strong knees. If I can get tired, so can the legions of men hanging from the bars in a DTC bus. Why would men, or better yet the State, persevere to make a woman feel helpless by ‘reserving’ our seats. But that’s just me.

The flip side of the coin is that when a woman who does not have strong knees comes begging for a seat, no one should not refuse her that seat. And it applies to a man and a woman alike, it’s only courteous to vacate. It’s only humanity. 

Norms are bogus. If I am a woman both strong and fragile, equally capable of loving a man or a woman, then there exist no rules for men either. We are rendered equally helpless by feminism. My fight is not to become a ‘man’, to take over men in what they can do, but to be myself. 

In being a gentlewoman, I want to be seen and heard as the ‘other’ half. A significant ‘other’. I want to be a woman first, and leave it at that. I don’t strive to grow a beard, wear trousers, have a thick voice or undertake any masculine task. I am gentle and polite and I wouldn’t change anything womanly in a lady. But I wouldn’t call gentleness and fragility in a man ‘womanly’ either. That would be an insult taken too far. 

The point is that every being is the same. And also that every being is so different. The same hair, eyes, nose and lips, but myriad rivers of emotions and traits underneath them, coming together to form an ocean. We need each other. And if there is no race between men and women, no comparison, then why would I want to engage in this tug of war in the first place?