In a sudden or intermittent rush, I started to see the things the changing around me. His dusty hands cautiously swept across his sunburnt skin, pale and sweat banded that this last piece of food item which I had duly handed over to him and him who had taken it as graciously as I had given, saw it as the last attempt to fulfil his wishes something of what he couldn't be deprived of. Even after living his share of life as a construction worker and above all a fanatic blasphemer who wouldn't forget to cast his usual imprecations.
I saw him when he had slid the two piece of laddu carefully wrapped and deposited in his pockets just before when he was splashing the mortar with his trowel over the courses of brick joints.
Beneath him I could sense the hint of smile his face had started to reveal upon, but I had better not ask something I knew too much about through talks or his regular pleadings to let go off when he was aware that he had given the word and as a father had made it a rule to follow more as a moral duty than a physiological burden.
The next moment he had stacked the two soft grained sweets neatly stacking them one over the other and under the weight of the overlying inverted curvature sweet the two had crumbled to pieces falling over the piece of cemented earth.
When I looked at him, he didn't say a word against it not even mumbled or went on giving his imprecations that were so natural and habitual with his internal growth as a man who would follow him everywhere and anywhere. He just wiped off the remains and carried on laying the next course of the bricks.
There are millions like him who you can see working at factories rails roadways, mobile homes and trailer park, there are a few problems in this world which you can address and ask solutions for, but there are some for which you can only pass a big sigh, some may call it a physiological response from the others but for me it's the product of their bad the inability of a father to fulfil the promises given to his daughter of what they want.
These things have changed the way I have begun to look at these people; somehow I now look at then with a feeling of pity and kindness they are clearly the less fortunate men perhaps the dear God has made them in such a way that they are a million times stronger than us both mentally and physically and that is what I would like to say to the others about them they must be treated like humans.
By Swapnil Upadhyay
No comments:
Post a Comment