A Rare Stroke Of Compassion

I was lost in my world when I first saw him; lost in my world of people who probably don't and will never care for me. Why he lay on the pavement dirty and with scanty clothing, is obvious. He was among those less endowed individuals scraping a half-life, grossly below the poverty line. Sustained and nourished in a well-walled home with a protecting parental environment encasing me like an oyster shell , I never looked at him for more than a few passing instances when I would glance at him obliquely, through the nooks of peripheral vision. I would walk on, perhaps lost in the harmonies of my own happy thoughts or the burning tips of my cigarette; so insensitive.

Today, however, although ensnared by all these selfish and 'intellectual' distractions, I did look at him for longer time than my heart warranted. Even though I was wont to carry on my travel homeward I felt a strange, almost painful, guilt, that I had suppressed forcibly earlier. I noticed him, due to the sole fact that he was asleep and not begging with upturned palms. Shamefacedly, I admit to myself that in my laziness, I would shirk the duty of presenting coin to him, if he did beg.

It was then that I thought. I thought of his hard pavement bed, and his level, concrete pillow; his blanket in filth and tatters encompassing his nudity. I suppressed a shudder. I considered a possibility of his being a mathematician or a research scientist for particle physics, under proper educational financial circumstances. Perhaps his mental abilities were better than his financial ones. Hence, for a moment my mind was engrossed in the What-if lane. But then i shook myself from useless musings, and back to his urban reality of perpetual hunger. That man had no work-place and no home apart that public seclusion that the pavement corner was to him. Simply speaking, he had nowhere to go, and successively no place to escape to. The pavement was the known devil to him; a cold constancy.

"He must be employing his mind in something," I thought, and my little insight led me to form a rough sketch of his occupation in my mind. As he potentially might be intelligent man, unexposed to the physical comforts and mental pursuits of this world. For him, I realised the world might as well be flat. No rivers need exist for his sustenance although groundwater supply may be a part of his consciousness. What, then does mean anything to him, since all he does is sit at the busiest spots near our university and beg?

I jumbled my mind for a probable answer and found one. The most significant part of his daily attention would constitute people. People from various parts of the city on their way to the various other parts of the same city or different ones, his observances and specialisation would entail mainly their natures with respect to him. For instance, how would a woman with permed hair and gauzy dress, leaning on the arm of a man, with hair set in the popular trend of the time, whom she has attracted with her beauty and charms, react to his obvious pleas for a negligible part of purse? This answer he would give as well as any in a situation similar to his. He would probably tell you about the nostrils of her upturned nose. He would also tell you about the more conscientious individuals who may give him meagre help one day and inform him of their lack of change the other. On some hot summer days they may fail him as they race back home or toward some shelter, unconscious of his unsheltered empty stomach.

In my understanding, then and his apparent relation to the unfriendly world around him, his work for sustenance would be a detailed study of the general attitudes of the average masses, that use his roadside place for repose and alertness alike, as their sidewalk, which, actually, it is.

A Toddler's Tales of Toddler Days

When I visit the past of my youth,
Those concrete lanes of concrete truth,
I feel the present slip away,
And though requested refuses to stay.
I wake recalling songs I adore,
That splash about daily upon the floors,
Of my teeming memories abrimful,
With nostalgia, innocent and sinful.
I remember my toddler plays,
Around the house with cups and trays.
I remember those lullabys,
Sung to me with sleepy sighs.
They fiddled with my senses young,
Mingling with many words unsung.
I remember the cityscape,
And my desperation to escape,
To places where the sky is seen,
A stretching dome or a canvass screen;
Where trees do russle to the passing air,
And mutter words to the flowers fair;
Where the gnarling binds itself,
To make a home for a crazy elf.
I remember picking some scarlet seeds;
Of some stately tree or wild weeds,
To necklace my throat and my little wrists,
And to hold the rest in my tiny fists.
I remember trying to match my wits,
And winning at times in snatches and bits,
Against an elder who with a grin,
Would ten mellow and let me win.
I remember those childhood days,
Of simple dreams and simple ways.
Is there no path or hidden alley,
That would walk me back to that valley,
Where life was healthy and tinted pink,
And happiest ever or so think.

THE HOME SONG OF THE EARTH WALKER

Let us go then you and I,
Until the sands do meet the eye,
Until music fill the desert sky,
And widows smile on the sly.
Let us hear the marching tune,
That stirs the dust upon the dunes,
And air we breathe is with gold hewn,
Smelling of the carcass of ancient runes.
Lets paint the world with a riders colours,
And grace the time with lores of tellers,
Inquiring the lives of wine dwellers,
Who fell their feet upon stony cellars.
Let us go in fresh pursuit,
Of God's grace and fortitude,
Of lively lyres and tunes of flutes,
Of rich cuisines; the mouthfull foods.
Let us reach the world's end,
Where the mountain water bends,
And to heavens the fallers send,
When their ways are all amend.
Yet let us return to homely abode,
To where at end every traveller rode,
To lay down the needed but heaving load,
And rest each limb, sinew, muscle and node.

The King's Concern

Minor call of the baffled king,
Rang around the circling;
A sad chill in the ring,
Telling of disasters emerging.

The rooted nobles, a quartet,
The wisest in the islet,
Throbbng to the core did wait,
Pulsing the news of the state.

"War!" said he, that doth stir,
The kingdom in a bloody blur,
"The enemy marches at length afar,
Pray thee now to thy lucky star."

The lashes of the nobles' eyes,
Tear up to the brows up high,
The army unprepared to die,
What good do twinklers in the sky?

Flashing thoughts of blasphemy,
Like simmers of golden alchemy
"Die we all, sire!" exclaimed he,
A noble in evident agony.

"Our king, our lives, are under attack,
Weakness shall now be severly racked,
For this King of State has heavily lacked,
In the grim reality of foreign attack.

Then silence adorned the courtly hall,
The king's concern bourn by all,
The Majesty's death, the naton's fall,
The end was near, the end of all.