The Blow

“Kehta tha aap sab majoori karte ho… Main service karoonga. Kehta tha main kuchh banoonga”… {“He used to say – You all may do labour work… But I’ll do a job. He used to say - I’ll become something”}

Not a trace of dampness in them, and yet so hollow were his eyes as he spoke of his son, that they sent a chill down my very bones. Hollow, just like his skeletal structure – eaten from within by the moths of poverty all his life; and now in the past few hours, every morsel of hope left in there chewed away to nothingness… This time, by the moths outside – the ones he doesn’t know, would never know. And there’s one more thing that he would perhaps never know – the answer to one simple question… Why?

As I sat eating a sumptuous lunch watching news on NDTV this afternoon, one after another, came on screen faces of people who I might have seen sometime, maybe passed by them, perhaps bought something from their shops. They had all lost some part of their existence today – a dear one had left them forever, and they had had no chance to hug them or wish them goodbye. One of the most peaceful cities in my country, the city dearest to my heart – Jaipur – has, instead, said goodbye to peace. “Friends, no more!”

7 bomb blasts… 70 dead bodies… 70 multiplied by a diverse range of number of years of LIFE multiplied by 365… days of LIFE, of memories, laughs, promises, cheers, dreams… turned to dust. Nothing left. Not a thing. The universe has a strange way of absorbing the most beautiful things about life. The things which are not things at all. Because… they don’t REMAIN when life doesn’t remain. And yet, they’re all that life is about!

The headline of today’s Punjabi newspaper Ajit reads “Pink city turned blood red”. It shakes my core everytime I read it. The pink city is the city where I spent the pink years of my life. Not once had it crossed my mind then that someone could even think of bombing this place, these people. And today when I know for sure that it has happened, I’m still trying to convince myself that someone DID after all think of bombing that place, those people.

I’m a firm believer in the Ways of God. That He knows best, and that He’ll make sure that whatever happens is for the best. On such days, though, I find my faith standing on rickety grounds. Why? Just why should an old man who doesn’t get enough water to drink have to shed it from his eyes, in the name of a son who was supposed to quench the thirst of his entire lifetime? Why can these people whom we call terrorists not see their own fathers in this man? And just why can they not see that their God, whoever He is, did not give them the right to create dead bodies? – Neither the ones they’ve left motionless, nor the ones they’ve left moving.