A drop in the Ocean

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#emotional

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I was going to catch the local to reach my institute. I was working as an intern in a reputed web designing institute. It was a journey of about an hour from my residence to that place. To reach the station I had to walk for a few kilometers passing through various people and houses.

It had rained the whole night and everywhere I could see water logged at the road sides with garbage scattered here and there. On my way a sight of a poor boy with a little girl on his lap took my attention.

I looked at them and felt that I was not the appropriate person to help them so I just tried to blindly cross them as if I had not seen them. It was not like I didn’t feel pity for them, but I was also like them. Somehow my farmer father sent me to school and then in college. There only on scholarship I got admission in a Web designing institute where I was doing my internship. It was difficult for me to arrange food and lodging for myself in such an expensive city, how could I think of helping these poor fellows. So I Continued to walk ahead. I got a call, “Bhaiya!”

Oh! I was not expecting this. I just wanted to run away from there but I had to turn back. Something within me provoked me to listen to the call.

“I have run from the orphanage last night as they were beating my little sister. She took a biscuit from the table and before she could have taken it to her mouth, they snatched it from her. They slapped her and didn’t give her anything to eat,” he said in one go.

I didn’t have any option than to listen to his full story. My conscience was telling me to sit with them but the stinking water and garbage all around was not allowing me to stand there for long. Still I asked him, “From which orphanage did you run away? You should better be there.”

He said, “Na!Na, Bhaiya! For God’s sake don’t say that. We’ve been travelling the whole night. In the morning we reached this place and got into a train without any doors. There were many other children like us but I was scared if they too were in the same orphanage as us. And after a little walk we sat here as my little sister is too tired to walk any more. Can you please give her something to eat? She didn’t have anything since yesterday morning.”

I was too touched by the love of the boy for his sister. I took out my water bottle and gave it to him. And then I also gave them my lunch box. But I was still worried. What else I could do for them. Soon I called my Institute and informed them that I would not be able to reach there. I took the children along with me to a BMC school where one of my friends was teacher. Rest of the things she managed for them being connected to several NGOs.

After a decade I am reading the interview of the same boy who has secured the first rank in the UPSCE Examination. I’ve walked a long way in my life earning everything that a normal man dreams of. But this is the best achievement of my life that I’ve got today. What I did was just a drop in the ocean of traumatized orphans around us but that drop has drowned me in the ocean of contentment today.

(After writing this I myself felt emotional imagining the scene.. And now when I re read them, I am again in tears.)

©Anupam Mishra