Everything feels like silk when I dream, floating amongst the formless clouds of thoughts. Often, I find myself walking in the parks and the desolate lanes that I encounter on my way home from college.
I find it a bit queer that even though I never actively exert myself to go on any of these walks, yet I wander around in solitude when I am desperately out of breath, energy or my mind.
The partially faded yellowness of the leaves reminds me of the borders of washed-out rusty photographs. Closing my eyelids to feel the lightly burning sensation of the sun upon my permanently half-tanned skin, I go back in time.
I have a vivid memory from my childhood of visiting a temple with my family. As we walked out, I could see a whole queue of people abandoned by the gods, near the boundary of the temple. The threshold separating the illusion and the reality.
The natural compassion that is often found in innocent children drew me towards them. My father gave me and my younger brother money to distribute among them. And we did. We began putting in a few pieces of perfectly cut rectangular paper in each of the polished steel bowls.
As a child, I was not completely unaware of the value of those paper pieces, but I had hardly ever known anybody to have their eyes light up by the mere sight of a paper that could not even buy me a packet of chocolates. When we reached the last of the deserted beings, we realised we were out of money.
She was an old woman past her fifties, with a frail and failing body, unkempt hair and gorgeous black eyes, drowning deep among the sea of wrinkles that covered almost all of her face. I looked into her eyes and I felt a wave of sadness wash over me.
She looked at me just like how an honest defendant looks upon his judge in the court of law to deliver justice to him. And I looked upon her as though I were her criminal. Her cold stainless steel bowl was left empty. I had to move on, but my mind never let go of her eyes, her hauntingly gorgeous eyes.
More than ten years have passed, and I still wonder about her. The guilt which once filled my heart contracted over time to a small marble ball that soon lodged deep inside one of my pulmonary veins.
Now, when I come across small kids in the markets in their soiled clothes, holding delicate and sweet-smelling blood-red roses in their soot-stained black hands, my mind wanders away.
Organised begging, drug addiction, child abduction, and many other reasons were listed to me by many people as to why we should not give alms to children. My former guilt does not move me anymore, and this made me realise that I am now a part of this world.
This cynical, unfair, morally corrupt adult world. The air in this city is tainted, and the stars in the night sky are hardly visible. The only visible star shines like the singular marble in my heart, and I wonder when I decided to let go of the hand of the child from my past.
