WaLk WiTh Me

As the morning dew kisses the grass, and my shoes cut their way through these pearls, I get the fragrance of life entering through the horizon. A few miles ahead I see more hands welcoming life as it grows old by another day. The child in her mother’s lap cries away the night blues. The dim lights in houses become bright and pressure cookers whistle away the morning alarms. As I turn for the second round at the edge of the road, the footpath withdraws its dollops from all the night refugees and they walk to wash their tiredness in the hand pump gush.

I talk to myself humming my favorite “everything I do” , I say my life is tougher, harder, the times aren’t good, nothing’s going my way, and I hit a stone, then I say oh this was the last thing I expected to happen. As I stepped an inch I see a small kid taking his place on that stone with a hard slice of bread in his hands. I quietly look ahead and move.

As I keep walking the cool breeze kisses me over and over. And I continue with everything I do and as I am supposed to cross the main road, a mob on cycles race towards me, and I am scared and murmur “hell, all of them had to come on the roads together”, as they leave my way I reach across the road. After getting ready I pick my lunch and bag kept side by side on the table and shoot a bye in the house as I jump down the stairs twice as fast I climb them. Then I step in the bus and place my baggage on the seat next to me. As the bus horns through the road I count on my pending works, morning greetings to friends. But the neighboring window gives me support and takes me outside the boundaries of my conventions.

I see the traffic personnel, waving his hand one-two-three-four in all directions, cars breaking queues and buzzing to race ahead together. I see the foot markets decorating the morning.

A thought ponders over me, their life is tough or tougher, is that they wanted by choice. I say to myself, do they matter to me, some unknowns on the walk of their life. But I question this, and say doesn’t the walk of life criss-cross the roads of life. Yes they do. Because not everything we do is for somebody but most of it is for ourselves too. At these crossings in the walk I take, I learn that time is the most powerful, neither do I want to murmur in the morning, neither the traffic personnel wants to exercise in the pollution of cars and people, neither the swarm of cycles want to remain cycles, neither the child wanted to earn a stale piece of breakfast on the stoned dinning table. Neither do the foot path dwellers wish to enjoy their cushions on the street. It’s just that they and I haven’t been able to pursue time to walk with me.

At every step of life, if time walks with a person, their life turns at 360 degrees, for his/her benefit. “The charm of those times” can easily coin what those days will mean. The request to time to “walk with me” carries along with it, the hard work to call upon time, the truth of the labor. And yes the destiny of the “person”. If only for sometime time walks with me, even then it can infuse the strength of walking with it for the rest of my life. This is a wish I found in every soul I saw in the walk of my life.