A REASON TO BREATHE
A young man exited out of a hospital
on a wheelchair, a bandage wrapped around his leg which had got severed while
trying to defend his motherland. Alas! He not only lost his leg but also the
battle. A small village which was the mining hub of the country had been
captured by the militants from the neighboring enemy nation.
The soldiers who had lost their lives
fighting bravely had achieved a rare martyrdom and were now being honored
posthumously. He remembers of a time two months ago when he was home on his
official leave, serving his ailing mother who had been diagnosed with a terminal
ovarian cancer when a telephone bell rang aloud summoning him to his regiment
as the news of the insurgency had been reported. Like any other soldier, he too
decided to put his nation before family, despite knowing there was nobody at
home to look after his ailing mother, his dad having died of a cardiac arrest
three years ago. When he reached his regiment, he got the sad news of his
mother’s demise but he couldn’t go back home, not even for the final rites
which were then performed by their neighbors while he was busy preparing to
fight against the nation’s own neighbors.
The war began in a few days’ time and
lasted for a month. The army tried out of their skin to resist the powerful
militant attack but couldn’t save that small village. The enemy neighbors had
now cruelly and brutally engulfed one the most industrially potent village of
the nation.
Thanks to his good fortunes that he
had survived only with a severed leg while his friends and enemies fell dead in
bloodshed like leaves falling off the tree on a dark, early winter evening.
Here he was now, being escorted by a
nurse on a wheelchair, being driven out of the same hospital where his ailing mother had lost a battle too, against cancer , while
he was away protecting his motherland!
He anticipated that his countrymen
would still be in shock of the lost war. But as he got across to the street
opposite the hospital, he saw a group of people, possibly college students,
laughing and giggling, celebrating a friend’s birthday! He was shocked and
amused at this scene which he had hardly hoped to witness!
He felt sad for his condition, for
what he had made of himself, for what he had lost, for what he was never going
to get back!
He then wheeled past a garden where
he saw an old man having his evening walk, a pair of lovers sharing an
ice-cream on the bench across the milk-bar and the surroundings appeared to him
as though nothing had happened, that the whole world was still the same, the same
blue skies and the green grass, the same sunlight filtering through the trees,
the same breeze rustling through the leaves!
He realized this was how the world
functioned, that there was a tinge of sadness in everyone’s life, the gloom and
despair which was so omnipresent yet not distinctly evident! Perhaps that old
man might have had a tiff with his son and daughter-in-law and decided to come
to the garden for a relief. Perhaps that girl had failed in her university
exams and her lover was trying to console her with an ice cream!
Whatever the reason, he was happily
amused to realize how quickly everyone had found a reason to exist, to survive,
to tide over the adversities and begin breathing again!
What was lost was never going to come
back, but there was no point in sleeping under the same blanket of despair when
one had the choice to throw it aside and let the sunshine kiss the wounds which
time had gifted! For he knew that when there was sun shining in one corner of the
world, there must be snow in some other corner; that though the wounded might
be mourning for the dead, there must be millions celebrating the birth of a
new-born too!!
The
world moved on and he hoped his life would move on too! He wheeled across the main road to his lonely home, determined to find a reason to breathe in this crowded world....
