A REASON TO BREATHE...

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....