I read once that we're born alone and die alone.
It's not true.
We all have an extended family, people whom we recognise as our own as soon as we see them. The people closest to me have always been marked by a peculiar difference in their make-up. They are the walking wounded, the ones to whom a psychological injury was done that they will never be able to define, the ones with the messianic glaze in their eyes, or the oblique glance as though a military tank is going to burst through their mental fortifications. They drive their cars regularly into others, cause psychiatrists and parents to sigh helplessly, turn meetings into free-fire zones, and even frighten themselves when they wake up in the middle of the night and think they've left the light on, and then realize perhaps their heads simply glow in the dark.
But they save us from ourselves. Whenever I hear and see a politician or an office senior, rings of black haloes at his back, trying to convince us of the rightness of a policy or deed that will cause harm to others; when I am almost convinced myself that setting humanitarian concern in abeyance can be justified in the interest of a greater good, I pause and ask myself what my brain-smoked friends would have to say. Then I realise the rhetoric would have no effect on them, because for those who were most deeply injured as children, words of moral purpose too often masked acts of cruelty.
So that's when you let go of reason and slip deeply into the wobbling, refracted green light of a marsh, with a child as your guide, and let the season have its way with your heart.
Current music: Talaash - Hona hain kya
