DOORSTEPS

Yesterday at my door turned up an old woman with a small kid. The women wore a red-colored soiled cotton saree and the kid was wearing a t-shirt and a small pant. She sat at my stairs started hitting the grill to call me from inside. I came out of my room into the veranda and stood there watching her and the kid. She passed her hand into the gap between the grills and asked for something. She suddenly started giving blessings and praise. She asked for something, I wasn’t clear about what she asked, I went back into the room and told my mother “a woman is begging outside”, my mother asked me to bring me her mini purse kept at a distance from where she was sitting.  I fetched her the purse and she took out a five rupee coin and told me to give it to the women. I said we should give a ten-rupee note to her, my mom clicked her tongue and took back the coin and handed me over a ten-rupee note, I went outside and gave the women the 10 rupees note. She took the money and slipped out her hand out of the grill. Now the little kid asked for money, I said that she would give you half of the money I have given to her. The women asked for a pair of slippers if had any I could spare, I noticed that the kid was barefoot. But I didn’t have any spare slipper for a kid. The women picked up her little baggage and the kid her own, they walked away from my house. I stood there and watched her go away to another house nearby just at the end of the road. It's not that I have not seen people begging, but I have always wondered how giving them a name makes them so much different from us. When she appeared at my doorsteps, she didn’t specify what she wanted, she spread her empty hands and just asked. Her empty hands are the hook which grabs everything which comes to them, she could use anything I have to give to her, she isn’t choosy, she wants anything she could get, it’s not because that she is greedy but it is because that she doesn’t have anything. So why they have a different class? Our society loves to classify and categorize people, so they have made this new one, we already have the categorization of rich and poor, upper class and lower class, upper caste, and lower caste, religious and sectorial differences but beggars are different from them. Beggars are devoid of caste, and religion, they have a single clan of people who only gather resources by asking, or more precisely begging.

How are we different from them? I cannot find any difference actually except for the physical and financial differences. It may seem to you all that why the physical and financial differences are not the actual differences. It is because we are comparing people not the amount of materialistic strength they have. When we compare people, we do not compare the number of zeros their bank balance has, because that is not comparing people that are comparing the Fiscal strength. So, to compare people, we should see what they want, for what they are always looking for throughout their life. Do they stop looking for it at some point in time, or they keep looking at their very last breath, does their needs are any different from people from other categories? Do they are so much different from us that we look at them below?

Let us first take a very good look on our ourselves and find out where our intentions lie? We would find out that we are not different from that woman that turned at my doorsteps yesterday. I say this because I felt the urge to write after seeing that women, I could see the sample of all the people in the world which ever existed in that poor woman. I think I didn’t get the real face of the women because of the dust on her face layered with the skin and have become permanent as part of her facial skin. Do we also have that kind of face, could someone we do not know be able to look at our real face once they see us. I think NO! I do not write this essay about the beggar as a metaphor but as the reflection of the whole big lavish world.

Our hands also pass through those little spaces of the grills and we try to snatch what we could, and we always want something. Maybe we have learned little specificity after the raised stature but we all remain the same; we all remain alike. It is in our mind that we are different by class, color, section, or whatever category you name it.  We just are unable to admit that we are the same as that ugly woman who is at everybody’s door but never gets invited in but gets something and leaves the door and goes to the next one. We might not look soiled or dusty but we are ugly from the inside, we are at everybody’s throat, and when we get what we want we move to the next throat. We are empty, we keep running for things sometimes we know what we want but the running never stops, the pace keeps on increasing on and seldom it slows but never stops. We are hungry beings; we all may look diverse but we are all of a similar kind and how many times I may write this but it won’t be enough for even me to accept the fact. We as a society are bound by our incapabilities and there are very good chances that we may never win but the quest will always offer a taste for the artists, They will die trying, creating, proposing, maybe they might have some fame but the victory will always look upon us and teasing and smiling.