Thursday, June 13, 2019

Extending the gift of presence:)


There are a few events which you feel like rewinding and this was one of them. As we were walking on the highway we saw a dog stumbling with a car. The car driver did not stop. Meanwhile, a teenage boy came running towards the dog and held him in his arms as if holding a small baby and started running towards his home. Midway we saw him pausing and placing the dog on the road.

Swara asked me if I would want to go to the kid and I said yes. The kid kept holding his tears while looking at his dead dog. Meanwhile, the boy's grandmother came running in our direction and started scolding him for carrying his dead dog home and for all the time and love that he had invested behind the dog. More family members joined in the chaos. At the back of my mind, I had flashes of a few deaths that I witnessed and how the social chaos did not let me get in touch with how I was feeling. It had taken a few years to connect and listen to that voice again and make peace with it.

In between the grandmother looked at us and identified us as parikrama-vasi so she invited us for tea at her place but we denied her invitation for the time being and kept standing with the boy and the dog. Swara intertwined the chaos and asked the boy if he wanted to pray for a few minutes for his dog. Tears kept flowing while we held hands and prayed in silence. I could feel the pain of death, my own attachments, pain for lack of space for expression, and for being vulnerable.

One of the family members gave him a washed shirt as there were bloodstains on his cloth. He silently changed it. His mother asked him to go after the buffaloes whom he had left in the farm so that they don't eat away the harvest. With a heavy heart and a little hesitation to leave the dog, he started walking towards his buffaloes. Before we left that spot Swara asked him if he wanted to cremate his dog but he denied, partly because of the social pressure I assume. We saw him slowly walking in the direction of his buffalo as we started heading towards the highway.

We looked into our bags if we had something to share with the kid and we found some grapes that someone had given us in the morning. Swara went to him and shared it along with a few pocket change that she had and told him to do some act of kindness with that money. Before leaving she extended a big hug to him. 

When Swara started walking towards me the boy called her and started checking his pockets. Swara thought he would be giving back the money. Instead, he took out the two ice candies that he had got for him and his younger brother and shared it with her saying one is for her and one is for your sister:) I was witnessing this beautiful moment from a distance and this time it was tears of love that were flowing from our eyes. We knew how priceless those ice-candies were for the child and to witness his giving especially when he had lost something very close to his heart was invaluable. We were walking one of the driest patches without a single tree on the road on a sunny morning. This encounter with the little kid made our hearts drenched with unconditional love and was reminded of this song that Arun dada sings which has a line saying, “Ankho ma pani to have ne jai nathe bhetar bhinash thate oche”. (Water in the eyes comes and goes. But the moistness within never dries)    

While reflecting on what just happened in the last hour, I realized, I might have witnessed the accident, maybe prayed, and silently walked ahead. It was a gift that my co-pilgrim extended to me because of which I experienced the power of presence. I was thinking in the later years if the boy might remember us. Not sure of that but I would at least make an attempt to pause and share my presence next time. Grateful to my co-pilgrim for being the torchlight; where my consciousness ends, she gently shows me a step further:)




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