But he is a man!

 BUT HE IS A ‘MAN’!

After spending the whole day ,  venting out my frustration by fiercely speaking about how my society and your society never bothered helping oppressed gender aka girls, grow wings, and fly and get the taste of broad blue skies ,I was casually walking across the road as I saw him. I saw him . My eyes stopped right into his eyes and through his eyes I collapsed and fell deep into some unknown dark pit. 

     He was sitting by a wall near a giant trash trunk on the freezing  road, half blurred by fog half by darkness and half by unknown sadness. Legs drawn closer to chest with head resting on folded knees as if it was too heavy for that friable soul to hold it up . Head was tilted to one side and so were the eyes. Even in that darkness I figured something pouring down from his dry empty eyes, across his cheek and making a mark across  dirt laden beautifully crafted face. . A person, who looked like an old discarded mannequin ,around 10 years old, wrapped poorly in brown kameez and shalwar which ended a lot higher than his ankles, broken and stitched and again broken chappal ,mockingly covering an inch length of his skin, feet were dry and cold and appeared ripped as was his whole world. Car drivers were racing , vendors screaming on top of their lungs, dark smoke from nuts laden carts was conspiring along with rest of darkening, but he did not belong to that world , he was stuck inside some other demonic world and with a mere glance, his eyes unwillingly and suddenly took me down into his world as if they have been in wait for centuries for some other eyes to cross paths with them so they can then show them what they had seen, and ask other one if they deserve to endure all this at such a fragile age. I also went down without resistance. 

        There my mind saw what my eyes have been seeing for ages. I saw 10 years crooked under the weight of his own self , 10 years of roughness dragged and driven by constantly applied grease of " a man must behave like a man" . I saw the glitter he had in his eyes , glitter just sufficient enough to sparkle the whole world. I saw him, one day, as he happily slid his fingers across his friend's new bicycle and made sure, through his plans, that he was going to get one, same to same, same color with same whistle and same extra seat on back. Then one day, I saw him looking upto his father's face for motivation of the day and hearing his friends voices echoing across the walls of his mind that he would turn up a garbage collector like his father. 'Isnt he so sturdy and brave?!' 'but I still don’t want to be like him,' he decided, he was going to turn the course of his fate and his mother's and he was going to set everything right .One pitched dark night, I heard his heart throbbing in his throat upon hearing dogs howling near the trash trunk which was his favourite thing for it provided daily plastic to his childhood. Then I saw with my own eyes, his world losing colors with each passing day. I felt his heart shattering with each sob he tried to suffocate while sitting outside his shed for he did not want to be mocked at ,by telling about his misery by hands of harassment some elder boys were putting him through those days. I saw him wanting to set the whole world on fire when he was snatched off his school uniform. Then getting beaten by mechanic and running away and being imprisoned back to that shop , he began losing last few strings of hope that were keeping him from drowning into sea of utter desperation. I saw that little soul getting overpowered by impulse of desire and stealing something out of his master's drawer but what happened next couldn’t be seen for I closed my eyes shut and shut them so tight that I woke up from that dream . 

      God knows how long had I been standing there frozen to ground , and in that moment, neither did I  moved my eyes nor did he .

    I came back home and my mind effortlessly, without even demanding my permission, started drawing out his future. You know one thing our brains and hearts are so good at doing. I started seeing him growing physically and mentally so barely, but so amply in self doubt ,self hate, getting enveloped in never retreating dark clouds of apprehension and under confidence. I saw adult him getting rejected by a girl he so heartedly adored. That’s all, thats where I ended my tormenting thoughts. I found it so hard to live , even though just in the thoughts, someone else’s life. Life many are and will be enduring . But who cares, a man is never fragile, he is born strong, he is meant to bear all the this......