I am a coward

I am a coward. I am unable to speak out. I am unable to express myself.

Everyone has come forward and condemned the heinous criminals of Peshawar.

Everyone has expressed their grief to the bereaved parents.

I am a coward. I have nothing to say.

What do you say to more than two hundred parents who sent their children to school like it was another day, only to realize it was their last? Can I look that parent in the eye and say I am sorry? Can I say time heals all wounds?  Can I even say time wounds all heels – that’s really not going to get their children back, is it?

Somewhere I had read, a child as being a piece of your heart that you allow to roam freely outside. That piece of your heart is gone. Now what do you say to someone who has lost a limb – a hand or leg, or in this case a piece of the heart? That life will go on? You’ll manage? What?!

These are parents with shattered hearts, desperately picking up the fragments, holding, clinging on to the shards, even if they bleed them dry. No tears can express their grief as they walk in a daze trying to come to terms with a bleak future where no night ends, and mornings don’t herald a new beginning.  Where there’s no hope of seeing the sunshine of their child’s smile every morning. Where life stretches eons ahead like a barren landscape: endless, colourless, hopeless.

Can I talk to these parents? I am a coward. I can’t.

Instead, I’ve shrunk into a dark corner in the recesses of my mind, crumpled up into a heap. I cringe at the very thought. I can’t bear to imagine the grief. I cannot empathise with them. I cannot sympathise. There are no words. These are no tears. There are no sobs that wrack the body with grief. There is just a wounding of a heart, tears of blood and a painful realization. I can only imagine the terror, the screams, the horror that hundreds of little souls went through. Nothing, nothing will ever be the same again for so many people. I can’t light a candle even in my mind; right now I don’t see it dispelling the pall of dark despair that this heinous act has cast.

And as I make myself smaller and smaller crouching in the dark, damp corner of hopelessness, all I can say is may the rest be a little more hopeful, a little more courageous than I am.

I for one am a coward. And I have no words to say for humanity. Or the sheer lack of it.

I’ve been thinking...

I’m late for my physiotherapy appointment.

It’s for my knee which is aging physically as I mentally regress. (Unfortunate but true)

The traffic is not on my side. Correction: all the traffic seems to be on my side of the road and I inch forward with the ticking of the digital clock in the car. The last patient in is at 7. It’s nearly 6:45 pm.

I reach just in time to park the car, dash across the road and make it to the physiotherapy department few hairs before 7.

I am in!

It’s only when I get in that I realize that I have left my phone in my car!

Oh no!

What’s one going to do for one hour (almost) without the phone? WITHOUT the phone. 

WITHOUT THE PHONE! Do you even get me?

My immediate mental response is to call someone to get my phone from the car.

I have forgotten my phone in the car… did you get how mechanical we are in our responses?!

Using the phone to get your phone… not happening.

#FAIL.

Second (and thankfully wiser) approach, run to the car and get the phone.

(Did I tell you something about a knee needing physiotherapy? How DOES one run?!)

Second #FAIL

Third solution: do without the phone.

WHAT???

Yes. Do without the phone. It’s barely one hour.

And then an inner battle ensues.

My Inner Phone Buddy (she’s not really a friend, you’ll see) rises up to the challenge, takes on the power pose (substantially helped by Amy Cuddy) and argues: What if you miss out on an urgent phone call?

It’s Saturday evening. And most of the (superb) lot I know are probably planning to step out. None of them are going to call me.

In the event one fine person (bless his dear heart) decides to call me, if he is part of the knowledgeable crowd I am in contact with, he should know my penchant for having put my phone somewhere other than where I’ve put myself.

The wiser ones will guess I am driving. The true Yodas (thank God for understanding friends) know I am doing something else and will answer at a later date (probably sometime in this year).

So technically, I tell my Inner Phone Diva, I can survive an hour without the phone.

As for the likes of Narendra Modi, Brad Pitt, Sr. Bachchan and of course those young men out there wanting to call me, they will just have to wait another hour, won’t they?

My Inner Phone (now) Goddess pouts, albeit too melodramatically for my liking, and talks about other emergencies. This time making my heart sink.

The social media disconnectness! Oh! Woe is me.

Away from the blue bird of social happiness, how will I know what the #Twitterverse is saying about 10 top celeb bikini fails or for that matter, will I miss out on someone who is promising me 5000 followers in 2 days? And the hashtags! Oh! I'll miss the hashtags. 

And how can I turn my face away from Facebook for an hour! What if someone does not “like” my latest post! And how can my latest post be latest if I miss out on an hour. No shares!!! How will I ever face the world!

And being delinked from LinkedIn? How will I keep up with all the management knowledge I could have gathered in that one hour that I would have flitted in and out of the pages! No pulse on the market? Terrible.

Then once again I steel myself. (So much for my impeccable self discipline). Surely a social media fast for an hour is good for the … well… good for the social media! And probably this is good for all those ‘out there’. Good for me too… cos my absence will make their heart grow fonder.

I lose myself in a megalomanic reverie and I am rudely brought back by the physiotherapist doing something painful to my knee. I came here to get rid of the pain I want to tell her, but she is not in a ‘listening’ mood, so I continue arguing with my Inner Phone Wench.

Hummph! I say, I am not going to miss the social media time spent too! Boo yaa!

This time she does a jig that I am incapable of doing. (She is really being badly behaved now!) What about all the games you play! She salsas on all my mental buttons now and makes me think of Ruzzle, Two Dots and Letterpress. (Thank God I don’t play Candy Crush or Clash of Clans – that Inner Phone Woman would have won then!)

Ha! I tell her. Have weaned myself off all the games. (I don’t admit it is because of the poor battery life of the phone) but she pooh-poohs me anyway. And then comes the final-really-really-lethal weapon from her armoury. (Wicked wicked Inner Phone Witch of the Worst!)

So… she says, in honeyed tones, as she sashays in front of me with an imaginary phone in her hand (and it’s a better phone than I have) with a smirk,

Then my darling, what ARE you going to do?!

Speechless!

Gobsmacked!

Thunderstruck!

What am I going to do!  I wonder. I flounder. I flail. I can’t imagine. I can’t think.

And then I calm down (once again to get the better of her). I think.

Yes… I think. It’s a strange unfamiliar world. Where your brain cells wake up, stretch themselves, look around and decide they need to brush their teeth and get ready to go to work.

So I hand out little tubes of toothpaste to those grey cells to get their teeth white and their breath mint fresh and… hurrah! I am thinking.

How about that?

I think about the various contraptions used to manage the pain in my knee. I engage with the physio as to what she is doing. I wonder about the other patients. (This feeling of not being alone in your suffering is very elevating, I tell you! Some may call it Schadenfreude, but I don’t want to be too honest right now!)

I think about the day ahead and the day tomorrow. I think about what I need to do. I think about the 20 pending items in my 20 to-do lists and how best I can avoid or procrastinate. I think about the best way to get home beating the traffic. I think about my next 15 blogposts (okay not 15!).And I think about various makeovers for the home and how buying a bigger home is the solution. And yes, while I am on bigger I think of buying a bigger car and (automatically) widen the roads in Mumbai! And then I am thinking of my next holiday... ah! Bliss. If thinking is so good, next time I'll probably meditate!

And then I am done! With one hour of physiotherapy. One hour of thinking. Of being in a wonderful world of thought, of traversing the woods of imagination, floating on the clouds of what ifs and why nots. It’s great. My knees feel great. And if I am skipping out of the physiotherapy department tripping the light fantastic, while dragging the Inner Phone Wreck by the charger unit to her phone, it’s definitely not the physiotherapy alone!

I’ve been thinking!