Wriggled

I have perceived, always perceived, an old saying that diktats a verity that if you do evil to someone in the morning, it vaults back to you the very same evening. For better understanding, I allude to Newton, who says, “for each and every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”. It is true I would say for I experienced it. I did (often do) vice and got it back to me the very same day. Do not think that I am philosophic in tone. I am plain, I sense. Read the following anecdote and you will know what I am trying to say.

That morning, a humdrum morning, I went to my class and some how I started talking about disturbances I face inside the bus in which I travel. I was talking about men/women who sleep and become a pest to the co-passenger(s). I talked about its fun part and about the furious parts. My students enjoyed it. Then I said about men who sit at the back of women and about their uneasiness when the shawl (dhupatta, we localize it) of the girl comes to the back seat accidentally with the help of the wind. My students had a roaring laughter when I expressed my thoughts. I never, myself, have experienced facing a shawl, so I was cracking many jokes.

Evening came and I started back to my home in the same college bus. The bus sped in the National Highway and as it increased its pace, my heartbeat increased its lubs and tubs, for a shawl came running towards me from the front seat. At first, the shawl touched my knees and my bag, which I always rest in my lap. I did not mind it. Later, because of heavier wind, the shawl touched my hands and slowly crept to my shoulder. I felt like the game that I play with kids, my two fingers (imagined as the legs of crabs) climbing carefully over the kid’s little arm to tickle it.

The shawl did not tickle me nor did I laugh but I was shunning at the non-living thing that was well animated the hands of the wind. Then it touched my face. Could it be called slapping? No, it could not be called so for it gave a pain; it made me wriggle but not literally and physically. Now, I thought, that shawl be renamed as shovel. Shovel usually gets coal and throws it into a burning furnace but this one takes my face and throws me into a different world – a world of shyness, a world of speechlessness, a world of cowardice, a thoughtless, numb world.

In a spur of a moment, a hand came pulling the shawl away from me. It was the girl’s – the owner of the shawl. The girl chuckled for she was my student who attended my class in the morning, wherein I talked about the pathetic situation of persons, who face the furious blows of a shawl.