cherubchild
He's merely five. His skin is coloured flawless ochre, his eyes are charcoal black and his hair razor sharp silk. Less than three feet from the ground he stands tall and tenacious. The first time I saw him he was using a small stick on a cane basket like it were a cycle tyre and running behind it as it bounced like a crazy ball. Ajit, is in the neighbourhood with his construction worker entourage who are helping erect the house next door.
He plays alone, shunned by the rest of the kids in the neighbourhood who are amusing themselves with fancy, expensive playthings. The kid is clearly on rocket fuel, alive and animated, blissfully unaware that he has been ostracised. He constantly uses ingenuity and enterprise to craft himself new toys and mind games. The landscape he inhabits in his head is movie like spellbinding and magical and he scarcely notices his surrounding.
I saw him this one time in deep concentration as he was striking a nail through a circular plastic device which he was affixing to a irregular stick. Once done he imagined it to be a bike and ran with it. I look at his folks, defeated, their eyes vacant and their bodies shrunken from the sheer physical ravaging they have suffered.
Ajit, don't lose that ingenuity and inventiveness and please do not let the world wear down your gee whiz enthusiasm for life. Go from labourer to mason to contractor to mega-builder.
Do not let them snuff out the fire in your soul.