Unveiling of holes

Strangers surround one in this world more than one can perceive. There are strangers everywhere, every time. It is difficult to ignore all of them, and it is difficult to notice all of them. Most we don’t dare to look; others we don’t care to look or we don’t see them. Some meet our eyes, lock our gaze, share a moment, take away that moment, give us a smile, and grant us a brief moment of discarded joy. Some we share with a common plight during that short locked gaze, plight that we don’t speak out, plight that we all know of, plight that is not worth acknowledging, the plight of remaining a stranger, the plight of living with distrust. Some gazes tell us a story; invite us into those deep eyes, deep enough to dive into, deep enough to live in, deep enough to drown in. Those eyes are scary because we recognize them even without looking in; they are so prominent, so loud, so flooded. We carefully avoid their gaze as we are scared of drowning; we are terrified of it, its power of survival. Those eyes are everywhere, every street, every lowly hut, every footpath, in every homeless dog, in the dark shadows of partial development. They are plenty in number, still we avoid those gazes, and we are skillful enough to see through them, to overlook them. Often when our skill backs away our eyes meet theirs, we fail, and we drown. The pang of guilt and sorrow heaves our whole system, it tightens our conscience, and we let them show us their grief, their hatred, their anger. It becomes grueling to hold that gaze but still we do because we feel locked, locked in that grief, in that immensity of injustice. We know what they need, their eyes are loud enough, yet we don’t do it, yet we back away, we reason out and alert ourselves the practicality, the very essential normalcy of our lives that we do not want to give away, we cling to the self centering. We gain the power to restrain the grief from swallowing us, from acting for us. Then we unlock the gaze, we break that invisible thread. The thread through which we saw a life, many similar lives and their stories, their needs and their grief, their hatred and their anger, their power of survival, their frantic breathless souls sinking in the ocean of injustice. We walk away, we let them sink. As we walk away our conscience screams at us, stabs us and makes holes in us, yet we walk, we listen to loud music hoping to silence the inner screaming voice, we laugh and eat merrily, merriness that has veiled the holes that smell of sinking bodies, of murderous grief. In some the holes unveil themselves, the inner voice grow louder than the music, the merriness fails to  survive over the grief, they step up, they pull up the sinking ones, one by one, as many as they can. They realize the beauty is in grieving along with the grievers rather than veiling it up piled up in ugly holes. They realize that the real merriness comes with no veils over nothing, without breaking any gazes, with listening to the inner voice, with giving away the normalcy of life to welcome the excellence, the seemingly impossible. Such people help the humanness survive, the plight of distrust reduce in power. They help the suffering diminish, they save the suffering ones from dying under the majestic footsteps of the massive ugliness of development. It is true; such people are just a few. Can’t we just follow those few? Listen to our inner voice and let our conscience act for us. Yes we can do that, I am sure we can.