The Standing Spot

I go to a familiar spot every day from where I travel to the place, where I get my rice and dals and vegetables and meats and whiskies; these things that I bargain with the objects that I’ve learnt to create,

The smells of a diligent workforce and machines and strangers and politics and money and arrogance… mark my destination: it’s another place, another sea of humanity and another different, ever-changing environment;

This morning, I was caught unaware as the Spot smiles at me—a simple smirk that makes me so consciously close to it as if we had known each other, even before the land dealers have robbed the land in the name of some Moreh-elastic ideologies and in the name of revolution and in the name of the people!

Grinning and in a friendly way, it said: “You come here day in and day out. I see you standing here as the blistering Sun laughs at you and the Rain—crooked and erratic as it can be—would occasionally greet you with its dull expression and the sullied Air that sympathises with your quirk of fate.”

Its empathy I appreciate it, and said, “Que sera sera—but I’ve been longing to say that you are also so patient, putting up with all the human debris around you and that you are so tolerable, allowing ministers and commoners alike to pass through your front and that you have been helping me reach my destination promptly.”

We continued our pleasantries, exchanging our stories and anecdotes and histories, and disclosing things that we like and things that we don’t like and things that we share together though we are made so differently:

I’m made of emotion and reason, and it comprises stones and steels, yet how we were composed did not matter as long as we were getting together and share mutual respect and don’t have to kill each other,

And it was not necessary to show that my journey is more important than its service to humanity.

Then it teased me, “You know I don’t killed for glory and I don’t die for the country and I don’t long for guns and I don’t yearn for money and I don’t mind what people do to me.

“Even if I’m blown away by your fellow being’s shits that made Hiroshima and Nagasaki the largest sulabh your kind has known. Mate, I heard you kind has shits that are thousand times smellier now? But again, I don’t mind if that would spare an atom of me.”

I replied, “Nobody can take a fragment off you. But I thought you were so considerate towards us, and how can you demean that the motherland lovers kill for glory and that the curry-smelling people die hopelessly for their country and that atom bombs are shits?!

But I’m pleased you don’t have filthy fingers to pull the trigger and caskets to hide money and are unprejudiced that others might harm you.”

Before the Spot responded, I heard the blaring sound of the engine and had to bid adieu and looked for my way to the door and embarked and saw the expression on its face that seemingly say: we shall meet again tomorrow. And I nodded.