Justice Of The Almighty

Around one year back we had shifted to an apartment in a new locality. One day while my daughter's private tutor was teaching her in the drawing-room and I was busy in the kitchen preparing lunch, the doorbell rang.

I rushed to open the door and found a miserable looking aged woman in shabby clothes crying her heart out that her only son who used to be the bread earner of both mother and son had died in a road accident and she didn't have a single penny to conduct his cremation.

Soft-hearted as I'm, I began to imagine the plight of the parents who have to conduct their children's funeral and I broke into tears imagining that I couldn't even imagine my life without my only daughter.

Then I gave her Rs.500 and she left. When my husband returned from office, my daughter narrated the whole incident to him, in her way of interpretation," Papa, do you know, an old woman came here this morning and told something to mama and made her cry!!"

 

When he asked me, I explained the whole situation to him. Then he exclaimed, putting his hand on his head exasperatedly," How much of a simpleton can you be? People take advantage of your simple, kind-hearted nature. I have heard from the neighbors, that she is one of the local sweepers and this is their regular well-planned strategy to extort money from newcomers to the locality!!"

I had answered," I donated to a needy person. God is there to understand my good intention. And if she cheated me by telling a lie of such an extent that her son had died, then also God is there to judge her action."

I had completely forgotten that incident as the days went by ,till yesterday when we heard that her stale corpse was lying in her hut ,in the slum areas near our apartment ,surrounded by insects, filling the whole area with putrid odour. 

Our society secretary explained in the society meeting regarding this matter ,that no sweeper was willing to touch her body because they were suspecting that she had died of COVID infection. They even didn't go near her to offer her food and water in her last days.

We summoned the COVID team ,who came fully attired in PPE kits and took her body away to some unknown cremation ground ,where COVID patients were being cremated in bulk, without any prayers or rituals at all.