The Black Angel

“The best time for supper – If you are rich, whenever you please; if you are poor, whenever you can.” (Anonymous)

Statements like these strike a responsive chord in my organic faculties. Why is it so?

Majority of the people with whom I’m well acquainted, and the general public, confess or rather, with a thumping voice, say that they are religious. The Holy Scriptures, all of them, never differentiate between human beings. All are born equal and will die so. Then why these earthly differences – shouldn’t such people who give illegal birth to these demonic ideas be tagged as Satan’s accomplice or rather ‘Satan’?

This is one such experience, which made my soul cry.

I was asked to visit a family friend and complete a formality, and so I did. I hate visiting such insensitive worldly-wise people, but when you live on a round planet, your choices are limited.

Behind the huge concrete walls of their majestic mansion, I noticed a little tender boy in worn-off clothes, so depleted and torn that the patches of his black sun burnt skin were clearly visible, resembling a barren crust of infertile land. The blisters on the soles of his feet were so enormous, that for a moment, I felt he had proved Newton’s law of gravity a hoax. His eyes had a unique attraction about them. It seemed as if the pair of those glowing iris wanted to convey something, which the vocal organs weren’t able to express. What was that? Confusion, bewilderment, dilemma, joy…I thought for a moment and then left.

After two days, when I again visited that artificial gallery of materialistic weeds, Chhotu was not there. Only that day I came to know his name. I took his address and went looking for him. Finally, my marathon ended, and what I saw there made my eyes water. The mother, Chhotu’s last surviving guardian, succumbed to her chronic ailment leaving that black angel of dewy innocence amidst sanguinary, savage beasts with their knives ready to butcher him. Fear sent shivers down my spine and for a moment my mental mechanism halted. What I felt at that moment would seem funny, but that’s what I felt. I wanted to get into the underpants of superman, wear his cloak and fly with Chhotu to some utopia. I landed back on earth when a passerby who said he was well acquainted with me, gave me a jerk.

The one and only thing on my mind was the future of Chhotu; his life which was at stake. I was somnambulistic for two days, with growing restlessness; my appetite almost collapsed. The malevolent experience was feeding on my nerves; I was almost on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

An acquaintance told me that someone has employed Chhotu for household chores. It was a professor having a considerable reputation, material repute in fact. I was losing control; I was so bewildered – should I go and see his situation? I was having nightmares. Finally I went to meet him, it was irresistible. When I reached my destination, the first thing I had to pass through was a non-stop rain of questions that Chhotu’s employer was showering on him. Chhotu was in the verandah, under the open sunlight, so intense and scorching that it made dogs pant with their tongues out. But the courage Chhotu displayed was immense and majestic. Like a warrior he was scrubbing the clothes; applying the detergent on the clothes to wipe off the dirt and mud in the same manner a warrior kills his enemy with precision. Finally, he made a breakthrough, the fight was over, and Chhotu emerged victorious. The clothes were all clean, shining bright as stars. I wouldn’t have been able to do it so efficiently. I got a glimpse of Chhotu’s tiny little hands; so coarse and thick as if he had grated them against something. Then began the never ceasing spree of tortures that Chhotu had to undergo. ‘Do this’, ‘do that’, ‘go there’, ‘come here!’.

People call me hyper sensitive, and aggressive too. Watching Chhotu pass through various tortures I was furious. I wanted to murder them all, kill this selfish world. The pain was getting unendurable. I left that place never to come back again. But Chhotu’s eyes, their innocence, pulled me back. It was a force so strong that no one would have been able to resist or so I think.

A solution struck my hotchpotch cerebrum and I wasted no time in executing it. What I did for Chhotu thereafter was like murdering him in cold blood. I got him admitted in a charitable school and finished further formalities. Among them all, being the local guardian was the best one. Now Chhotu can understand things better, he can judge between right and wrong. But his glittering eyes are still chaste, like pearls in a seashell, like stars shining evermore amidst various shapes of the galaxy.

If Chhotu happens to meet his former masters – who have taken a step further in their panache for hurting and ridiculing others (and for that instead of weeds, now I call them ‘degenerates’), he still lay open before them his casket of respect, studded with gems of affection and pearls of care. He still calls them ‘Sahab’.

I saw the world, the whole cosmos through the vision of Chhotu. He made me realize the pettiness of this material world; a world of self-centered ugly beasts who are eating up the very roots of their existence, like monsters of the deep.

What Chhotu gave me, I think, I’ll never be able to get again, not in this world, not in this life. It is something that I’ll cherish for my lifetime. You must be thinking what that thing was.

He called me ‘Dada’.