Where have all the tears gone?

I have a part of me which is very naïve….it makes me believe that when one is hurt and cries out aloud, help arrives. I believe that good always triumphs, I believe in prayers being answered, I seriously believe that if I were involved in an accident and were lying helpless, a good Samatarian would stop to pick me up.

I have never disregarded what I believed to have been a distress call. I think it is a human impulse which all of us possess and listen to.

I have dogs at home…see, I do not say I keep dogs…I am lost without them, their presence completes me. Sometimes as I lie listening to music and my dogs lie near me, I roll over and let our foreheads touch and I know that He who has made me has made them, I can sense our connection.

I admit that I cry when I listen to Sufi songs…and I do not understand a word! I cry when I pray very hard and it is so very embarrassing.....I always have a tear in my eyes when I hear our national anthem. When the Sabri brothers sang on one chilly night in Delhi , I wailed away and was very glad of their robust voices which concealed my sobs very effectively. My crowning moment was when I first came to Bombay and had gone to drop my son to his bus stop and we saw a stray dog with one eye and suddenly there I was, weeping away unabashedly with Sangram patting my shoulder and looking around to see who else had caught sight of his mom making a spectacle of herself.

So as you can see crying comes easy and I seem to be getting better with age. One would have thought that all the horror of these past days would have wiped out the entire tissue supply of neighbouring shops…but I do not cry. I did not cry when I saw the emptied station with abandoned heaps of luggage mixed indiscriminately with congealed pools of blood and footwear strewn all along which captured the essence of what went on there, I did not cry when we saw the tally of the killed and wounded, I did not cry when I saw the proud Taj being strafed into submission, I did not shed a tear when I saw the dead Major’s mother talk to a son lying in his casket, I did not cry when I saw sons cremate their fathers and their mothers turned to stone, I did not cry when I saw a father raging at the world when they handed him his only son in a coffin ( he reminded me so much of my dad), I did not cry when I read about The Taj GM who lost a wife and children, yet kept on saving the others….my tears have hardened into a mixture of rage and anguish.

I know that tears have no place here…they are weak, weak, weak! They have turned to lava and they burn the back of my throat and keep me awake. I do not want to talk and when I see the political guys trying to wriggle out of the cesspit they have created with their filthy, filthy ideas, I wish I could change a bit of the scenario and include them too in this spectacle which exceeds all nightmares! The terrorist shooting at random and getting away to later realize he shot down his family, A Vilasrao bidding farewell to his only son (where are the grins now, eh, fatface??), a Patil finding his own charred home and shrugging nonchalantly “aise hadse to hote rahte hain”, A livid Rane cursing his party upon seeing the dead (not now when he has been rejected for the post of CM), An Achutanand…(by the way, very appropriate name, suits him, how did his mother know)….being attacked and savaged by hordes of dogs as soon as he opened his mouth to utter sacrilege, Naqvi condemned to live forever with a wife in all her “natural’ beauty complete with 6 inch moustache and 4 inch goatee, and body hair which can be plaited (now why do you wail for beauty parlours and cosmetics, you pathetic throwback!), A…what IS Benazir’s husband’s name, Bhutto?? (There’s some cashing in on the dead wife’s name, politicians are a breed apart) saying at a press conference that Pakistan is not involved and a grenade shatters a wall to show a terrorist training camp in his garden, the ISI chief stating firmly his innocence and Osama’s call coming in loud and clear on his answering machine, Mme Rice shaking hands with the Pak delegation and then looking down to realize that her wristwatch and rings are missing and 3 of her fingers too ….I wish I could be scriptwriter for a day! Tear down all these veils of hardcore lies, expose the deceit and get redressal!

And I take heart from the anger I see reflected in others…this anger is good, it will burn all apathy, it will get things done, it is infinitely better than the tears and wails that have been of no account till now, it will start something new. We might see a phoenix rise from the burning flames of our collective anger!