People sniggered as he walked past – those who cared to take notice. Others did not even feel his presence. Nondescript, clumsily attired, disheveled hair, torn sandals flapping at every step.
No one knew much about him – no one cared to. Somewhere in the blurred and distant past he was part of society. Some vaguely remembered that he came from some noble stock. But that was very long ago, and none cared for the bygones. Today there was only one word to describe him – failure.
He did not have a job (was he capable of doing one?), he lived in a shed in the compound of a long-closed factory, he didn’t seem to possess any clothes other than those on his back. He had no friends, at least not among the respectable citizens. The lunatic hanging around the City Market square seemed to like him very much. So did the stray dogs that the elite wanted terminated. There was also the old beggar woman, crawling on hands and stubs of legs, who seemed to be fond of him. Wasn’t the company he kept itself enough evidence of the fact that he was a failure?
One day a highly respected scholar was passing by City Market. He was an acknowledged authority of wisdom in many fields, and a very prosperous and respected man. The scholar saw this man sitting on the pavement and noticed that he was scribbling something with a pencil stub on a dirty bunch of papers. With disdain he went near him and inquired what he was writing. The tone of the question clearly conveyed his contempt that the person could write at all. Silently, and with glazed eyes, the man held up a bunch of ragged papers to the scholar.
“Reality of Life” read the scribbled title. The scholar started reading and his jaw dropped in disbelief. The wisdom of the words pierced as an arrow. The depth of the thoughts could only have come from profound intellect far beyond the average. The scholar kept shaking his head in disbelief as he read page after page of unbelievable excellence, an insight into life that no human had unraveled before. “Where did you get these notes from?” asked the scholar sternly, as a policeman interrogating a criminal. The man sitting on the footpath raised his eyes, and in the depth of those eyes appeared the mysteries of time immemorial. “I wrote it” he replied simply.
The scholar berated him for lying. He laughed derisively. A rainbow of emotions passed through the scholar’s mind – incredulity to greed. His heart was racing with the idea that was forming in his mind – an opportunity of a lifetime. He looked down again at the miserable figure on the pavement, and loudly started scolding him for being useless and an imbecile, a burden on this earth already overloaded with other vermin like him.
Continuing with his loud tirade, he slowly and purposefully thrust the bunch of papers in his bag, and walked off without a second look. The man on the pavement seemed to be giving a blank stare – but none knew what was going on in his mind’s endless depths. He was quick to grasp what had happened, and he accepted it with the same cynical grace as he had accepted every turn of his miserable life.
Days passed by. Life on the pavement was no different from one day to another. The rich, the beautiful and the intelligent would turn their nose up and walk past our miserable wretch, while those who thought they were more miserable than him reached out for his support. He often wondered what he had to give them. On the other hand, they knew what they were getting from him. No one said it in words, but deep down these wretches knew how much more wretched they would be without him.
One day he was shuffling along the main road that led to the Town Hall. Suddenly he was stopped by a lathi wielding policeman. He looked up in surprise to see that a fabulous function was being readied. There were buntings and banners. The crowds were waiting to receive the honourable Governor. The occasion, as announced by the banners was – the release of a book by the very same rich scholar who had snatched the papers from him. The book to be released was entitled “Reality of Life.”
The man pushed behind by the policeman looked towards the floodlit Town Hall. The book was yet to be released … but he knew every word of what was written in it.
