Last Saturday, after a long time, we went to the park near our place to enjoy the pleasant weather of Hyderabad and to grab some junk foods (specially paani-poori or Batashe:- my wife’s fav).
After overdoing food-wise, we decided to sit there for some times to enjoy the weather and to see the cute kiddos kidding around.
There was this little girl sitting alone in the park, who caught our attention. She was looking at the children who were playing over there and looked very sad in her red dress. She never tried to speak to the playing children. She just sat there watching them with sad eyes. There was something in her eyes, that caught our attention but somehow we never got a chance to talk to her. But I felt that Khushi was not at all happy and asked me for several times, “why she was like that?? Whats troubling her??” I had no answers at that time but I promised to take her to the park again next day to check whether she is there so that we (or she) can talk to her..
The next day, when we went to the park, we were happy and shocked at the same time to see the girl sitting in the very spot where she was yesterday, and still with the same depressing gaze in her beautiful eyes.
So we decided to make our move and walked over to the little girl. As we get closer, we found that the back of the little girl’s costume was grotesquely formed due to some deformities. We stopped over there and looked in each other eyes for a second and then decided to go ahead and talk to that girl. When we got closer to the girl and faced her, she lowered her eyes to avoid our stare.
But Khushi smiled to let her know that, "its ok", we were there to talk to her. She sat beside that girl and said “Hello”. The girl was a bit shocked but manages to give a stammered “Hi” and shyly smiled back. And then we sat there with her for almost two hours, eat ice cream together and talked bout her working mother and her school.
When Khushi asked her reason of being sad, the girl looked at us with tear filled eye and said “I am sad, because I am different” Khushi said “yes sweetie, you are different” and the girl became sadder and said “I know that I am different, no one plays with not even my brothers”.
My heart ached at her pain but Khushi managed to reply; “Sweetie, you remind me of a charming little naive angel” She was surprised and happy and slowly asked “Really?? Am I an angel”.
Khushi said “yes beta, you are an angel, who was send by the God to watch over the children playing in the garden” And she gave us the most beautiful smile that we have seen till date and slowly stud up on the bench and opened her hands like wings and giggled “yes I am an angel”and then she said then she had to go home to tell his brothers bout this.
We sat there for some time, speechless, emotionally withdrawn and finally came back to our place heavy hearted..
Tell them dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for being
~Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Rhodora"~
