...Of these Times...

We were wrong, weren’t we?


Five W’s in that line.


We associated the word passion only with hormones kicking at and around puberty. After that, we thought human beings succumb to social pressures and passions are monitored, dictated and exercised by the collective voice of one’s society.


We were wrong.


Any amount of words spoken for 8th October, 2005, will not suffice. Enough words have been spoken and written already about an event that will go down in our collective history and memory as a mark-point of eons, perhaps. Passion of the youth is ventilated in the forms of words, actions, tears, vows and physical presence at the site of disaster.


But one woman, who probably represents countless other women, remains uncaptured by any lens, human and electronic.



Ahmadi Begum.
Aged 87, perhaps even more.


Cannot walk properly anymore, her eye sight brings incorrect information sometimes… but she remains an Amazon at heart, with strength your prodigious sons would be shy of. She has been too much already, migrating to Pakistan in ’47, the wars of ’65 and ’71… and then, the successive deaths of her parents, husband, siblings, even younger siblings, children, and grandchildren, too. I have driven her to and fro the death sites of some of her dearest, closest people… deaths that brought tears to my eyes, even when if I had never exchanged anything but a greeting with the deceased.


But my Amazon grandmother never cried. I never saw tears in her eyes. In desperate failure to understand her disposition, I even went as far as assuming, may be she doesn’t care about anyone or anything.


Aftermath of 8th October, 2005.
Now, I see her cry.


I see her cry and then, I watch the fluctuations as the resource woman augments within her, asking me to bring yards upon yards of stretchable raw cloth, so she can stitch masks out of them for doctors and aide workers to wear. I have no heart to tell her that such an effort would be wasted, we can buy those masks right of the shelf at a pharmacy now, and send them across. She has braided raw strings into strings for those masks… as she weeps at the sight of mass-graves on the television.


Each day, on my return from work, she hands me a list of point persons to contact, numbers she has taken down with teary eyes and shaky hands, as dictated on the television. Each day she narrates her new ‘plan’ for the reconstruction of this destruction – how we can split our house into portions to accommodate families of wounded people who will travel south for medical assistance; or, how we should pool in all our earnings and reserve a good percentage for at least 2 years to support a specific number of families.



Ideas are endless.
We thought rationality should take over by her age, at least?



There are no strict boundaries between reason and idealism anymore, such is the nature of these Times. The distinct worlds of Plato and Aristotle breathe together under the same roof – at last – the rational and empirical worlds.



Is this what God had in mind?
Effective, very effective.