EASILY ENTANGLED..

- Joshua Cherian Varughese

H

e walked days at a stretch; His irregular steps tended to trip him over, his hair was ruffled and unkempt like a tramp, his lips hung down uncovering his dry mouth, his drooping eyes gazed hopefully somewhere into the future looking for something that he seemed to have seen. He had seen something so gripping in the past that his well to do life filled with fun, frolic and talents moved into the background and got blurred; His thought world was a swamp with no solid ground worth a firm foothold. .his identity bobbed up and down like pieces of ice melting in water.

It was not a sight of horror that he had seen for his face was calm nor was it a sight of goodness for he lacked any in him..It was hope that he saw.. It was a sight of such great hope that lifts one to the heights no human has felt but that hope which lasts but for a moment. What is hope if it does not last? Hope by definition is something that lasts but the hope which came to him lasted only for a moment.  And yet it was so real that when it vanished he dropped from those heights to these lows. 

It is not once that he had thought it will not appear to him again, it is not once that it occurred to him that he should live in the present like everybody else, it is not once that he tried and it not once that he fell back into this depressing chasm of a “hope” of seeing that hope again. One fine day he would decide, “No more of this!!” and he would start living a normal life like anyone else. But how can man not hope when he has seen the heights of it? He would feel the “hope to hoping like he hoped” crawling irresistibly up his legs slowly winding itself on him like a python which cannot be stopped. The days that followed would be least described by the word “pain”. Repeated “normalcy” and “abnormalcy” left what is left of that fine young man to wonder:

“O hope, why didst thou choose me?

Did I ask of thee, Did I ask even a morsel?

Did my soul seek its self  or did I rob the poor?

What great sin did my self commit, O my soul?

Or what great charity did I do for your benevolence?

I just sought to live a life, with nothing but a smile

But thou hast made me hope to the pinnacle

That when thou art not, I search..I search endlessly”