Government Hospital

She is lying on a wooden plank outside the orthopedic department. Two steel rods are tightened across her feeble leg. The cotton has turned crimson from where the rods pierce the flesh. Hardly nine years of age, her wet eyes look around, desperately looking for her father who just promised her that he'll be back in a minute; he has gone to bring a rickshaw.

I stand there, watching her and cursing myself for not having the courage to console her. My perfectly ironed clothes and polished shoes start to make me feel guilty.What if her father never comes back? This is Pakistan and she is a girl. What if the father weighs his options and finds out that it would be better to leave her there rather than to take a disable girl back home, a financial and social burden. 20 minutes pass and the father is still not back; the girl is not crying anymore. Her expressions tell me that fear has replaced all other emotions. I am still standing there at a distance, constantly looking at her. She looks at me after every few seconds. My heart lies to me that perhaps my presence is a little relief to her but I know that I mean nothing. We are both helpless beyond imagination or at least we feel like that.

I know that eventually I'll have to go. I'll be thinking about this for a couple more days, those eyes will haunt me for sometime but then (and I don't know why) I'll forget it. Life would not let me stand on the shore and one of its many torrents would take me away with it. I just wish those eyes could haunt me for the rest of my life so that I could never even dare to complain for how things are or would turn out to be.

__________ I exist because I think but my inability to think what others' think makes me extinct. I am alive because I feel pain but my incapacity to feel others' pain tells me that I am long dead. Slave of the most carnal desires I have the audacity to call myself different_____

The father did come and took her daughter away. The stubborn hope gets the last laugh.