~ A Soul Aloof…~

He is ‘free’ from his responsibilities and have set his foot on doing things which otherwise he could not have done. His journey of life is as fantastic as the man he is – always making you smile and cracking pranks and jokes when he will meet you. ‘Sheel Uncle’ as we always have called him ever since we have known him for so many years in the past, he has shared our growing up years and quite often used to see us playing games in our local park.

Now that his only son has left him alone for greener pastures overseas – though being offered to accompany him, he blatantly refused ( as he once told me, though don’t know if it was a genuine truth or he just spoke to save his son’s character!), he has been meddling with petite affairs of locals, be it of his locality or neighbors, though nowadays I see him quite often spending time with shopkeepers in a nearby market. One thing for sure I have to claim about Sheel uncle – he has been a man of integrity and honesty as I have benchmarked his character through an incidence that happened long back.

As street urchin’s, we used to spend zillion hours during the day passing time in a nearby park and uncle’s home was just adjacent to our playground and as a natural inevitability, one day his glass window got shattered by one of our cricketing shots  - Just then, all hell broke loose as Sheel uncle just could not control his anger and broke our cricketing bat 😊. As kids, the neighborhood’s sympathy went in favour of us and Sheel uncle soon realized his folly and paid us in full the amount required to buy the bat of same stature and quality, not a penny was compromised. Further his large-heartedness bestowed us that day when he bought cold drinks for us as well and did not demand money for the damaged window!

That parable still has an strong stamp on my mind whenever I see him roaming around in aloofness – His wife is no more and there is nobody who he can share his loneliness with…We as grown up kids now always make it a point to greet and share our past memories with him, which he always remembers , believe me times certainly changes.

Many of us living in colonies have such people who are singletons and there is nobody who they can call friends or acquaintances, more so , they are vulnerable to changing times and are hawk-eyes of criminals. We as a society can be a soothing stance for them – just sharing or cracking a simple joke or giving some moments of our life and talking to them certainly makes a huge difference to them.

Remember, our days would also come as our kids would be busy in our own lives – may be out of this country and we would be in a situation to live like Sheel uncle – our family would be our neighbors and old friends with whom we have shared our life’s moments and now they are in the same carriage as we are in.

The oldies as I always say are full of life’s wisdom – the only flaw is with us that we are so super busy in chasing our dreams and aspiring to be ‘Something’ totally oblivious to our approaching years… for that would be the most demanding years of our life’s… with health bottlenecks and we requiring a constant care …a good friend or a neighbor would be our only hope for a witty talk and survival…till then, be someone’s companion and share a joke or two to help pass his boredom… someone is seeing you doing this…!!!