Bus Doctors- Operation donation

A small journey started writing itself out. It started as a thought to pen, to confess and to compress colors of life. Yet, what played out was just a fraction of the story called life, raw natural life.

The boy had just been enamored with the concept of mindlessly traveling in public buses. Being a Bangalorean, it meant a wide range of options.

One such journey had the boy sitting on a windows seat, yet looking inside, smart bus conductor conducting their business in style, a wide palette of people getting in and out. It was a straight out university level education.

A small kid starts walking around, into the bus, looks to recognize potentials, marks a few people, stands in front of them, walks by rubbing her satin cloth onto them while passing, all indicators of the markers.

Since the bus is at a starting junction, it would be waiting for a while to begin.

The marked individuals while squirming to not cause any dis comfort to the kid now each get a piece of paper. A paper that details in detail the plight of its owner and her family, the kid being one of them. The hard time started due to a accident of the husband and the operational costs could not cover it. What is next is a surreal appeal to your human conscience to donate generously to the cause of her plight to be alleviated.

What is a beautifully masked secret is the jewelry cleverly concealed under the clothing on their neck. Gold seemed to be omnipresent. Now, an argument can be made that it is fake gold, but that's a different story.

For someone who is appealing for their spouse's life, the manner in which the donation exercise was carried out was quite to the precision. The kid does a recce, the mother gets in the bus, does a systematic dropping of printed chits to everyone, waits for the markers and a time spent of thirty five-forty seconds.

Then the reverse journey begins. Each time the time spent by the kid and mother in front of the marked individuals are quite longer.  If no donations are given, the collections continue from others who do after a brief awkward pause. The family gets out of the bus and the whole donation operation is completed in a matter of 3 minutes.

The boy was marked too, but then the questions arise as well. The family is out begging in public buses. How true is it?. Typical response would be of dis-trust. But there is something of dispassionate humanity that just drags one out of comfort zone to think.. Why? Who? When?

Why would life throw these experiences in front of you. Is it a reality check by nature? Is it a sociological issue? Or is an economical option for a desperate family taking to desperate measures to make ends meet.

All said and done, the reality was never known. But in the three minutes that the boy had been exposed to, two things stood out.

One: The mother never made any eye contact with any one with who the donation was being made except for making observations on the kid.

Two: The boy saw the eyes of the kid marking potentials. All that he saw was just lost distant eyes. The childhood had been sucked out into the distant void that the child seemed to be searching for.

The journey had not been the usual pleasurable one, yet life had taught a lesson that was best forgotten always- looks are deceptive yet if receptive enough humanity may survive somewhere in the distant void the child was looking into.!!