Reflections from Village Visit at Hasuri Ausanpur, Siddharthnagar
Their eyes are perpetually on the verge of tears. The lines on the face hardened by toil, burdens unknown, sun, dust and time. Whenever now the tears flow, which is quite often, they make their way through these lines. As if a seasoned river flows through its valley, meandering at life events and gushing at waterfalls where the skin folds and droops. They don’t tell you stories, they tell you life. Real, painful, unfair and raw.
No one knows when these lines start appearing prominently but they do have some correlation to wisdom sometimes. A night watchman or a forest guard will have a third eye shaped by skin folding between his eyes. It’s the years of squinting and spotting things, that others don’t, that gave them that mark. The mark is not a sign of ageing, it’s a sign of life.
Parents, grandparents, elderly are all just tags. In the larger scheme of things 80 or 90 years is a speck of dust. Everyone is the same, just the exterior changes to make you into the person nature intended you to be.
From birth where the skin and even bones are as mouldable as clay to the age where the wrinkled memories appear, it’s a constant process of making of an individual. Any man who thinks that later stages of life are unproductive or not worth their time, think again. You’re never really made. We humans, in this gift of life, are always a Work in Progress. It stops only with our tombstone or willpower.