Saturday, March 09, 2019

The Strange-Looking Fruit

I was driving on my two-wheeler with my family near Banashankari bus stand one day, and was about to take a left turn when I noticed a mother crossing the road, dragging her child behind her who was struggling to keep pace. I stopped my vehicle to let her cross the road despite getting honks from behind me. While the mother was looking hither and thither to ensure she was not in the way of any vehicle, the child who was about 4-5 years old, had absolutely no care in the world for all the traffic around him despite the road being heavily occupied with all sorts of vehicles. He had absolute faith in that hand which was held by his mother; and his legs just kept moving one feet after next following his mother. To be honest, it was definitely a tough road to cross even for adults what with all the vehicles enjoying the erstwhile green signal, and having to drag a child too in the complex moving maze was a challenge indeed. 

And while he was following his mother, his eyes were looking high above the sea of vehicles. His eyes lit up and he tugged at his hand to catch his mom's attention. But she didn't pay any attention to the tug. Her sole aim was to cross the road. He kept tugging and indicating her to look at the top of the tree which was at the corner of the junction. But she couldn't take her eyes off the road. At that instant both my wife & I followed the direction of the boy's attention and then we saw what the boy was seeing: a strange-looking fruit!

It was big in size, rectangularly-oval-ish, with maybe some spikes & brownish. It was something I had never seen before. And there were lots and lots of them. I was astounded and so was my wife. In fact, my wife asked my daughter to see that bunch of strange-looking fruits too! I am not sure if the mom finally paid any attention to her son's tugging or not but it was as if that whole episode was for my family and me to witness Nature's inexplicable existence: a massive tree growing a large bunch of weird looking yields in the middle of a highly polluted crossroad!

I have driven over that road thousands of times having never once paid any attention to that tree nor its fruits - & here comes this tiny being who just took the tree and kept it right in front of my eyes! What a marvelous experience! And look at the innocence of a kid: in all that cacophony of angry honks, amidst the waves of vehicles, he calmly looks at a tree while crossing the road, sees it in entirety a way an adult never does & appreciates it to such an extent that he wants his mother to acknowledge too!

It is such simple things as these that we as adults miss but kids do not. And unfortunately when kids highlight it to us, we brush it off lightly and yet these are the gems of the Creation that we ideally ought to wonder about. The whole scene might have lasted less than five seconds - and it occurred about 4-5 months ago and yet I cannot forget it.

Nor did I want to miss blogging about 'such a simple incident'!

😊