The bore well kid

“Hey you heard about the bore well kid? He died today evening”

“Jeez…I didn’t even know there was a bore well kid…”

“He was stuck for fifty hours it seems. How can you not know about it?”

“I’m not exactly the 24hour news channel types…maybe that’s why I missed it”

This is the conversation I had with my mother yesterday. I don’t watch India TV, I haven’t been reading newspapers lately, and so this piece of information had completely eluded me. Until now, that is. Oh well, too bad I thought. Poor kid.

That night, for some reason I couldn’t sleep. Maybe it was the thunder outside. Maybe the disquiet inside. I switched on the TV sometime around midnight. It was on, as expected. The whole episode about the boy.

I learnt his name was Suraj. I learnt he was six years old. First standard. He fell in while playing, they said. Apparently, it was a desolate area and he was playing by himself. Now that’s news, I thought. What kind of kid plays alone in a desolate area?

A little later the answer to my own question came to me. The kid who plays alone in a desolate area is the kid whose parents cannot afford him a cricket bat or a football. He’s the kid whose parents are helpless as they see their child pass his time with pebbles and slingshots. Maybe they were casual laborers with no time for him. Maybe he didn’t have friends. Maybe he wandered there all by himself on his way home from school. Maybe he was scouting for new pebbles, or had spotted a few colorful odds and ends in that desolate area. Maybe he just shrugged off his school bag and went behind a big butterfly or something. And fallen in. Must have been the longest two days of his little life. More so for his parents. I realized my eyes were moist.

The world works in mysterious ways. What kind of God allows this to happen? I cried a little that night. And I went to bed hoping Suraj awakens in a better place.