Innocence

He is the one who his friends call a Bigot. An immaculate one at that. He believes that world is to be doomed. That the globe is living out a cursed tenure. There's no semblance of reason to what he believes. After all, he is a bigot. An immaculate one.

The bigot is travelling to his workplace which was an hour's drive from his dilapidated house. He is sitting by a window of a state run bus. The bus is, as usual, very crowded and noisy. The ticket distributor is doing his job. He's struggling effectively in going back and forth through the maze of people distributing tickets. sweat is trickling down his body. He has a thin body and that helps him, thinks the bigot.

Twenty minutes into the drive already, the bigot looks out of his window. What he sees would leave him in a state of suspended sorrow for the rest of his day. He sees a small hut near a bus stop where the bus jolted to a screeching halt. Inside the hut which was small enough to be labelled unfit even for a scavenging place, there's enough that a family of four can ever need to live. There are cooking pots, a mud fireplace, a few untensils, blankets strewn around, a few pitures of dieties that is probably their sacred praying place. All of these in a six feet by six square. What he sees outside the settlement stunned him to death. There is a boy and a girl. He can't gather what their ages are. They might be around 10 years each. They have a huge hammer each in their hands. They were indifferently listening to a man who's seated on a small rock with a reasonably big iron-hook in his hand, to help hold a lump of iron in its place on an iron plate.

He sees the elderly man shout - "Hit". The boy and the girl make dextrous movements and pull their hammer down taking turns, while the man, probably their father, adjusts the hook to expose the right part of the moulded piece to get it into a desired shape. It seems to him that the girl, especially, would follow the motion of the huge hammer and fling into the air with it, but she's not. She's holding her feet to the ground, firmly.

There's an unbearable stech emenating from a drianage canal beside the hut which has been overflowing with human filth for god knows how many years. The bus moved after taking in some of the commuters who barely had place to stand in the already overcrowded bus.

Of all things, the innocence of the children is what the bigot still has etched in his mind. They are innocent. They don't know what malice is. They don't have the envy that many of us have a better childhood than they have.

Innocence and Ignorance is truly a bliss to them, he thinks.