by Parmjit Singh

Amidst all the festivity of Christmas and New Year that engrossed us during the last few weeks, my mind slipped inevitably into the shades of our world.

It occurred to me that as we sat amongst our family members and feasted on the choicest and most carefully chosen menu, people in some part of our world were madly trying to outrun the mammoth wall of watery graveyard chasing them beyond its resting place in sea. When we were praying for familial and national prosperity, the people on the other side of the world were trying to piece together their broken lives. .

The hearts were hollowed in one swift swipe of fate and celebrations were drowned out by the rage of tsunamis in South Asia. As the world appeared poised to welcome New Year, someone’s life-span on this planet was being cut short unexpectedly.

When we were chatting and sharing laughter with our family members, others who are less privileged here and elsewhere trembled and shivered in their loneliness, homelessness and stared vacantly into the emptiness of hopelessness. We might have prayed for prosperity and they for subsistence, a bite of bread or a gulp of heart-warming soup, a news of alive family member and a piece of clothing to prevent the freeze seeping into their frail bones.

We all did something. The rich people had elaborate dinners while the poor contended only with meager ones. We invoked the same God, sought directions in life and called upon Him/Her for benediction. As the bells jingled in celebrations across our continent, death was dancing its macabre dance on the beaches of Asia. The people there just happened to be plain unlucky for as the world slept after hailing the birth of Lord Jesus, the Savior, the demons of sea were having a field day by swallowing the life of countless children and families. There were no hyphens or Savior in that tragedy—death came in the form of watery de-hyphenated terror and flattened all the dreams and aspirations in one stroke.

As the glittering shopping malls in our part of the world snapped back in fierce business, people in Tsunami-hit countries were scouring their ravaged homes to sustain their waning hopes. As we rushed in for Boxing Day freebies, they must be lining up for international dole to arrive or hear some news about their lost family members. It sounds so innocuously similar yet so poignantly different—there is a lurking pain in this verisimilitude because the same day brought hope and delight for some and life-long pain for others.

As some of us got back to the business of life, people in those areas were busy cleaning stench of death and destruction left behind by the waves. They too must have made some resolutions for New Year but fate had something else in its mind. And as I was pondering more and more on this, I was inevitably getting reminded of the inherent uncertainty of life. How many of them knew the impending doom as they stood bewitched with the walls of death hurtling toward them?

Each day as news flashed harrowing clips or video-grabs, my heart went out to those countless mothers and fathers who lost their children and children who lost their parents. How heart-rending it would be for a mother to make a choice of letting go of one of her kids because it was only one she could save at that time? The other one had to be left in the raging water. It is beyond comprehension the choice one has to make, given the horror of circumstances—and it is even more horrifying to bear with the consequences of one’s choice. As the Christmas and New Year passed, the world fell back into its normal pace. Some of us started progressing from where we left and others started piecing together their lives left asunder by tsunamis.

In a fatal quirk, I realized how a beginning and an ending are always fatefully intertwined—for some this New Year was a beginning and for others an end…and so life goes on in all its shades!