Abid Ali Mir
It was a damp evening, the kind where the sky resembles wet ash and every streetlight flickers not out of design, but fatigue. On such evenings, men walk home not out of choice but compulsion, their shoulders sloped like half-collapsed scaffolding. Among them was a man on a worn bicycle, navigating a half-forgotten road outside the city where neither pavement nor sympathy had reached in decades.
Tied carefully to his cycle was a transparent plastic bag. Inside it, a cheap lighting ball blinked in confused colors: red, blue, green; as if unsure whether to entertain or mourn. The man was too tired to notice how odd it looked. Or perhaps he did notice, and simply didn’t care. After all, when a man is returning home to his child with something in hand, he is permitted a little absurdity.
This father whose name is irrelevant to the newspapers and who would never appear on the voting lists of any political party had walked and worked through years that had stripped him of most things. A once-hopeful student of literature, his name had once been scribbled at the bottom of unpublished poems and classroom debates. Now it was attached to loan slips, electric bills, and silent accusations by relatives who measured worth in earning, not effort.
He worked as most of his kind do in jobs that require no resume and offer no pension. Today’s labour was laying a cement floor. Yesterday’s was stacking iron rods under the July sun. His body, though not yet forty, had started speaking in the language of pain: knees that clicked, a back that needed straightening every few minutes, and a cough that refused to leave. And yet, it was not this physical toll that aged him. It was something else. Something harder to name.
He had seventy rupees in his pocket. Not in a wallet wallets are for men who carry IDs, cards, things that justify identity. He carried his money folded in tissue paper, alongside a half-broken pen and a house key whose teeth were ground flat from overuse. The lighting ball cost a hundred rupees. He stood for a few minutes, staring at it on the roadside. The shopkeeper looked at him with the half-amused glance of someone who knows the limits of human longing.
The negotiation was brief, awkward, and mercifully successful. The ball was handed over for seventy. No one clapped. No music played. But a battle had been won.
He tied it to the handle of his cycle with a strip of cloth torn from the lining of his shirt. The ball was too light; the wind kept tugging it. At least five times he had to stop and adjust it, curse the air, and start again. But each time he imagined his daughter eleven months old, just learning to stand, already aware of how silence lives in her father’s eyes he cycled harder. The road was uneven. But then again, it always had been.
At home, he entered quietly. His wife was folding clothes. The child, sitting on the floor in a woolen shirt with a hole near the collar, looked up. When she saw the ball, her arms rose instinctively. A noise of joy a kind of squeak more than a laugh burst from her. He placed the ball near her feet. She crawled toward it, tapped it, then hugged it as if she knew what it had cost not in rupees, but in will.
It lasted maybe twenty minutes. The ball. One of the batteries came loose. The colors stopped. The magic blinked off.
He said nothing. She cried a little. He hugged her. She smiled again. The ball was forgotten.
But he would remember.
There is a cruelty to poverty that rarely makes it to slogans or charity posters. It’s not just the absence of things. It’s the mocking arrival of temporary joys the lighting ball that flickers, the borrowed phone call, the cup of tea you know you can’t afford but drink anyway. It is a life of temporary suspension from despair. And when that suspension ends, the fall is felt alone.
Tomorrow, the man would wake up and return to work. He would cycle again, perhaps past the same shop, this time not looking up. Inflation would rise. The debt would remain. His neighbours would still whisper about his failed ventures and unpaid dues. But none of that mattered not for those twenty minutes. Not for the squeal of a child who didn’t yet know what money was, but knew the shape of love.
One might say it was just a father and a cheap plastic ball. But it was also a nation, a generation, a system, a silent scream wrapped in blinking lights. And for a brief moment, under a leaking roof and beside a flickering bulb, that scream became a lullaby.
Disclaimer:
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or real events is purely coincidental. The characters and situations depicted are entirely imagined and intended to reflect broader social realities, not specific individuals.
Author Abid Ali Mir is a Kashmiri writer, occasional poet and, thinker advocating Islamic finance, social justice, environmental preservation, and action against plastic pollution. He can be mailed at abidmir0078@gmail.com
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