Sticky and tasty!

He picked it up from the floor. It was sticky and a  foul nauseating stench was emanating from it. He felt his stomach churning. Can you find it in your heart, a surging question to know what it could be? More likely, you should be more interested to know how he began his day.

The rain pattering on the asbestos roof of his dwelling woke him up at half past five in the morning. Startled he woke up  and saw his mother, who was busy arranging empty utensils around the house, to hold the rainwater leaking. The inner atmosphere was soaked up with an all-pervading reek of alcohol, stemming from his father who lay in a sound slumber.

He had entered another day, to pass by. The hearth was unlit, was cold and dull as death. Suddenly, he felt something clambering on his shoulder. He checked, only to find scores of lice, residing in the knots of his sleeve. The knots were formed by repeated stitching of his sleeve which tore how many times he knew not.  He was late already.

Staring at a bottle of pesticide behind his tin sheet door, he carried two bags of incense sticks, he had to sell in the bazaar that day. He set out and walked (barefoot) for miles until he could no longer take another step. He was direly thirsty. He did not have a single pie in his pocket. Furiously, he ran into a nearby railway station,  with the hope of finding a trickle of water to quench his life-extinguishing thirst. After hiding his bags under a chair, desperately, he ran to every single tap, not a single one could afford to give him few drops of water to slake his blazing thirst. Bottles half full with water were tossed into and around the garbage can. Shame gripped his heart. He couldn’t accommodate the thought of drinking from them.

At a distance from the tracks, he caught the glimpse of something that seemed to be a pool of water. He sprinted as fast as his weary muscles could help him, only to find heaps and heaps of dry sand all over.

Even salty tears would have evaporated from his bony cheeks, that roasting hot, the flaming sun was.

There he found this slimy, sticky food which was utterly rotten and putrefied. The fetid pong was choking. He had been starving for the past ten days.  The very thought of eating it seemed to be death, but living famished anymore seemed worse than death. He wedged it all into his mouth and then lay flat, pondering about all the creatures who might have met it some time ago.

When obtaining a morsel of food was so arduous, could he even contemplate about holding a pen in his hand?

Did any soul on earth have the slightest inkling about his heart ripping agony and tribulation?

All that people did was to cast away food when they didn’t like it, without a single thought about the millions like him for whom a stomach-full meal was indeed a distant dream!