How often do you catch the pain behind the unwavering smile?

I often find myself visiting memories offered in your reads. I allow myself to flow without tooting one’s own horn in your series of self-discovery and reflection writing prompts. Helping me open the floodgates of my emotions.

Answering the original question:

“What is written on the lines and in between them?”

in my words and my understanding

How often do you read between the lines of your old grandmother’s face?

I remember myself standing at the metro station waiting for my train. Eight years old, 4 ft tall, when a strange shadow behind me caught a glimpse of my eyes. The shadow of a tiny girl carrying a big 30-kilogram sack on her back and her baby brother in her arms tied with a cloth on her waist. With just enough stamina left, she was walking barefoot, crossing the railway track under the sun where the beaming light from the source was shining right at half past noon. It was 45 degrees.

Wearing her unwavering smile ear to ear, she was hiding behind the pain. The pain of her sufferings. Standing next to my mother, pointing to my mother what I had just noticed. I noticed the hamlet lass’s old mother. Her old mother was sitting on the pavement with the hope of feeding her children. Reading between the lines, hope stood right there—an unnoticeable solitude behind her eye-catching smile. A simple picture of her face struck behind the lens of my myopic eye, speaking a thousand words if I could read between the broken lines on her wrinkled face. I now visit the memories stored in my body, the emotion. It is only now that I can do justice to the emotion and decipher the muted word, inaudible noise of the covered truth of suffering existing in human life.

I saw suffering all around me. I saw an older man walking with a hunched back with a stick. I was just tall enough to notice it all. I wanted to give money to the old mother. I wanted to offer free education for her girl. But I was paralyzed. My two hands were tied, appearing like one.

My emotions were free and boundless just like my vision. My myopic eye lacked far-sightedness, unlike my visionary eyes. I saw a path. A path where I was walking with faith in my heart to transform the actual, real sufferings of the older man, the old mother with her daughter holding her infant brother. I saw myself carrying their souls in my mind’s eye. My 8-year-old mind’s eye read all the messages appearing like moving clouds.

I now force myself to read more, understand more, and absorb more.

Since childhood living with the delightful feeling of taking birth in India. A land of rich heritage and hidden treasures. I found the gold, the jewel in the frail line of sight of the weaklings right in front of me. Both love and pain existed at that moment. My love for the poor was found in the pain of the poverty wrapped in a blithe smile. If I cared more to not only read between the lines but also rewire my cognitive empathy. The spark of my reading from then is still lightning within me. Still alive, unspoken, unforgotten only if I still could hear the inaudible and foresee the invisible.

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