Giftwrap

Love can surprise you in more ways than you have ever known.

A thing of beauty is everywhere, often scattered like tiny water droplets across the vast horizon of time that we call life. One incident on one of those evenings opened my eyes to this truth of life. The incident took place in a small stationery shop. Yes, a stationery shop. I have always believed that as innocuous their nature is, so are the setups where one stumbles upon these beautiful moments. Without much ado, I will now begin.

As I was patiently waiting for the shopkeeper to attend me, I noticed it was a rather small kid of 12-13 years who was the reason for my wait. The kid was getting something wrapped in a gift paper. Without any option but to care not for the event transpiring beside me, I choose to lose myself gazing into the vast emptiness of the skies to pass my time. But soon I was brought back to the world, as it turned out, by the kid. The kid’s dilly dallying over the colour of gift paper was making me restless. I moved a little closer to find out what was the boy getting packed. And I realized that he was dictating the shopkeeper to pack his gift of a modest looking pen, a small pouch of coloured toffees and a rubber band. Amused at the contents of the gift pack, I asked him with a confused smile “For whom?”  “For sister” came the reply with a more honest and fearless smile. Before I could immerse myself in awe at the beauty of the moment that had slipped into my life from the heaven, the shopkeeper added with another smile ‘’Today is his sister’s 18th birthday, for which he is getting ‘this’ packed.’’

There was a tinge of sarcasm added to that ‘this’ that is so typical of this world. But it was all lost in the innocence of the little boy who by now had engrossed himself in taking out money from his pockets for his purchase. After a little battle with his small hands which were finding it tough to keep all the coins from falling, he piled a heap of coins in front of the shopkeeper. And before the shopkeeper could complete his gaze over the pile, the kid fled away with his gift with a smile on his face that remains etched in my memory to the present moment.

Love, I realized, in its most pristine and chaste form was something I witnessed that day.