Pick

Probably not going to make an effort to write here again. Just for memory's sake this piece written back in 2007 lends meaning and completes this blog.

December 12, 2007

It didn’t fit.

 It had to right? That’s what he’d been taught.

The kid wailed loudly. He’d got flustered trying to fit the pieces of the jigsaw together.

His parents who were around tried to console him. They assured him it would.

They had always been around after all.

Right from the times he had started picking the pieces from the box.

The kid had heard so many things about the jigsaw puzzle from them. All he was supposed to do was to fit the pieces, one by one to get a predetermined beautiful picture in the end.

The kid looked around. There were so many others trying to fit theirs. Surrounded by myriad creatures offering them strategies and ideas to go about the jigsaw, each kid seemed to make a desperate attempt. Each kid longed to see the final picture.

Some kids had the pieces neatly laid out in a box. Their parents could after all choose and pick the pieces that the child would go on to fit. The final picture did seem pretty easy to accomplish for them.

While for many others, the task did seem Herculean. They had to search for their pieces. Nothing was laid out. All that was there was an empty plate rusted, broken at parts and weathered by the many stormy seasons.

But they never seemed to lose hope. They knew they would see the picture someday.

The picture they seemed to form somehow looked way more beautiful, way subtler and visually pleasing than the other group he’d seen.

The kid turned his attention back to his own jigsaw. He’d formed about less than a quarter of the jigsaw. While some of the pieces had been laid out to him he had found many of his own too.

 It seemed intensely fascinating to the kid as he played with the strewn pieces around him. He found the pieces very funny. Each seemed so insignificant, so disfigured when held single. Yet, lent so much meaning to the final picture he was going to create.

So many combinations seemed to be possible. Only one would finally fit in though, into a place.

The kid generally liked to play with his jigsaw alone. He never liked anyone else trying to fit them for him. They somehow always seemed to have a different final picture in the end based on the rules they had been taught to play. He found it hard to bend his rules.

His rules had to be right. Shouldn’t it?

After all his ancestral blood had formed them. They had all formed their pictures based on them. They had been successful in forming them, so they claimed atleast.

He too should be able to? Shouldn’t he?

The piece he’d been trying to fit still didn’t.

Frustrated and exhausted, the kid got up and walked away from the board, from the jigsaw, from the strewn pieces and from the people who had taught him the rules of the game.

Where was he heading?

He walked past the stones, the wooden numeric symbols, the crescents and the stars.

The division bell that had once been so fond music to his ears seemed to fade out over the horizon as he treaded on.

He marched past all the kids trying to fit in their pieces.

As he walked on, he came by the stream and stopped in wonder.

He observed the stream as it splashed by… madly surging over the bed. He observed how it originated from a tiny unknown source and found its way through, split into channels by rocks midway, carrying along stones, mud and moss. The vortex of the flow somehow though seemed to cleanse it of all its impurities.