Hey Clementine,

This one’s hard to write, and I think I will end up skipping many details. But out of all the seminal events in my life, I think this one is definitely in the top three. Here’s how a child’s eyes broke me and restructured my whole worldview…

I was home during the summer vacations of my first year in college. During those days, we had a maid who used to bring her 3-year-old son, Prince, along. The routine was simple: she would come around 2 PM with her son, both of them would have lunch at our place, and then before starting her work, she left Prince alone in a room with some toys and a notebook to sketch in. In between, Prince would cry looking for his mother, and she would take him to the washroom or feed him, and then put him to sleep.

Around the same period, Maa had flu or something and felt exhausted all the time. And you know all I need is a reason to sleep, so I asked her to take a nap with me. Both Maa and I went to sleep while our maid continued to work. The next thing I know, Prince was crying, and I woke up worried if this will disturb Maa’s sleep, and yes it did. But soon he went quiet, and we assumed that the maid would have looked after him.

As we tried to sleep, he started crying again, and this time it went on for longer. It was weird and I was already annoyed. Finally, Maa said in her tired voice, “Why is he crying so much? Can you go and check?” But I got extremely angry, I don’t know why. Maybe it was him breaking Maa’s sleep when she was sick, maybe it was that I had to move my lazy ass from bed to see him.

When I entered his room, Prince was all alone and stopped crying as soon as he saw me, maybe due to my angry face. I asked him why he was crying but he did not utter a word (he was not able to make proper sentences by then anyway). So, with an angry voice, I asked him to stay silent and left the room.

As soon as I left the room, he started crying again, and this time I lost it. I went back instantly and slapped him. It was a hard slap and unexpected for him. The poor child fell on the ground frozen in fear. And he was literally frozen, with legs folded like he was sitting earlier, hands stuck the same way, and his eyes looking at the same angle before I hit him.

But one thing had changed: the feeling in his frozen eyes. I saw confusion, sadness, helplessness, and extreme fear. The poor child did not even move a bit for as long as I stood there. In fact, the transition from his crying to silence was so abrupt that I felt scared if his mom would see what I had done. So, I put him back in the original pose and rushed back to Maa.

The next few hours (and even years) were some of the most difficult for me. I felt a mix of guilt, shame, sadness, and many more feelings that I cannot even describe. Prince stayed silent that whole day, and Maa asked me what magic I did but I had no answer. In fact, her question made me feel even more guilty.

Ok, I feel I censored some information there Clementine. My reaction to slapping a child seems too exaggerated, right? It does to me reading the above sentences now, so let me tell you the truth that no one else knows, yet.

The moment I slapped Prince and he fell back, the thought of killing him crossed my mind. Yes, I thought of choking him to death! I visualized it all in a split second, and maybe he felt it too and hence his reaction. After all, children do have a great sense of empathy.

And when I saw his eyes after my slap, they reflected what I truly was. I was still trembling in fear and sweating out of what I had just thought. I was so close to killing him that it’s not even funny. It revealed ME to myself.

Over the next 5-6 years, I frequently thought about things like:

Am I so blind in the love for my mother that I forgot that Prince was the beloved son of another mother, another life form?

Why do we kill? What gives us the authority to decide who will live and who will die?

How can I value one human’s happiness over another’s?

Do I even know myself? Where did all this evilness come from?

This put me on a journey to self-exploration. I read everything I could get my hands on. I read Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Camus, and Jung. I even remember finding new meaning in Gibran’s lines when I re-read them after this incident:

And how shall you punish those whose remorse is already greater than their misdeeds?

Is not remorse the justice which is administered by that very law which you would fain serve?

Yet you cannot lay remorse upon the innocent nor lift it from the heart of the guilty.

Unbidden shall it call in the night, that men may wake and gaze upon themselves.

For all those years, I had failed to justify my thoughts from that day. Those years were the toughest but today I feel thankful to them. Maybe because now I have made peace with it. I do not try to make sense of why it happened and what I could have changed, anymore. I am not shameless or cold-hearted either. I just am.

All I did was accept myself and my thoughts. It was only after facing myself that I knew what I was capable of and came to terms with it. Even bigger was the realization that a person like me lies behind every face I see in the world, and yet the world does not fall into chaos. Within each of us, there are greater creative and restorative forces at play that give way to life. And for that, I am deeply grateful.

Today, this memory is not a burden crushing me anymore, but I still think about Prince. Life may be tough and random, but poverty makes it even worse. And it was only after my reconciliation with me that I committed myself to empathize with everyone and do my best to alleviate some of the pain in the lives I touch. No, none of these will change the past, but I sow these seeds in the hope of a better tomorrow, so there will be no child helplessly crying in the first place. If anything, today I feel deep gratitude for those eyes that helped me see my own reflection and do better.

I breathe with everyone now, for one we are.

This is the way…