Awwal allah noor upaye
Kudrat ke sab bande
Ik noor se sab jag upjaya
kon bhale kon mande

(Every person born by the blessing of one true God is a nature’s child. All of them come from one holy light, then who is bad and who is good?)

I was 9 years old. Living in a dingy neighborhood with streets flowing with sewage water every monsoon. We weren’t rich. Clearly.

Lower-middle class society. My mom made friends with this lady next door. Her grandson was around 4 years old then. He would often come and play with me in the evenings as my mom would sit and gossip with his grandmother and his mother prepared dinner.

One day I took him to my study room. It was pitch black and I didn’t turn on the lights. I laid him on the bed. He resisted a bit but I calmed him down. Then I took off his shorts and began looking at his penis. Hardly a centimeter. I flicked it and it got hard. Still, hardly a centimeter. I sucked on it. Then I zipped him back and let him go.

Take a pause and assemble your thoughts about me.

Now read on.

When I was around 4 years old, our living conditions were even worse. We were living with our relatives who hated our guts but had to keep us due to societal pressure, at least till our house which was getting constructed in the next plot could be completed. Every day was a battle. Every evening my mom and my aunt would be in quarrel, shouting, and cursing. We had a neighbor who was a friend of my father. Due to the ongoing cold war with relatives, our dependency grew a lot on that neighbor. She respected my father and I adored him.

This neighbor-uncle had three sons, the middle one being around 14 years old at that time. One afternoon, he called me to his house. His father was away for work and somehow none of his brothers were home. He gave me a sweet and asked me to chill on the bed. We didn’t have cable television at our place but he had in that room, so I quickly switched it on.

I was eating and watching when he joined me in bed. He turned me around, making me lie on my stomach. Then he pulled down my shorts. I was still engrossed in the sweet and television when I felt a sharp pain in my ass. He was fucking me. He continued for a minute or so and then left the bed. I was in utter pain and confusion now, so I ran off as soon as he left the bed.

He continued this for the next couple of years. He knew the routine of my family perfectly and nobody suspected him of any wrongdoing. He always had access. I was a shy, reserved, and timid child. So reserved, never shared pain with parents.

Now the thing I did with that child, taking his pants off and sucking his penis, I believe you will have a better understanding of why I did so. I was puzzled, confused. I wanted to make sense in my childish way of what was being done to me for so much time.

But suddenly, you don’t think so less of me. You think I was a lost child who needed guidance and support. You see, just by going one layer deeper in the ‘why’ of one aspect, you could unfold so much information which shook a bit of your earlier perspective, if not changed it entirely.

Think about it.

Oh, by the way, the story is false. I made it up to drive home a point.

A Tibetan quote said, “Everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always.”

Everything that is happening, everything anyone is doing, has a reason. Sometimes the reasons are out there, ready to be observed and understood. Like seeing a guy help an old lady cross a road. The obvious reason: humanity. But if you keep going layers beneath the reason, you will find many other intentions and motivations riddled with life experiences and situations interactions (with everything & everyone) that you will soon experience almost every reason for that seemingly obvious one.

Now think about the not-so-obvious ones. the most common being seeing someone behave in a certain way and immediately believing you figured out the entire list of motivators and influencers. I ask you to refrain from that. Firstly, it isn’t your business to understand everything in the crudest possible way that suits you and then try to draw life interpretations. You will fall! You will end up in squares where you question every relationship you had: friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, parents. Everyone.

And secondly, if you wish to know, seek more than a single layer of reasoning before building your inference. Try to gauge through the obvious and the masked elements to draw better information about the underlying influencers & motivators. They say fear has layers, right? Well, get a pen and a chart or something and get on it. But remember, you can ask that person too. He/she will maybe tell, in the best-case scenario, the best he knows. But then how many layers deep did he self introspect before concluding? You wouldn’t base your conclusion on someone being ‘lazy’, right? Then what do you do? You keep investigating, although I don’t understand what means you will have at your side by then.

Too much work? Try minding your self.

You see, nature is a circle and our brains are squares. We try to find defined corners in everything for better understanding. Categorizing, tagging, labeling, society, religion… all are essentially attempts of man to find defined corners in things to label rules and laws.

But nature is a circle. Never begins more than it ends. Never begins away from where it ends. It has no corners, no borders. It isn’t solid at all. It is a liquid, for it flows. The only ‘gravity’ to it being time, and this you must understand.

You do not understand yourself fully, yet you claim to understand the next person and label them as good or bad? You’re limited by your laziness of thought and depth of inaction. Everyone is as evil as everyone else. Everyone is as a saint as everyone else. Every saint has a past, every sinner has a future. We aren’t category so next time don’t put someone in one.

Awwal allah noor upaye
Kudrat ke sab bande
Ik noor se sab jag upjaya
kon bhale kon mande