Tommy and Martha

          Tommy led Martha out of her downtown studio apartment into the bustling streets below. He noticed she barely squinted in the bright sunlight outside. " Time to go to work Tommy  ", said Martha with a smile. Martha worked as an elementary school teacher at a public school that was five blocks away from her apartment. Every day it was Tommy who took her to work. He knew she followed a routine every day on her way to work. They would leave the apartment at exactly 7:45 a.m. walk down their street to the Dunkin' Donuts at the corner. She always ordered the same egg,cheese and sausage bagel and a coffee with cream and sugar.They spent precisely 18 minutes eating and continued through the nearby park to her elementary school. Tommy and Martha arrived at her school at 8:25 a.m after negotiating the clutch of pedestrians who always pushed and hustled past others at the intersection in front of the school. Tommy was often disgusted by some person or the other enough to almost snarl at them to watch where they were going.

         Tommy stood outside watching Martha go in to her class and address her students. He watched her chestnut hair fall lightly on her shoulder, her deep blue eyes dancing with a joy that reflected the true, unbridled happiness in her heart and realized how lucky he was to have her. They had been together for 8 years now. He had absolutely adored her from the moment he first set eyes on her. She meant the world to him and he had always been fiercely protective and possessive of her.  Martha in turn rarely went anywhere without tommy by her side and loved him so much that she could not bear the thought of a single day without him. School got over at 2:30 for Martha and she stepped outside to find Tommy waiting for her. She hugged him and they both started to walk outside when a man hailed them from the steps of the Victorian era main building of the school. Not Mr.Barney again , thought Tommy. Mr.Barney walked over to the pair with a pasty smile.

" Hello Ms.Cooper!. How are you doing today?" , He asked with exaggerated hand motions and a fake childishness.

"Oh Mr. Barney. I am excellent.", replied a genial Martha.

"What is the latest tale from the principal's office?"

" The usual you know. Signing off on a dozen meeting minutes, telling off a couple of brats." , Barney said in that off hand manner.

"And how are you doing today, Tommy , big boy!!"

Tommy grunted. He hated to be called a boy anymore. He wandered off a bit to let them have their conversation. After a few mins he felt Martha's hand on his shoulder.

 " I know you don't like him, Tommy but let's not waste a beautiful evening by sulking." She said as he looked at her with mournful eyes.

They made their way back to the park and found their usual bench to sit on. Tommy knew this was her favorite spot in the city. Every day after work, they spent an hour at this park just sitting and taking in the sights and sounds. The sinking sun shimmered off her jet black hair making it glow like gold. The laughter and delighted screams of children filled the air and made her laugh merrily. The smell of the lilies and roses in full bloom teased her nostrils and painted vivid images in her mind. She rose, and spread her arms out, feeling the gentle evening breeze caress her body. Martha then stepped forward reaching out with her hands. She walked gingerly forward whilst Tommy watched with concern. And then her hands touched a tree. She knelt down and moved closer feeling the striations on the bark, her hands moving swiftly and smoothly feeling out intricate patterns and details.

Martha was blind. She had lost vision in her right eye completely and had just about 10% vision in the left eye. She had an eye disease that had progressively worsened her vision over the past 7 years. The world around her started losing color first and then definition. Three years back her family was killed in a car accident. Her parents had perished instantly but her sixteen year old brother had defied death for a month before he too succumbed.To Martha, the growing darkness around her matched the black hole that her family's death had left behind. Martha cried herself to sleep as the world lost focus, and images blurred together. By the time she was almost totally blind she had resigned herself to nothingness. Tommy had been with her from before her disease started affecting her. He had been perplexed at what was happening at first, even got frustrated at taking care of her at a point. But then he had rediscovered how much he really loved her and was determined to be with her almost every moment of her life. He had even undergone special training to look after, communicate and help her move around and live life normally. Over the past two years Martha had found a  renewed joy in life. She had moved away from her family and friends , left her old job as a journalist and started to teach. Tommy had sacrificed a lot of things to take care of her but given another chance he would have always picked Martha. He had watched helplessly as she descended into the depths of despair and had been with her as she picked up the pieces slowly, as she found an uplifting happiness in teaching little children and began to almost approach normalcy in her daily life.

   Tommy padded up to the tree and snuggled up against her. He sensed she was now content - she was glad to listen to the fun and laughter around her, the blissful innocence of the children and the anxiousness of the parents. She was thankful that she had Tommy by her side and for the fact that blindness had shown her an entire knew dimension of the world to her. A dimension where one "saw" through imagination, through dreaming up a beautiful and exotic world with its surreal flavors and sounds and where the ugliness and decay brought upon by man remained forever hidden.

A small rubber ball rolled towards Tommy and he eyed it with excitement. The little boy who was playing with it, stopped a few feet away, hesitating. As Tommy moved the ball around with his feet, the boy piped" Do you want to play with me"?. Martha stirred from her reverie, turned partially towards Tommy with a smile on her face. " Go, Tommy play with the child" , she said as she bent down to undo Tommy's shoulder harness. Tommy's eyes lit up, as he wriggled free and bounded on all fours with the ball clamped between his jaws. As the boy scampered past them screaming in joy with Tommy galloping after him, tears of joy welled up in Martha's eyes as she slowly groped her way back to the bench and sat down.

The human rat race

We begin the race the moment we come into this world bawling our eyes out. In fact we're already tired from winning our first race by beating a million sperms. From day one in this unforgiving world we are nurtured by doting parents, tutored, cajoled, coached to compete, to run the race, and to win. Yep, the goal is always to win, to be the first and best in whatever you do throughout your life regardless of whether you like it or not. We are under constant pressure to excel academically from Ist grade all the way through graduate studies. Every one us gets forced into a rat race throughout our entire lives fighting tooth and nail for one uppance. Be it friends, family or relatives, we jostle, tustle and fight in a mad scramble to edge ahead. It's a shame that we are always running for the next milestone, never stopping to catch our breaths, never stopping to savor the little joys of life, and a shame that we have such tunnel vision with only our next goal visible and everything else being mere happenstance.

Few people, myself included, realize that life is about experiences, life is about the journey and not the destination. It's about waking up to see the sun rise in all its glory, a cup of coffee in hand and taking a few moments to let nature speak to you through the birds, through the whispers of the morning breeze. Instead, almost every one of us wake up with our minds buzzing with what has to be completed that day, the troubles of yesterday and the worries of tomorrow. We are more concerned with where our peers are in the grand race to riches, more worried about society's eye on our "so called" progress in race called life, and more worried about doing things that are socially acceptable than doing stuff that our hearts tell us. We often do not have time for our loved ones, the time to make a random person smile, the heart to lend a helping hand to a distressed soul, or the thought to listen to a friend's troubles. In most cases people are running a race they don't even like. They go through life struggling to make a living and not living a life of their own making. So many of them will stay in the wrong jobs all our life, putting money, social status and savings before things close to their hearts. 

If we just lift our heads up, put our ultra-busy lives on pause for a moment and take a look around, take a look back at our own lives, what we've accomplished so far, what we've really wanted to do with our lives, then I suspect a majority of us would rethink the way we would want to live the rest of our lives. Then, maybe, we would make an effort to come out of our shells and live life the way we want to - doing things we like, the way we like and whenever we like. We need to stop running the race and realize that life is not a race. And then, maybe,  we can start living life and not run for our lives.