King Kong was his name. I don’t know whether he was christened King Kong or people just called him King Kong because of his wrestling skills. His life started on the street. Street children do not have names. They have no identity. You call them anything, and they become one. Some of them do not even know who brought them into this world. How they arrived on the street. Sometimes they, the lucky ones, get picked up and find shelter in a home where they spend rest of their lives.
In a system where foster care was a foreign concept most street children never saw a home. I don’t know when King Kong became a member of our family. I was too young then. Today all that I remember of him is that he was my own homegrown wrestler, who I would play with.
A young man of extraordinary physique, King Kong was kind of an all rounder. He would do odd jobs, work in our farm, cook for us and even baby sit me and my siblings. All of that with a smile always adorning his face. When King Kong entered our family, I must have been a toddler, or perhaps I wasn’t even born.
When I reached school going age we moved to the city. King Kong stayed in our farm. On holidays we would visit our farm and find King Kong always at our service. In one of those visits, I didn’t find him. He was gone.
“Where’s King Kong?” I was too young and insignificant to ask and get an answer to my question.
A few years passed by. Time made it easy for me to forget Kong Kong. Children have tremendous capacity to learn and unlearn. King Kong did not exist on my radar screen anymore. He was a past that had faded out of my faculties. I was growing up to learn some of the nuances of life. But, still too young to comprehend the complexities of right and wrong, innocence and guilt, virtue and vice, moral and immoral.
I must have been in 9th or 10th year of my life when my learning took a quantum leap. It all happened within a few moments.
It was a warm afternoon. I was back from school. I stepped out of my home to do things that kids my age did. As I stepped out I saw the silhouette of a handicapped man entering the street sitting on a plank of wood fitted with small coaster wheels. With barely any clothes on his body and both of his legs paralyzed he was using his hands to push his makeshift cart down the street towards me.
“A beggar,” I thought.
“I must get some coins from my mother to give him.” She always had some to spare for the less fortunate mortals, I reasoned.
As I was about to turn around to get the coins, I heard some rumbles:
“Ay ay aa ay.”
The beggar was now closer to me. He was trying to talk to me but his paralytic twisted tongue couldn’t convert his sounds to any meaningful syllables. I looked at his eyes. They were looking at me and telling me that he knows me, and asking me, “how are you doing?
I took another good look at him and a revelation donned on me. I could barely stop my scream.
“OMG! King Kong.”
In a fit of shock, recognition of that homegrown wrestler came in a second, and fright in the next.
I turned around and ran inside my home. Dropped on my bed and could not stop crying. A strong body of a wrestler reduced to an emaciated frame of bone and flesh that had no legs to walk. No tongue to talk. How did this transformation happen?
Oh God is this Your justice? How cruel can life be? I was too young to figure out the answers to all those questions. All that I could do was cry, cry and cry.
When I finally got my senses back, I realized what I had done. King Kong was right in front of me, greeting me, flashing his distorted but distinct smile at me, and all that I did was run away from him.
If this was an average beggar, I would have at least done what my mother always did. But instead, I ran away. I ran away from King Kong? OMG what had I done? Instead of helping a man who was once a part of my life, who took care of me in my early formative years, I dumped him on the street. Did not even acknowledge his greeting. This wasn't how I was brought.
I picked myself up and ran back to the street where I had found him. He wasn’t there. King Kong was gone. I never saw him again. He never gave me a chance to say, “I am sorry.” He left me to live rest of my life with guilt. A 10-year old’s guilt of letting shock and fear overcome his compassion for a dear one in need. A 10-year old's guilt of escaping his own responsibility. A guilt that kept searching for a passage to redemption. I finally found my redemption in ceasing to be an escapist. My redemption was in never running away from adversities. It was in facing calamities head-on. It was in not letting my tears become my weakness. In making those first tears of fear, my last ones.
PS: This is not a fiction. Even the name of the protagonist is original. I lived through this. In fact what my experience was could be any child’s vulnerability to the vagaries of life. But it actually taught me to be as strong as I subsequently became.