Skip to main content

Broken Things



I have always been attracted to broken things.  Not that I could ever mend them.  I am poor at that sort of jobs.  In fact, I’m bad at anything practical.  I can read books and at best teach them to impressionable young people.  Nothing more.  If there is a leaking tap at home, I have to depend on a plumber.  I won’t even be able to replace a punctured tyre of my car without somebody’s assistance.

But broken things enchant me. When I was 18 years old a classmate of mine quoted the catchphrase of Fevikwik in a speech: “Fixes everything except broken hearts.” I was stuck to that phrase for years.  [I think it was Fevikwik, I’m not sure.]

People came and went in my life breaking hearts. Not mine; I have no heart, they say.  They broke the hearts of each other.  I saw people sitting by the shore of a weeping river and gathering the fragments of their broken hearts.  I saw them piecing the fragments together. 

I broke somebody’s heart recently.  With just a statement.  It was a silly joke actually.  Hearts are extremely fragile, I learnt.  I learnt to guard my jokes.  A costly lesson.  I lost one of my best friends.

I wish I could heal hearts.  I wish I did not love broken things so much.



Comments

  1. Kokila guptaFebruary 13, 2018 at 2:03 PM

    Sad. Specially because it can be fixed not, healed.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. जितेन्द्र माथुरFebruary 13, 2018 at 2:12 PM

      I agree Kokila Ji that it can't be (completely) healed. Even then the hurting person (being a sensitive one) should try to heal it after realizing his / her aberration.

      Delete
    2. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 13, 2018 at 4:39 PM

      It can be fixed, not healed, yes. I fixed it, in fact. But certain scars always glare at you.

      Delete
  2. जितेन्द्र माथुरFebruary 13, 2018 at 2:04 PM

    Hearty thanks for sharing this post which I can definitely relate to. I personally consider breaking someone's heart is an unparalleled sin which if done deliberately without any sense of repentance, should never be forgiven. And if such person, after doing so inadvertently, realizes it later on, he / she should take the penitentiary action as soon as possible. I wish, I could heal all the heartburns and heartaches which were caused by my actions / omissions.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 13, 2018 at 4:40 PM

      Deliberate hurts are inflicted by absolutely heartless people. I hope I don't belong there. No, I don't. I am sensitive. I go out of my way to mend the hurts.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Waiting for the Mahatma

Book Review I read this book purely by chance. R K Narayan is not a writer whom I would choose for any reason whatever. He is too simple, simplistic. I was at school on Saturday last and I suddenly found myself without anything to do though I was on duty. Some duties are like that: like a traffic policeman’s duty on a road without any traffic! So I went up to the school library and picked up a book which looked clean. It happened to be Waiting for the Mahatma by R K Narayan. A small book of 200 pages which I almost finished reading on the same day. The novel was originally published in 1955, written probably as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and India’s struggle for independence. The edition that I read is a later reprint by Penguin Classics. Twenty-year-old Sriram is the protagonist though Gandhi towers above everybody else in the novel just as he did in India of the independence-struggle years. Sriram who lives with his grandmother inherits significant wealth when he turns 20. Hi...
9 comments
Read more

The Lights of December

The crib of a nearby parish [a few years back] December was the happiest month of my childhood. Christmas was the ostensible reason, though I wasn’t any more religious than the boys of my neighbourhood. Christmas brought an air of festivity to our home which was otherwise as gloomy as an orthodox Catholic household could be in the late 1960s. We lived in a village whose nights were lit up only by kerosene lamps, until electricity arrived in 1972 or so. Darkness suffused the agrarian landscapes for most part of the nights. Frogs would croak in the sprawling paddy fields and crickets would chirp rather eerily in the bushes outside the bedroom which was shared by us four brothers. Owls whistled occasionally, and screeched more frequently, in the darkness that spread endlessly. December lit up the darkness, though infinitesimally, with a star or two outside homes. December was the light of my childhood. Christmas was the happiest festival of the period. As soon as school closed for the...
14 comments
Read more

A Government that Spies on Citizens

Illustration by Copilot Designer India has officially decided to keep an eagle eye on its citizens. Modi government has asked all smartphone manufacturers to preinstall a government app, Sanchar Saathi , on every phone in such a way that no citizen can ever uninstall it. The firms have been also ordered to install the app on existing phones too using software-update technology. The stated objective is to strengthen cybersecurity and protect users from fraud. The question is why any government should go out of its way to impose “security” on its citizens. For over a month now, I have been receiving a message every single day from the Government of India’s Telecom Department to install the app on my phone. I wanted to block the sender, but there is no such option. Even that message is an imposition. I don’t trust any government that imposes benefits on me. “ Beneficent beasts of prey ,” Robert Frost would call such governments. When Modi government imposes security on me, I ha...
8 comments
Read more

Schrödinger’s Cat and Carl Sagan’s God

Image by Gemini AI “Suppose a patriotic Indian claims, with the intention of proving the superiority of India, that water boils at 71 degrees Celsius in India, and the listener is a scientist. What will happen?” Grandpa was having his occasional discussion with his Gen Z grandson who was waiting for his admission to IIT Madras, his dream destination. “Scientist, you say?” Gen Z asked. “Hmm.” “Then no quarrel, no fight. There’d be a decent discussion.” Grandpa smiled. If someone makes some similar religious claim, there could be riots. The irony is that religions are meant to bring love among humans but they end up creating rift and fight. Scientists, on the other hand, keep questioning and disproving each other, and they appreciate each other for that. “The scientist might say,” Gen Z continued, “that the claim could be absolutely right on the Kanchenjunga Peak.” Grandpa had expected that answer. He was familiar with this Gen Z’s brain which wasn’t degenerated by Instag...
10 comments
Read more