Hero

 

By ChatGPT

Fiction

At 65, Francis had begun to measure his life in absences. Like the promotion that never came. The business he never started. The many betrayals of people whom he had trusted.

He sat every evening on the narrow veranda of his modest home, watching the road gather dust and dissolve into dusk. Somewhere, in another version of life, he told himself, he would have been a man people spoke about differently: with admiration, perhaps even a touch of envy.

In reality, however, he had become… plain ordinary.

Ordinary. The word settled heavily on his chest.

That evening, his grandson, little Joe, came running up the path, clutching a dogeared notebook.

“Grandpa,” he said, “you know what?”

Francis adjusted his glasses. “What is it?”

“Teacher asked us to write about a hero.”

“Hmm. Who’s your hero now?”

“You.” Joe opened his notebook and showed what he had written. “My Hero: My Grandpa.”

“What?” Francis blinked. Then he burst into a laughter that wasn’t characteristic of him. “You should have written about some real hero. A great person. A scientist or a leader or…”

Joe frowned. “You’re my hero who tells me all the stories. About Rama and Sita, Arjuna and Krishna…”

Francis didn’t say anything. He smiled. At least a ten-year-old child thinks of him as a hero.

“And you taught me cycling,” Joe was thinking loud. “And when I fell, you didn’t laugh. Instead you said falling is part of learning.”

You will learn to walk / After many a fall. Francis remembered the lines of a Malayalam song which he sang for his grandson on one occasion.

He looked away, towards the road now fading into twilight’s emptiness.

Joe went inside the house leaving Francis alone on the veranda.

Greatness is not in conquering the world, Francis recalled what he had read somewhere as a younger man, but in quietly doing the ordinary with unwavering excellence. He had done his best, he thought, though his best was not excellence in the eyes of others.

Francis took Joe to school the next day, as he did whenever Joe’s father was not free. Outside Joe’s classroom was a bulletin board on which were sheets of paper that quivered in the gentle breeze. My Hero was the caption written in bold and colourful letters. Historical figures and movie stars occupied prominent places on the board.

My Hero is my Grandpa. He is not famous. But he’s always there when I need him. His grandson’s full name was written beneath that.

As he walked back home, he thought of what he had been. All the hard work. The painful struggles. Occasional falters. Nothing very great. But nothing tragic either. It was a quiet journey. Persistent. Without applause.

That evening, as he sat again on the veranda, the road looked the same. Dusty. Unremarkable. But he noticed something that he hadn’t before. It was not a road that led to a darkening twilight. It was a road people used, every day, to reach where they needed to go.

Perhaps, he thought, life did not need to rise high to matter.

Sometimes, it only needed to be there, quietly persisting.

PS. A friend of my age sent me a WhatsApp message expressing his sadness about the lack of a sense of fulfilment in life. I have felt that way too many times. There are many others, whom I know personally, who have similar feelings and moments of frustration. When I reflected on it this morning, this story emerged.