By Roshel
He was sitting in the verandah, sipping his tea and watching a group of children play in the garden below. All of a sudden, a woman rushed in, shrieking, “No baby, don’t eat that garbage!” He strained his neck to get a better view. He spotted a toddler pushing a fistful of mud into his mouth. The woman grabbed hold of the child’s hand and forced him to spit the mud out. Then, wiping his face, she said to him, firmly yet kindly, “Baby, you must never eat garbage, okay?”
He smiled at this expression of the tender love and care of this mother for her infant. How concerned she was that her child should not eat rubbish!
Just then, his mind travelled to his childhood days. He couldn’t remember ever eating mud like this little boy had (although he might have done so), but then, the thought came to him, he had actually consumed rubbish—and large amounts of it, in fact—in other ways. He thought all the trashy books that he had read, for instance. He was not yet in his teens when he was hooked on comic books that peddled lust in the name of romantic love. Then, just a few years later, when he became a voracious readers, sexually-explicit novels were almost the only thing he read besides the textbooks prescribed by his school. Wasn’t reading all those useless books akin to ‘eating garbage’?
And then, there were the movies that he had once so loved watching. In those days, television hadn’t reached the part of the world where he lived, but movies had. The fortnightly family outing was almost always watching a movie in a theatre, followed by dinner in a fancy restaurant. And what were those movies, he thought, but huge mountains of garbage? Sex, so-called glamour, crime, violence—these were the themes that figured prominently in almost all of them. Now, wasn’t watching all those trashy films ‘eating garbage’ too?
How he wished that, like the mother who had just rushed in to save her child from eating mud, there had been someone in his childhood—a wise elder, a parent, a teacher, a sibling or whatever—to instruct him on the pitfalls of feeding on all the garbage that he become addicted to! At the same time, though, he felt fortunate to have realised—although quite late in life—the error of his ways.
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