Power of insensitivity

One evening, a group of children living in our apartment complex went out for their usual walk. And to the shock of the parents, they returned a while later with the most stunning thing wrapped up in a jacket. A small pup!

This small pup had won their hearts by following them during their walk, sniffing, licking and cajoling them to play with him. A closer examination of the pup resulted in a group verdict that the poor little thing was feeling cold. And promptly a jacket came off my niece and it was wrapped neatly around the small pup. And he looked really warm, cute and cared for in that blue denim outfit.

The children took turns requesting each of their parents to adopt the pup. Tears and requests were consistently met with firm denials. For every practical problem the parents came up with, the children had a ready answer straight from their hearts.

From offering to give it baths, clean its’ poop, take it for walks, forego trips, the children were ready to do anything just to have the dog.

 Seeing the continuous refusals from all the parents, they came up with an innovative proposal to keep the pup in a common location in the basement. They all wanted and offered to have equal responsibility in taking care of it. And this too was turned down very sternly by all the adults and even more sternly by the apartment’s association head.

After a lot of back and forth failed negotiations, the teary children were led by the adults to return the pup in the same place from where they picked it up.

The jacket which warmed the pup, and had actually looked better on it than on my niece, was put to wash separately. The geysers were switched on in the houses to bathe away the harmful effects of holding a pup.

The tears of the children dried up after a while. Things slowly started drifting back to normal in most houses as the night approached.

I thought the incident had faded away from the children’s minds after they watched a couple of cartoon shows before turning in to bed.

But, I found the profound effect it had on my child by chance. My daughter’s school requires her to practice writing a couple of lines every day to improve her writing.

As I was checking her work that night, my heart broke as I read what she had written in her handwriting book that day. Her lines read: “Why is it that children always find ways to make it work, and our parents always tell us why it will not work.”