Hard Rocks From The School Of Hard Knocks

It started with some soft rotten tomatoes, then rotten eggs, some felt like boiled eggs and then rocks. They hurt! It seemed everyone threw one at him sometime. He was sensitive to begin with. Gradually it seemed like he developed a thick skin, so that even the stones seemed to bounce off. Of course, they still hurt. The injuries and bruises were too many, countless. While each was a reminder of atleast one painful hit, together all of his injuries seemed to have given him a shield, making the next hit in the same spot less painful than the first time. Maybe that is how injuries worked, the hard, healed scar made you tougher at that spot.

He had come to expect the rocks. After all, this was life, the school of hard knocks...

He used to look at the faces of the people who tossed the missiles in his direction and it used to surprise him that many were 'friendly' faces. He had stopped looking at the faces now, and did so only by accident. He had often observed a face, in the background mostly, of a figure that he had not seen participate in the stone throwing. It had an expression of calmness, kindness and wisdom. He thought he sensed in it both interest in what was going on and a detachment. It seemed to watch everything closely and yet not intervene.

It was a face framed with long, flowing grey hair upto the shoulders. The beard too seemed to flow and met up with the hair around the face and head. All the hair seemed like the tributaries of a river that met and flowed down from the face. One could clearly see the expressive eyes and a permanent slight smile on the lips through the two streams of hair from the upper lips.

He thought of this person as "The Saint". He had never seen this figure throw anything at him. If it did, he was not looking at it then. To him it appeared the one person who had not ever thrown a rock at him.

One day, he was feeling down and had received a fair bit of rocks. Now, mostly, the physical pain was something he could easily bear, but it was his heart that hurt the most. His 'armour' skin was quite tough. Rarely did any stone sting or extract blood. There was a pile of stones at his feet, all that he had thrown away all these years.

Suddenly, he felt a real painful sting, and a little spurt of blood where the rock had hit and had become embedded in his skin. It felt unusually hard. He grabbed it, all bloodied and dirty and threw it away at his feet. He was surprised. He looked at the wound. He applied some pressure on it to stop the bleeding. He did not even look at who had thrown it. This had been the most painful and hardest hit he had ever felt in his life. Just as the pain was subsiding and he was about to move on, he felt another painful sting, a similar hard, sharp and a bigger rock this time. This hurt even more than the previous one.

This time, he caught a glimpse of the person who had thrown it, the hand still completing the motion of the throw.

It was "The Saint!!" And he had an expression of a mischievous smile on his face. He quickly resumed his appearance of detachment. He could not quite figure out what was so different about the rocks that came from this person, that hurt more than the ones he had seen others hurl with more energy. He felt the sharp edge of the rock still embedded in his arm. As he pulled it out, his fingertips were showing crimson strips where the sharp edges had cut deep without him even feeling it. He had the sense to handle it carefully and take it away, wash the blood and grime off it and look at it closely. He held it up against the sunlight after wiping it gently and carefully with a cloth.

A thousand shafts of little rainbows seemed to dance around the rock, heading in all directions. He was wonderstuck. Suddenly, he understood! A smile crept into his face.

"Life Rocks!!" He thought, as he made his way to the pile of stones he had thrown away all these years.

Copyright  (c) Kannan Narayanamurthy 2012

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