Give Up!

And he said “ I don’t want you in Jail” my son, your uncle was also vocal like you and you know what he ended up with “ an FIR ” nothing else, you are my only son thus my only prop, please have mercy on me, your mother, and your sisters. Leave all this revolutionism and focus on your studies…!s
As he finished I started asking myself “what jail? ” Why Jail” I have not done anything of such sort than why is he reacting in such a way, it was a difficult situation I even could not ask my father why? these questions troubled me for next few hours , I even was not able to utter a single word,
(As the silence has prevailed she spoke out)
“It is our bad luck otherwise you had qualified two tiers of some exam( as she is unaware) and you would have started going on duty after the last interview,” our Bad luck she repeated and said I don’t want you to do more degrees, etc because of these you are getting attracted to such things i… I am never in favor of that, let me be clear( in an aggressive mood) get a government job, settle yourself somewhere and live a simple life we don’t want any kind of revolution from you, let them do whatever they want to do.
My mother was in such a trauma that had never ever been witnessed by me she had seen harsh situations in the past but this was a totally different and difficult situation she had never experienced before.
The conversation was going on and an old lady entered into the room with hope and smile on her face, after sharing greetings with my parents she asked me what about you, are you here? Son (as my face was pale and grim ) I quickly replied with a fake smile ” yes aunty I am fine ” What about you and your family ?
After taking a long breath she replied
“You know the whole condition I am going through, my son visits different places in search of work and in order to make both ends meet but this lockdown has been a disaster for us. You know I am suffering from diabetes and am also a hypertensive patient since past many days I am falling short of medicine this is why I am here”
I replied with assurance and she left. But these lines further complicated the whole conversation I was having with my parents.
Everyone was silent and the whole series of events was running through my mind,
The university was closed because of covid pandemic and I came back to my village depressed and stressed and always thinking what next. As the days passed a close town in my vicinity was declared Redzone , I began to think about possible remedies in order to keep covid at send. I impatiently wanted to save my village from a catastrophe.
After due deliberations with some of my friends , local administration and some village headman, we formed a team of ten volunteers and decided to enforce strict lockdown on our own. To make people aware of the disastrous repercussions of the pandemic we launched awareness campaign, distributing masks not letting people assemble, ensuring social distancing, asking people to take extra precautions , spending our whole day monitoring public activity, not letting people assemble in masjids became our daily routine, one thing was clear in our minds that virus should by no means enter our village while we were busy ensuring that covid remains at bay as for as our village is concerned another two villages in the vicinity fell into its trap.
So it forced us to ensure a strict lockdown, we were surely left with no other option than to go for a harsher one. But we knew it will mean disaster for destitute.
In order to help the poorer section live as comfortable as they used to, I with a friends help came up with an idea of establishing a local NGO and we did the same. The sole purpose of the NGO was to heal the wounds of distressed. In order to run NGO we started raising funds, locally and to our bewilderment, the newly established NGO received an overwhelming support from the local populace within few days we reached out to most of the families and distributed essential commodities among them.
We worked from dawn to dusk, the NGO kept growing slowly and smoothly, but its growth and popularity did not suffice a section of society particularly the elderly headman, , they thought that its growth will dent their popularity to impede its growth they started playing fouls, slowly and steadily their machinations proved effective in getting us embraced in the eyes of local populace. Yesterdays heroes began to be treated as today’s hooligans we fought their machinations but their experience in the field worked out for them and we received a severe blow , when our own people bluffed us, the people that had given us all the strength to fight the deadly virus. My family also suffered a severe criticism.
After a long silence my father rose from his place in anger and yelled at me
“ Would you still continue to get us and yourself humiliated?”
I was stunned for the first time in my life I could see the fear in his eyes, his questions kept reverberating in my head than started a tough fight between my soul and heart, heart was still pumping for the people who had denounced me but the soul pitted heats thought , ultimately it was soul that triumphed over heart and I was asked to “give up”.