OLD BAGGAGE CLOUDS OUR MINDS
This morning, our garbage bag was left uncollected outside our apartment. Like most places, the maintenance staff collects our garbage everyday. I knew that they had come as I had instructed the maid who works at our place to hand over the garbage. Yet an hour later, it lay there, open and not tied. Puzzled, I asked the maid. She told me that everyday she walks up to the bin and dumps the garbage herself while the maintenance staff look upon. This morning however she had left the bag outside to get picked. In the course of our conversation, she grew irritated thinking that they purposely left it there, in order to get her into trouble. Worse, she thought they were trying to show that they will not pick garbage left by her. An hour later, a maintenance staff rang the doorbell. She apologised saying that she had forgotten to pick up the bag the maid had left earlier. She had come looking for it just then but could not find it anywhere. I turned and looked at the maid who works at our place. A big smile literally popped up on her face. All the hatred that was growing with her by the hour dissolved in seconds.
We are so influenced by the past, by experiences and emotions that we accumulate as we grow old, that we cease to see anything with a fresh perspective. It was so easy to assume that the maintenance staff had purposely left the garbage bag, with intention of leaving a message of superiority or ego or whatever negative emotion we could think of. But the truth was that she had no such intention. She had simply forgotten to pick up the bag as the maid had done something different today. Yet the staff considered it her duty and took pride in her job. When she remembered, she did not dismiss it but came back to do her job. I have no idea why we couldn’t think of possible reasons such as, maybe she forgot or maybe the garbage bin was full just then. All that we could think of was that she was trying to show her superiority over the maid.
By Lakshmi Mitter
Founder of MerryGoBooks
LAKSHMI MITTER, WRITER AND ILLUSTRATOR
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