An Ordinary Man

In every morning

Ordinary people

Get up with absolute

Extraordinariness

And with extraordinary beliefs,

Engage themselves in their

Daily routines.

But the extraordinary ones

Without realizing their qualities

In complete ordinariness

Involve in their daily lives.

He gets up like an ordinary man

The moment he wakes up

He remembers a few familiar faces

Children, wife and God, in that order.

He proves that children and wife

Are there in the vicinity

When he sees them sleeping

Like different letters

Within a long sentence like him.

But he could not prove that

God exists till date.

However like a virahi, the separated one

He tries to imagine the face of God

In his mind.

Then without reaching anywhere

In the effort, he would get up from the bed

And would go to the bathroom.

One of his old days will pass through

The drains that lie like the veins of a city

With exploding voices and winds.

Then he would look at the mirror-

Seeing his own reflection

He would ask whether God’s face

Looks like that or not.

Then he would convince himself

That God has a woman’s face.

Thus his day would start

On a walking path, in some wild flowers

Through the songs of some birds

And with the rising of sun.

When he harks for his own footsteps

He would hear the conversations of ants

The prayers of snails as they go to a pilgrimage

The flirting of flies with flowers

And the fights of beetles around the plants.

In this universe,

Besides the noises of cars, buses

Military vehicles and flights

That threaten a silent sky

He would realize that

There are other voices too to hark upon.

As days pass by

One day some extraordinary people

Happen to see him talking to ants

And asking the snails whether

They have seen the face of God.

They ask all the people around

To isolate him as he has gone mad.

If he wanted he could have

Fought with them and reasoned

Saying that he was talking to the ants

About love, life and death

And also he could have proved

That the snails had told him

About God who looked and raced

Like a horse but devoid of a shell.

He could have said it in the name

Of a shell-less God and his kids.

But thinking that all of them were

Extraordinary people

He walked off into the noon.

When his vehicle passes through a tunnel

He burns a book and becomes light unto others

When he recognizes that the burning book

Has the face of God and his own

His station appears before him

And the doors open.

He leaves his vehicle with a smile,

An ordinary smile of an ordinary man.