A Lesson To Become A Better Person

This is about an incident not so uncommon to all of us. Almost everybody, everyone must have gone through this, must have seen this, must have lived with this and may die with it without giving a thought over this. I am not a social worker, neither am rich nor can do much for those poors poorer than me. But, I have this feeling in me that I should have done more for them, atleast upto what I could have done.

In that compartment of the sleeper class there were 14 of them, a mother, a father and a very old woman with thick glasses on a broken frame with their family of 11 childern with 9 girls. All of them within the range of 7 to 8 years, most of which seemed to have a gap of only few months . They were shifthing home from Delhi to Guahati, Assam. The compartment was full with their things wrapped in the torned cement bags. The colour of the dresses the children were wearing was hard to make out as they were really dirty. Most of them were almost black as it seems to me but, I knew it was not the original colour. It was not a healthy environment there and I am sure anyone would not want to have a journey with them for a whole night and a whole day. Me and my friend never even bother to come down from our top decks, we were there for almost half of our journey. I kept on looking at those children. I saw a lot of things about them during that journey and tried to imagine how their lives would have been, what would become of those children. 

I had a brief conversation with the eldermost son, the ninth child of the family. He was Bapan and his mother called him Bappu with much care. He told that he was the only one in his family to go to school and was recalling some other stories. He was so frank as if he knew me well from before. At a station somewhere, the train stop for a minute. There we saw some men cleaning the mess that the passengers made. Bappu pointed his finger at a man with a broom among the men and said "My father used to do that, but he doesn't get much money". Then, he pointed at a man in the same group with a little better dress with an old shabby black coat that appeared to be brown. He then said "My uncle has the same coat, and he has a lot of money". I don't know what induced him to utter these words all of a sudden, but, I could see the difference in his eyes when he told me. Just after that insant I saw a woman with a baby in her laps sweeping the compartment floor. After she had finished she came back asking for a little favour for her service. Some gave a rupee and some two. The child took out the 5 rupees note that I gave him to buy sweets and handed it over to the woman and ask her to return a rupee. The woman returned two coins of one rupee, smiled a little, put her hand over the head of Bappu and then she left.

I felt ashamed of myself. Instantly I felt far below my level. The small kid taught me humanity. How to help someone in need ?  

I believe I can be a better person.