Brave as a 'child' (Dubai)

Travelling back home from work one evening in the metro, I couldn't take my eyes off this adorable little girl tucked cozily between her Dad and Mom. She was very pleasingly smiling at people seated on the opposite seats and had no dearth of the glee in her beautiful and innocent eyes. I assume that she might have been around 3 years old and she probably was an Egyptian. Well I could assume that because now I am a bit familiar with certain body language and appearance of Arab Nationals here in the UAE, just as how an Indian would know just by looking at a fellow Indian and say from which city or community he / she might belongs to. So...back to the little girl. After passing a few stations, the girl got up and sat alone, not far from her parents when this new passenger who came and sat beside her. This passenger was a young Arab lady and the minute she looked at this little girl in no time she had tears in her eyes. She was trying to control her tears and overwhelming emotion as she drew herself closer to the girl and gave her a 'bear hug' and kept kissing her arm. I was unable to understand the whole scenario because all this while there was something very important that wasn't yet visible to my eyes. The Arab lady then sat the girl on her lap, gave her phone to play and just when the girl held the phone with just one arm and tried to 'manage' it with the other, that's when I saw that this little angel had an amputated arm, from the elbow! Yes...my eyes were moist the very second I saw this appalling yet joyful sight of this bundle of gladness. Appalling because she was so young and was bearing such a rude reality of life as part of her body and joyful because there was not a single wrinkle of sadness nor an utterance of a single word of pain or complaint. Instead, the little miracle - as I think of her, was a powerful and heartfelt persona of happiness, strength, courage and life! Her face was like an oasis of pure happiness for someone in a desert of lost hope. Her indescribable acceptance of disability was a lesson for a life time for all those who think that the world is not kind and welcoming to them just because they have dark skin or are bald, short, lean, fat and what not.

One has to always realize that though physical disability deprives us from living a life unlike normal folk, but an individual with a heart and mind that does not have faith in God, or the will power to bear life's challenges head on, to conquer it with wisdom and perseverance, is more handicapped than that one person in some part of the world, who is still living a 'contended' life, with no arms and no legs too!

A spineless heart is worse than a severed arm!