We used to see him reading torn pages of English newspapers aloud, incoherently, but words would not be ambiguous. He used to narrate out-of-context topics in broken language, but on being stopped, he never used to get offended or offensive.
Sometimes he would utter words like "Jawaharlal is bad." Nobody knew whether he was referring to the first Prime Minister of India or someone related or known to him.
I was barely six or seven then. One day, suddenly a skinny man had appeared in my area. Nobody knew who he was and where he came from.
Most of the time he would be on the streets, walking or sitting somewhere on a stone or a platform. He also used to sleep there on the pages of old newspapers which he had a habit of collecting from everywhere.
One day I saw some mischievous children throwing stones at him and he even chased them once or twice, but then stopped resisting. I saw that he was bleeding on his face and hands. This pained my heart a lot and I told this incident to my mother.
Some kind people used to give him something to eat and wear, but he never spoke anything to anyone. Despite people's provocation, he remained calm. My father also tried to engage him in conversation, but to no avail.
He had become a topic of discussion in the area. Everyone was curious to know about him, but he was not giving any clue. Some people said that he had escaped from a lunatic asylum, some others said that he was a spy. Some believed that he had lost his balance due to overworking of the mind. But most of them believed that he was a madman who had lost his way from his home or asylum.
One thing was sure that he was an educated and knowledgeable man. One day I overheard my father telling my mother that he seemed to be his childhood friend, Muzaffar Miyan, the most intelligent student of his school. And since then he became Muzaffar Miyan for all of us.
He never proved to be a nuisance to the people who lived there, but the people did not like his presence in their area, fearing that he would someday prove to be a security threat.
One day Muzaffar Miyan suddenly disappeared from the scene. My father told us that a complaint was made to the police authorities, and they took him away to hand him over to the concerned mental asylum.
But no one in my area could know what drove him to madness, whether it was financial stress, or failure in love, or trauma, or simply a medical condition. It is easy to throw stones and abuses at a person, or to call someone mad, deranged or lunatic, but it is very difficult to understand what brought him to that situation.
Some kind of craziness is necessary for a person to ignite passion and achieve success, but a line has to be drawn. But as a society we still lack what makes us a society.
--Kaushal Kishore
images: pinterest
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