Failure as a human being

I was in Bangkok recently for a holiday hoping to find a fickle of spark to rekindle my dying relationship, a hope in finding what was lost in transition over the past few months. Anyway that’s another story. What really made me re-look and re-think of myself as an ok decent guy was a scene which still haunts my memory till today though it was merely a couple of days ago. It was rather late around 10.30pm and I just had a really bad fight with my girl friend but we still decided to head for a badly needed massage. My back was bloody killing me and it felt ready to snap into two if I stood for another minute.

We walked really quickly hoping to still catch our intended massage at a nearby centre from our dining place before they closed. As we walked past the many tightly shut shops on the dimly lit street, I saw a plumb lady seated by the side of one of the closed shops cuddling a kid. Now if you have been to Bangkok, these would be a scene repeated many times over on many corners of the street. Poor people, poor children begging for some spare change you could throw down. As I turned the corner a memory of what I saw made me cringe at my indecisiveness to do a little charity. A small act of kindness to a fellow human being.

I thought I saw her cuddling a child who looked a lot bigger than most on the streets begging. The child likely to be a girl was plumpish like her mother, age perhaps 10 or 12 based on her size, and was all wrapped in a cloth like sarong. On her forehead rested a previously white face towel already covered in soot. The pace that we were walking soon took me far from where I last saw the lady whose child had her eyes closed like she was sleeping but the image of her was firmly etched into my head.

As we walked into the massage centre and took our respective packages paying some 500 baht each, I felt a sense of guilt handing the money over the counter without batting an eyelid to feel better about my back but yet hesitated in doing the same for the lady. Her child was likely to be running a high fever and given their plight probably couldn’t even afford medication and she had to resort to the basics of wet towel over the forehead. Soon the pain on my back was soothed away under the skilled hands of my masseur but the ache in my heart wasn’t.

We were done at midnight and we hopped into a taxi to head back to our hotel, to our comfortable king size bed with warm lights and designer fittings. As the driver sped away, we passed the scene where I last saw the lady and there she was still holding to her sick child tightly.

I closed my eyes and turned my head away in disgrace and disgust with myself. Ashame by the very thought that I failed as a human being to another.