The Flowers That Do Not Bloom

Each Sunday the family visits the local vegetable market. They hardly purchase anything but wander about the whole market asking people to adopt one of their eight children. The family consists of the husband & his wife and the eight children. Three boys and five girls. Starting from the age of three to the age of 15 the eight of them represent nearly all age groups. The husband a 42-year-old man works as a daily laborer and the wife helps her husband by working as a maid in a rich family in the outskirt of their village. The village consists of 26 such families staying in their small thatched cottages. They are all poor and hardly get two times of food each day. Yet most of the families are happy excepting this one and two or three like this. The excessive number of children in these two or three families have raised their requirements above their level of earnings.

And for the unfortunate children of these families, the conditions worsen each year with the arrival of a new member. All of them are malnourished, dressed in torn or tattered clothes spend their time playing among themselves or begging for food in the markets or houses of well to do families. None of them has seen a school or has ever seen a book in their entire lifetime. Yet they rarely complain. Because they know their fate. They have been born to suffer. When people reject them, scold them or simply try to dismiss them from their sight they don't try to hide their sorrow but never attempt to argue or fight. They know they are unwanted. There is no place on the earth where they can claim their right and raise their voice to ask for their rights.

They have been born as the would-be citizens of an independent nation. Yet they are chained, restricted, squeezed from all directions in their own motherland and they even can't claim their legitimate rights of food, clothes and shelter. Even the local administration or the leaders of the political parties have ignored their rights despite repeated requests from certain NGOs and voluntary organizations.

Is it their fault to be born in a poor family? Are they destined to be famished when a thousand liters of food are being dumped and wasted in roadside garbage bins all over the country? Yes, to certain extent their parents are responsible for their plights. But we can't blame them in total. Because it is not their fault that they couldn't obtain the much essential education to plan their families.

So, whose fault is this? Why these flowers do not have a right to bloom? Is the gardener only to blame? 

No certainly not. We all are equally responsible. We never allow these flowers to bloom. We forget our moral responsibility as fellow human beings and as responsible citizens of the country to sacrifice our vested, selfish interests and share our love, gratitude and more importantly the three basic amenities of life for these deprived, destitute flowers of a lesser God.