04 Sep A TEACHER TURNED HOMELESS & BEGGAR

Every time I look at this picture, it makes me wonder, infact it puzzles me more of how life keeps surprising us. What might happen next is just so unpredictable that sometimes it hits you and it hits you really bad. I met this homeless woman with a brilliant command over english. I couldn’t resist asking  as to why, what circumstances could have probably put a knowledgeable lady like her on the street left homeless. She smiled subtly saying ‘there are many who ignore me, thinking I am just another homeless person on the street, sitting on the sidewalk and then there are few who are curious just like you, but never conveyed. It’s deeply painful for me to talk about how I ended up here, I believe sometimes life takes everything away. I lost my job, my husband and children denied me, I was deprived from the basic necessities and gradually circumstances became worse and I became homeless before i knew. I was not a beggar but I became one and the hardest thing to do was to beg in front of my own children to help me pay the rent. After all that misery, pain was tolerable. There are days when I prefer earning it, instead of begging, so i do little bit of sweeping, unloading the farm trucks and in return get healthy fruits or a good meal. This entire phase to fight for food, shelter to even taking a shower, brings me to tears of hopelessness everyday because I feel I don’t deserve this. But, somehow I try to find a silver lining, thinking life is worth fighting for till your last breath, after all it’s not all that dark before sunrise and when I was a teacher I used to make my students understand a lesson out of a story, so here I am trying to learn my share of lesson from my own story’.