At-tawakkal - The Reliance upon God!

التوکل

A fat boy seeker of light used to go to a a Dahi Bhalla shop at roadside in central part of Alipur city of Southern Punjab, because he was fond of the taste of that shop. What was the shop, it was nothing more than an itinerary wooden cart, painted in green with four bicycle wheels, and decorated with glass on the three sides to protect from dust the open wide bowls of peeled potato, chilly paste, and yogurt, cut onion and tomatoes, and other condiments used to prepare Dahi Bhallas. The vender was a man with beard mixed in white, black and brown, with a bit tanned skin, little fat, clad in simple Pakistani dress, by face and dialect belonging to the community (perhaps the Sheikh or mewati of Haryana) who migrated from India and lips brown and red perhaps because of traditional Indian Pan leaf eating.. And the most important were the black eyes with sprinkling silence and kindness - a Sufi! like many others Sufis who live among the commoners silently, but the seekers can feel the manifestations of Sufism in them!! The boy on one day broken the silence and asked 'Sir, please give me an advice'. The vender said: "Tawakkal Al Allah!" (Rely on God). 

Time passed and passed until the boy grew up and became a man. A changed man! His life became full of tests.. He found himself alone in every field and place. The melancholy of loss, exaggerated sense of decreasing life, money, time and the feeling that everything in universe is going more and more disorderly, and the mind least converged on moment, object or thought, in short he became an example of melancholy. He had got no big belief in ever fertility, mercy and blessings of God. He had slept, the lesson had been forgotten! Really was he alone?

One day he met an accident in a lonely street of a distant city in north... Yeah, he was alone in that city, but not in that street. An old lady hurried, "Son, would you take milk?"

© afterwind

image courtesy: Dahi Bhalla, www.itslife.in