A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings By GGM

 

Summary-

While killing crabs in the courtyard during a rainstorm,

A couple discovers a wearied, old and disoriented man,

He is peculiar and an outcaste,

Shabby with large wings, and unaware of the local language, Latin!

Concluding him to be an ANGEL,

as their sick daughter recovers, upon his arrival.

They decide to keep the old man alive and not butcher him!

But they butcher him in ways far more treacherous than a one-time slaughter! ☹

They throw him in the chicken coop, to suffer incessantly!

People from far-off places visit to see him,

The couple makes money from every visit,

Villagers pelt stones at him, pluck his feathers, and disregard him in every way possible! ☹

A day comes, when the coop collapses,

The old man starts wandering from room to room in the house,

infuriating the wife!

Finally, a day comes, when the old man stretches his wings,

And takes off, escaping the ceaseless cruelty imposed by the humans.

The wife sees him go, till he disappears over the horizon!!

 

 

My Views-

I would like to give an irksome and ruthless 5-stars to this relatable story on the savagery, brutality, wickedness and harshness of the human society. ☹

A magical-realism narrative, demonstrative of the barbarism and viciousness of humans ☹

I found it a perfect malevolent story of yesterday’s, today’s and forever’s cruel, non-compassionate, exploitative and inhumane reality!

Its all about the grossness, selfishness, and the atrocious human society. How we humans end up using each other, without paying heed to each other’s needs and with utter selfish hearts throw out (use and throw) once your need/objective is over.

How once, you hold no longer significance (in someone’s life), are thrown out, exterminated, expelled from the place which you once burgeoned and flourished!

 

Humans are short-sighted and can’t comprehend the present events from a vantage point that helps them more of a futuristic approach!

 

We as humans, fail to treat the events/situations encountered with sanity, when greed takes over. We don’t let wisdom take over, when greed intrudes and douses!

 

Another important point to be derived, is we as a part of society, find it tough to absorb any outcaste/outsider into our lives. We become too much complacent with what we see in our daily lives, that when the villagers see a very old man with gigantic wings (supposedly an angel), for them he is an outsider, and people from far-off places are ready to pay just to catch a glance of him! He is kept in a chicken coop in the most ramshackled and decayed conditions. He is persecuted, treated cruelly. Instead of appreciating who he actually is, rules and expectations are imposed on him!

I didn’t find the villagers and the house-members to be ignorant but utterly ghastly and exploitative!

They don’t take any trouble to learn about the old man, or be empathetic towards him. Instead, they keep traversing in their own pool of expectations, and impose the same on this poor man!

 

For me the angel is emblematic for every ingenuous innocent being who ends up being a sacrificial goat!

 

As a reader, our takeaways should be what we are supposed NOT TO BE! We shouldn’t be what like the villagers turned out to be!

 

It’s a story not to be overlooked but to be perused in totality, to learn what not to be!