Rebellion

There once lived a boy in Lahore, a boy some eight summers old. Hassan was his name, and he was a fine lad, the only child of his mother and father. It was near dusk one frosty winter when Hassan was outside, playing with his father. The sun's rays grew more and more feeble and were on the verge of winking out into twilight. Hassan had climbed onto the lowest branch of an old, bent tree that grew in their verandah. Below, his father was looking up at him, smiling.

"Come down now Hassan," he said. "Before your mother calls for us."

"Will you catch me, baba?" Hassan asked. He was laughing. "Baba, please say yes!"

Baba shook his head playfully. Then he smiled. He held up his arms and beckoned him with his hands. Still laughing, Hassan slid off the branch.

At the last instant, Baba drew his arms away.

Hassan fell on to the brick-covered ground. The skin over his knee split open in a gush of blood. As he lay in agony, he looked up at his father in astonishment.

His father sat down on his haunches beside him. He was no longer smiling and his eyes were grim. When he spoke, his voice was stangely quiet. "Never trust anyone in this world," he said. "Never forget this."

Hassan never did.

As the boy matured into a man, his mistrust of people grew with him, developing into a strange, quiet frenzy. He became cynical without experience, always looking on somebody's kindness with resentment, and the world's evil with a sad nod of his head. He made few friends, and those he did make often shied away from him, spooked by his paranoia. And thus, lost upon him were his father's kind intentions. His father had wanted merely to give him a slap on the wrist - something to open his eyes. As time went on, however, Hassan's eyes became more and more tightly shut.

When he started college, things finally started to change. He started to see things, see people differently. It first began when he was on the verge of failing a course in his first semester, and some of his classmates helped him out, for no apparent reason. No apparent reason at all. They weren't even his friends. When he got his result card and saw how barely he had made it, he thought, "What have I been doing? All this time, how could I have been mistrusting these very people?"

He used to lie awake many a night, rattled by terrible guilt. He would think of the times when he'd turned others away, refusing to play with some, refusing help from others. In his heart started to grow a deep love for his fellow people. On other nights, he would curse the day he had jumped off the tree - the day that had robbed him of so many years.

Time went on. He got married and had a child. One morning, as his boy lay sleeping in his lap, Hassan stroked his hair, and whispered in his ear, "Always trust those around you, bachay. The world is your friend."

And so parental wisdom passes on generation after generation - wisdom that zig zags pendulously between extremes like a see-saw.

Wisdom that is shaped less by evolution and more by rebellion.