On the way to the doctor’s Utpal and Meher came visiting. They are both extraordinary kids with incredible spirits. Meher is undergoing plastic surgery and looks like an adorable ET and Utpal is as always a true hero.
Looking at them my mind went back to the day Utpal had first landed in my life. He was a bonny almost one year old that his mom use to bathe in the open in front of the door of my old office at exactly the time I use to walk in. I had taken to pat his wet head and ask the same question every morning: when are you sending him to our creche? I never knew then that his journey to our creche located just a door away would have to go through a baptism by fire. And yet had not that happened Utpal may just have been a rowdy little boy in a government school who perhaps came to a pwhy centre in the mornings. But that was not to be. A terrible accident ensured his life would change forever and Popples as I call him is today in class II in a nice boarding school.
Little Meher has her tryst with fire in a remote Bihar village almost three years ago. She was badly maimed and would have carried on like that were it not for a on the spot decision of her father to join his brother in Delhi. The brother’s rented hovel happened to be nest to our women centre and it was there that I met her one fine morning. The rest his history. She touched many lives and they decided to sponsor her reconstructive surgery. Today she looks like an ET because of the expanders in her scalp which will ensure that most of her scars disappear and her hand has already been repaired. She too will one day join Utpal in boarding school.Today they are both living at the women centre and though they sometimes fight, they are true soul mates.
I wonder what would have happened to both these children had they not sustained third degree burns. Strange are His ways, but then can we complain?
How lovely to see the beautiful smiling faces of Meher and Utpal on the day that I have just started to read Dear Popples.
That is great. Please let me know what you think of dear Popples when you finish it