The doorbell rang. I was in the midst of a family tiff. A pleasant-looking young man stood outside the door. “Yes?” I asked gruffly. “Huh,” he mumbled as he pointed towards a delivery packet in his hand. We
had not ordered anything if I remembered right. Apparently, he had got the address wrong, I inferred.
“What is it?” I asked again, getting impatient. He pursed his lips, touched them and waved his hand dismissively, wearing an apologetic smile, surely, put off by my curt behaviour.
It took me a few seconds to get it. He was a specially-abled person with speech impairment. He had come to deliver an order to my next-door neighbour as I found out on squinting to check the address on the pack. He rang their bell to show me that there was no response. At his request, I called up my neighbours and conveyed to him their reply.
Now that got me “talking” to him. "How do you manage a job which might pre-requisite a certain level of verbal communication?" I voiced my query all the while animatedly gesticulating with my hands. "I usually type out a message on my phone," he made me understand with his well-articulated gestures. "Thanks," he conveyed with a little bow and a twinkle in his eyes before leaving.
As I closed the door and turned around, there was pin-drop silence. The young man had interrupted a heated argument between the family members in our household over what, now, no longer seemed important.
We all sat down, quietened and mellowed down by what just transpired. Our differences got relegated to the background and the bickering seemed laughable at best and reprehensible at worst.
His positivity was infectious. Here was a young man going about doing his job, trying his best to earn a livelihood while being, somewhat, restricted by a faculty impairment. And there we were, cribbing and complaining about extraneous factors which seemed irrelevant in hindsight, after all. It got us thinking. How we take our privileges for granted. How it was time to count our blessings.