The Republic in a Single Smile

The Republic in a Single Smile

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शौक़ को कामयाब होना था

हिज्र में कैफ़-ए-इज़्तिराब न पूछ

ख़ून-ए-दिल भी शराब होना था

तेरे जल्वों में घिर गया आख़िर

ज़र्रे को आफ़्ताब होना था

कुछ तुम्हारी निगाह काफ़िर थी

कुछ मुझे भी ख़राब होना था

रात तारों का टूटना भी मजाज़;

बाइस-ए-इज़्तिराब होना था

– असरार-उल-हक़ मजाज़

( Beauty had to be without veil

Passion had to be successful

Don’t ask about the pain of separation

The blood of heart also had to become wine

Finally I got engulfed in your glow

The particle had to become the sun

Your gaze was infidel to some extent

I also had to be ruined to some extent

The falling of stars at night also had to be a cause of pain

– Asrar-ul-Haq Majaz)

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Shahab Naqvi

Dehradun, Aug 15

Here, beauty is the quiet dignity and untapped potential within a person, waiting to be seen, hidden for years under the veil of society’s neglect; desire is the will to live, dream and to keep reaching, even when everything around appears impossible.

This is a moral compass – of being cut off: from opportunity, from healthcare and from inclusion. The pain never really leaves; it becomes part of the body and part of the soul. Strangely, these struggles though exhausting – turn into a kind of fuel, something that keeps the spirit burning when nothing else does.

When society finally chooses to look with clear eyes towards someone who was invisible for years — treated like a speck of dust — one can shine with the brightness of the sun.

Roji’s hardships come partly from the cold indifference of those in power, influence of wealth over systems causing relative deprivation and partly from the crushing weight of her own circumstances – pulling her back again and again. In her world, even the smallest setback, even a tiny piece of bad luck, feels heavy — enough to create new worry and new fear.

This is the story of a struggle most people never see. Beauty here is resilience. Romance is the longing for dignity. Separation is not from a person, but fromjustice. Meeting is that rare, precious moment when we finally see her — not as someone to pity but as someone full of light.

Every feeling in this poem speaks to her life: the natural, unshakable wish for more; the pain of being shut out; and the deep change that comes when someone is truly seen for who they are.

I met Roji about a month ago in Timli, a small quiet village in the Vikasnagar block of Dehradun district. About forty kilometers from the city, it is the kind of place that disappears from national memory. I had travelled there with my colleague Sheeba to identify families of people with disabilities — a task I have done often enough to know it is never just about the disability. Poverty, isolation and histories of neglect wrap themselves around each story, like tightly knotted threads you cannot easily undo.

Timli’s mud lanes led us to a small wooden-and-mud structure covered in tarpaulin to keep the rain from seeping in. Even so, water still trickles through in the monsoon.

Inside, there was one cramped room — kitchen, bedroom, storage and living area all in one. The air was heavy, a mix of damp earth and kerosene. This is where six people live: a father, mother and four children. Out of these six, four live with some form of disability — including the mother, who has bipolar disorder but has stopped taking her prescribed medication.

Roji is thirteen-year-old girl with the sweetest smile you can imagine, living with cerebral palsy. She has frequent seizures. She cannot walk unaided. The toilet is outside, and she must be carried there — a task her father or brothers manage daily.

She has two brothers with intellectual disabilities; both identified after assessments conducted at NIEPVD in Dehradun. Her father works as a helper in a grocery shop, earning ₹100 to ₹200 a day for long at backbreaking hours. Sometimes, her mother takes up daily wage labour, leaving Roji alone in that one room from morning until evening.

And yet, when I peeped in — unsure if I was intruding — there she was, sitting on a sagging bed, smiling at me as if to say: Yes, this is my world and you are welcome here. That smile cut through the darkness of the room. It was the only light in that space. She told me she wants to study; she wants to have friends visit her and that she likes reading. Imagine a family with no education, almost no income, and four members disabled — and in the middle of that, a girl who dreams not of escaping her life but of participating in it fully.

The house is alive with small, quiet acts of solidarity. Neighbours bring leftover food, old clothes and sometimes a little cash on festivals so the family can celebrate. They speak of the family with compassion, not contempt. This is not the charity of strangers — it is the instinctive sharing of people who know what deprivation tastes like.There have been interventions — a disability certificate for Roji, a wheelchair given more than once, some ration from the BPL card, an old attempt to build a bricked house under the PM Awas Yojana a decade ago, but the house was never completed; some of the money was used for family needs and some given to the mother’s brother. The wheelchair often breaks quickly because there are no paved roads, only mud and stone.

I could see in Roji’s father the pride of a man who refuses to live on pity. He will work hard for twelve hours a day, but he will not extend his hand for alms. He knows his family’s dignity is worth more than short-term relief. In this dignity, there is both strength and tragedy.

I cannot help but think of the irony. A 5,000 years old cultural heritage, one that has weathered invasions, built systems of community life and spoken endlessly about compassion and duty. Yet, it’s hard for a thirteen-year-old girl in the foothills of the Himalayas to leave her home because her wheelchair breaks on unpaved paths. Her desire to study depends not on her will but on the ‘chance’ alignment of infrastructure, policy and mercy – and of whom?

Independence, for many of us is still an unfinished journey. The colonial power they fight is not an empire across the sea, but the everyday absence of accessibility and equal opportunity. It is this casual-neo-elite indifference that writes them off – development.

I have learned that disability is only the surface layer. Beneath it lie deeper currents — poverty that spans generations, gender disadvantage, social identity, geographic isolation, lack of education and the mental health struggles that perhaps, do not have a name. All of these together do not just marginalise a person; they place them in a kind of permanent seclusion within their own space.

And yet, the answer is not hopelessness. I have also seen — in Timli’s neighbours, in the small acts of help, in the community-led work we are trying to build — that we still have within us the capacity to hold each other up. That is the India worth celebrating on 15th August. India of ramps and accessible toilets, of schools whereevery child is welcome and of policies that find their way to the last person in the queue.

We belong to a civilisation that professes to see the divine in every life. Ours has never been a culture built on endless competition or the urge to conquer. If we truly believe this, then we must keep looking inward, strengthening and renewing the moral fabric that holds us together.

When I think of Roji’s smile in that dim, crowded room, I see the republic, we have the power to build — a place where her wheelchair moves easily along smooth paths, where her seizures are met with steady, reliable care, where her schooling never breaks, where her brothers find opportunities shaped for them, and where her father earns with dignity and returns to a home that keeps the rain at bay. Roji’s freedom rests on a promise we have yet to fulfil.