Yesterday my cute one-month-old son was taken to the paediatrician for vaccination. He was happy and warm in his mother’s hand. He looked like an angel free from all worries and troubles. He was sleeping tranquilly. Both the mother and the child looked so calm. He believed his mother’s lap as the safest place on earth and his mother felt good because she was like an ocean of love for the little creature. The mother-child relationship was an exchange of many silent, yet powerful human sentiments.

But these calmness soon vanished. When the turn of my baby for vaccination came, my wife started to shudder in fear at the sight of the needles and the injection syringe. The paediatrician took the baby from the hands of my wife and pricked the needles into the veins of my son. The innocent silence and complacent looks of the baby suddenly turned into a heart-rending cry. I could feel that in that cry there was a deep pain of a shattered faith. The baby’s cry bore the hidden meaning, “Mother, whom can I believe now? I am not safe even in your lap. In your presence how somebody could put me in pain!” 

The baby’s cry brought tears in the eyes of my wife. Both the mother and the child cried together and I stood silent like a stupefied spectator.