Every stone has a story

I once stumbled upon a slip of paper on a café table, abandoned like a receipt nobody cared to claim. It carried a curious poem: a man urging stones to “become human,” only for the stones to sigh back, “We can’t be that hard.” The irony was sharp, the truth sharper. For who among us is not stone-like nowadays?

It made me think of my mother, who could sit on the sun-warmed steps of our courtyard for hours, tenderly turning over pebbles she had gathered from the riverbank. “Every stone has a story,” she would say, her voice soft yet certain, as though entrusted with a secret syllabus the rest of us had missed. Once, she pressed a particularly smooth one into my palm and whispered, “If you listen long enough, even silence speaks.” As a 12-year-old, I thought it was a riddle meant to delay my playtime. Now, decades later, I hear in it a maternal murmur, a lullaby for compassion corroded, like inscriptions weathered on ancient rock.

In our restless rush to be modern, perhaps we have become mineral — cold, calculated, unyielding. We clutch gadgets tighter than we clasp hands. We ‘connect’ in virtual vaults but forget how to converse across dining tables. Even grief is outsourced; condolences come canned in emojis. TS Eliot once sighed about being “distracted from distraction by distraction.” Today, I suspect he might have simply switched off his Wi-Fi.

Stones are not merely inanimate; they are metaphors in motion. They build temples and break windows, pave roads and mark graves. They endure centuries, but we, the self-proclaimed crown of creation, can barely endure a traffic jam without cursing strangers. When I recall that café poem, I wonder: was it mocking us, or mourning us?

A small revelation struck me one monsoon evening. Walking home, drenched and disgruntled, I noticed a group of children chasing marbles in a puddle. Their laughter leapt over the rain like sparks. The marbles clicked and clattered, tiny galaxies in muddy palms. A boy, no taller than the umbrella I carried, looked up and declared, “These stones are brighter than stars!” He was right. In that fleeting floodlit moment, their play carried more humanity than any parliament debate, more poetry than a hundred lectures on empathy.

Loss of values is rarely sudden; it is sedimentary, layered over time. We compromise here, overlook there, and soon we are ankle-deep in apathy. My neighbour once confessed, “I don’t know the names of the watchman’s children, but I know the Netflix password of my cousin in Canada.” Her honesty was refreshing, her admission tragic.

And yet, I resist cynicism. As Albert Camus wrote, “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” Perhaps within our stony selves too lies a kernel of kindness waiting to be tapped. Sometimes it takes the simplest triggers — a child’s marble, a mother’s proverb, even a stray poem on a café table.

Last week, I pressed the slip with that poem between the pages of my diary, like a leaf saved for memory. On the adjacent page, I scribbled a note to myself: “Try not to become a stone others stumble over. Be one they might sit beside, or skip playfully across a stream.” Witty? Maybe. Wishful? Certainly. But necessary, if we are to thaw this frost-bitten century.

Stones may be patient, but humans are supposed to be tender. If we forget that, we risk becoming monuments instead of memories, gravestones instead of guides. And the irony, of course, is that when stones finally look at us — as the poet imagines — they find us harder than themselves.

And in my mind, I hear my mother again: “Every stone has a story — if only we soften enough to listen.”