ပုရြက္ဆိတ္ နဲ. ႏွံေကာင္

The Ant and the Grasshopper



When I was a very small boy I was made to learn by heart certain of the fables of La Fontaine, and the moral of each was carefully explained to me. Among those I learnt was The Ant and The Grasshopper, which is devised to bring home to the young the useful lesson that in an imperfect world industry is rewarded and giddiness punished. In this admirable fable ( I apologize for telling something which everyone is politely, but inexactly, supposed to know) the ant spends a laborious summer gathering its winter store, while the grasshopper sits on a blade of grass singing to the sun. Winter comes and the ant is comfortably provided for, but the grasshopper has an empty larder: he goes to the ant and begs for a little food. Then the ant gives him her classic answer.

“What were you doing in the summer time? “
“Saving your presence, I sang, I sang all day, all night”
“You sang. Why, then go and dance”

I do not ascribe it to perversity on my part, but rather to the inconsequence of childhood, which is deficient in moral sense that I could never quite reconcile myself to the lesson. My sympathies were with the grasshopper and for some time I never saw an ant without putting my foot on it. In this summery (and as I have discovered since, entirely human) fashion I sought to express my disapproval of prudence and common sense.
I could not help thinking of this fable when the other day I saw George Ramsay lunching by himself in a restaurant. I never saw anyone wear an expression of such deep gloom. He was staring into space. He looked as though the burden of the whole world sat on his shoulders. I was sorry for him. I suspected at once that his unfortunate brother had been causing trouble again. I went up to him and held out my hand.

“How are you? “ I asked.
“I am not in hilarious spirits,” he answered.
“Is it Tom again”
“Why don’t you chuck him? You’ve done everything in the world for him. You must know by now that he’s quite hopeless”

I suppose every family has a black sheep. Tom had been a sore trail to his for twenty years. He had begun life decently enough: he went into business, married and had two children. The Ramsays were perfectly respectable people and there was every reason to suppose that. Tom Ramsay would have a useful and honorable career. But one day, without warning, he announced that he didn’t like work and that he wasn’t suited for marriage. He wanted to enjoy himself. He would listen to no expostulations. He left his wife and his office. He had a little money and he spent two happy years in the various capitals of Europe. Rumors of his doings reached his relations from time to time and they were profoundly shocked. He certainly had a very good time. They shook their heads and asked what would happen when his money was spent. They soon found out he borrowed. He was charming and unscrupulous. I have never me t anyone to whom it was more difficult to refuse a loan. He made a steady income from his friends and he made friends easily. But he always said that the money you spent on necessities was boring, the money that was amusing to spend was the money you spent on luxuries. For this he depended on his brother George. He did not waste his charm on him. George was a serious man and insensible to such enticements. George was respectable. Once or twice he fell to Tom’s promises of amendment and gave him considerable sums in order that he might make a fresh start. On these Tom bought a motorcar and some very nice jewelry. But when circumstance forced George to realize that his brother would never settle down and he washed his hands of him, Tom, without a qualm, began to blackmail him. It was not very nice for a respectable lawyer to find his brother shaking cocktails behind the bar of his favorite restaurant or to see him waiting on the box-seat of a taxi outside his club. Tom said that to serve in a bar or to drive a taxi was a perfectly decent occupation, but if George could oblige him with a couple of hundred pounds he didn’t mind for the honor of the family giving it up. George paid.
Once Tom nearly went to prison, George was terribly upset. He went into the whole discreditable affair. Really, Tom had gone too far. He had been wild, thoughtless and selfish, but he had never before done anything dishonest, by which George meant illegal, and if he were prosecuted he would assuredly be convicted. But you cannot allow your only brother to go to gaol. The man Tom had cheated, a man called Cronshaw, was vindictive. He was determined to take the matter into court, he said Tom was a scoundrel and should be punished. It cost George pounds to settle the affair. I have never seen him in such a rage as when he heard that Tom and Cronshaw had gone off together to Monte Carlo the moment they cashed the cheque. They spent a happy month there.
For twenty years Tom raced and gambled, philandered with the prettiest girls, danced, ate in the most expensive restaurants and dressed beautifully. He always looked as if he had just stepped out of a bandbox. Though he was forty-six you would never have taken him for more than thirty-five. He was a most amusing companion and though you knew he was perfectly worthless you could not but enjoy his society. He had high spirits, an unfailing gaiety and incredible charm. I never grudged the contributions he regularly levied on me for the necessities of his existence. I never lent him fifty pounds without feeling that I was in his debt. Tom Ramsay knew everyone and everyone knew Tom Ramsay. You could not approve of him, but you could not help liking him.
Poor George, only a year older than his scapegrace brother, looked sixty. He had never taken more than a fortnight’s holiday in the year for a quarter of century. He went in his office every morning at nine-thirty and never left it till six. He was honest, industrious and worthy. He had a good wife, to whom he had never been unfaithful even in thought, and four daughters to whom he was the best of fathers. He made a point of saving a third of his income and his plan was to retire at fifty-five to a little house in the country where he proposed to cultivate his garden and play golf. His life was blameless. He was glad that he was growing old because Tom was growing old too. He rubbed his hands and said:
“It was all very well when Tom was young and good-looking, but he’s only a year younger than I am. In four years he’ll be fifty. He won’t find life so easy then. I shall have thirty thousand pounds by the time I’m fifty. For twenty-five years I’ve said that Tom would end in the gutter. And we shall see how he likes that. We shall see if it really pays best to work or be idle.”
Poor George! I sympathized with him. I wondered now as I sat down beside him that infamous thing Tom had done. George was evidently very much upset.

“Do you know what’s happened now?” he asked me.

I was prepared for the worst. I wondered if Tom had got into the hands of the police at last. George could hardly bring himself to speak.

“You’re not going to deny that all my life I’ve been hardworking, decent, respectable and straightforward. After a life of industry and thrift I can look forward to retiring on a small income in gilt-edged securities. I’ve always done my duty in that state of life in which it has pleased Providence to place me”
“True”
“And you can’t deny that Tom has been an idle, worthless, and dissolute and dishonorable rouge. If there were any justice he’d be in the workhouse”
“True”

George grew red in the face.

“A few weeks ago he became engaged to a woman old enough to be his mother. And now she’s died and left him everything she had. Half a million pounds, a yacht, a house in London and a house in the country”

George Ramsay beat his clenched fist on the table.

“It’s not fair, I tell you, it’s not fair. Damn it, it’s not fair”

I could not help it. I burst into a shout of laughter as I looked at George’s wrathful face. I rolled in my chair. I very nearly fell on the floor. George never forgave me. But Tom often asks me to excellent dinners in his charming house in Mayfair, and if he occasionally borrows a trifle from that is merely from force of habit. It is never more than sovereign.

W. Somerset Maugham


ပုရြက္ဆိတ္နဲ. ႏွံေကာင္

ကြ်န္ေတာ္ ကေလးဘ၀ အရြယ္ခ်ာတိတ္တုန္းက လာဖြန္တိန္း ဒ႑ာရီယုံတမ္း ပုံျပင္ေလးေတြကုိ အလြတ္ရတဲ.အထိ က်က္မွတ္ေလ.လာခဲ.ရျပီး ၊ ပုံျပင္ေလးေတြတစ္ခုခ်င္းစီရဲ. ယူစရာသင္ခန္းစာေလးေတြကုိ ေသေသခ်ာခ်ာနားလည္ေအာင္ရွင္းျပတာကုိ ခံယူခဲ.ရပါတယ္။
အဲဒီပုံျပင္ေတြထဲမွာ မျပည္.စုံတဲ.ေဟာဒီ ကမၻာေလာက ၾကီး အတြင္း ၾကိဳးစားအားထုတ္မွဳအတြက္ ေကာင္းက်ိဳးခ်မ္းသာ ခံစားရျပီး ၊ မွဳန္မွိဳင္းေတြေ၀ျခင္းအတြက္ ဒဏ္ခတ္ခံရတယ္ ဆုိတဲ. ၊ လူငယ္ေတြအတြက္ အက်ိဳးရွိတဲ. သင္ခန္းစာေလးကုိ ေပးတဲ. ပုရြက္ဆိတ္နဲ. ႏွံေကာင္ ဆုိတဲ. ပုံျပင္ေလးကုိ ကြ်န္ေတာ္ မွတ္သားခဲ.ရပါတယ္။
အဲဒီႏွစ္လုိဖြယ္ ပုံျပင္ေလးထဲမွာ ( လူသား အားလုံးဟာ ယဥ္ေက်းသိမ္ေမြ.ၾကတယ္ ဒါေပမယ္.အတိအက်ေတာ. မဟုတ္ဘူး ဆုိတဲ. အေၾကာင္းေလးကုိ သိသင္.တယ္ထင္လုိ. ကြ်န္ေတာ္ေျပာရင္ ခြင္.လႊတ္ေစခ်င္ပါတယ္။) ႏွံေကာင္က ျမက္ပင္ေလးေပၚ ထုိင္ျပီး ေနေရာင္ေအာက္မွာ သီခ်င္းဆုိေနတဲ. အခ်ိန္ ၊ ပုရြက္ဆိတ္ က ေဆာင္းရာသီ စားနပ္ရိကၡာ အတြက္ ေႏြရာသီတစ္ခုလုံးမွာ ပင္ပင္ပန္းပန္းခက္ခက္ခဲခဲ ရွာေဖြစုေဆာင္း ေနတယ္။
ေဆာင္းရာသီလည္း ေရာက္ေကာ ပုရြက္ဆိတ္အတြက္ က စားနပ္ရိကၡာဖူဖူလုံလုံ ရွိျပီး ႏွံေကာင္ရဲ. ရိကၡာက်ီထဲမွာေတာ. ဟာလာဟင္းလင္းေပါ.။ ဒါနဲ. သူဟာ ပုရြက္ဆိတ္ဆီ သြားျပီ အစားအစာ နည္းနည္းသြားေတာင္းတယ္။ အဲဒီမွာတင္ ပုရြက္ဆိတ္က သူမရဲ. ဂႏၱ၀င္အေျဖ သူ.ကုိေပးလုိက္တယ္။
“ေႏြရာသီတစ္ခုလုံး ဘာမွ မစုေဆာင္းပဲ ရွင္ဘာေတြလုပ္ေနလဲ”
“ မင္းရဲ. အာရုံဖမ္းစားႏုိင္မွုေတြကုိ စုေဆာင္းရင္ သီခ်င္းဆုိတယ္ေလ ၊ ေန.ေရာညေရာပဲ “
“ သီခ်င္းဆုိတယ္၊ ဘာရယ္။ ဒါဆုိ ရွင္ သြားျပီး က လုိက္ပါဦးလား”
ကြ်န္ေတာ္.ရဲ. အရြဲ.တုိက္တတ္တဲ.စိတ္က အဲဒါကုိ ကေလးဘ၀ နားလည္ခံယူႏုိင္စြမ္းနည္း တဲ.အခ်ိန္ မွာ ၾကဳံရတဲ. ၊ မယ္မယ္ရရမဟုတ္တာေလးဆုိတာထက္ပုိျပီး အေျခခံအေၾကာင္းအရာအျဖစ္မမွတ္ယူတဲ. အတြက္ေၾကာင္. အဲဒီသင္ခန္းစာ နဲ. ကြ်န္ေတာ္ ရင္ၾကားေစ. လုိ.မရခဲ.ပါဘူး။ ကြ်န္ေတာ္. ရဲ. သမၼစိတၱျဖစ္ျခင္း ဟာ ႏွံေကာင္ဘက္မွာ ရွိျပီး ၊ တစ္ခါတစ္ခါ ပုရြက္ဆိတ္ကုိ အျပစ္မတင္ပဲမေနႏုိင္ေအာင္ပါပဲ။ ဒီစာတမ္းေလးမွာ (လူပီသျပီဆုိကတည္းက ရွာေဖြေတြ.ရွိလာတဲ.) ဆင္ျခင္ေတြးေခၚမွဳအသိနဲ. သာမာန္အသိတုိ.အေပၚ ကြ်န္ေတာ္.ရဲ. သေဘာတူႏွစ္သက္ျခင္းမရွိမွဳမ်ားကုိ ေဖာ္ျပမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
တစ္ရက္က ေဂ်ာ.ခ်္တစ္ေယာက္ တည္း စားေသာက္ဆုိင္တစ္ခုမွာ ေန.လည္စာစားေနတာကုိ ေတြ.တဲ.အခါမွာ ဒီပုံျပင္ေလးကုိ သတိမရ ပဲမေနႏုိင္ေအာင္ျဖစ္မိပါတယ္။ဒီလုိၾကက္ၾကီးလည္လိမ္ေနသလုိမ်ိဳး အရမ္းကုိ ပူေဆြးမွိဳင္ေတြေနတဲ. သူတစ္ေယာက္မွမေတြ.ဖူးေသးပါဘူး။သူဟာတကယ္ကုိ ေငးမုိင္ေနပါတယ္။ကမၻာေလာကၾကီးတစ္ခုလုံးရဲ. ၀န္ထုပ္၀န္ပုိးၾကီးကုိ ထမ္းထားရသလုိမ်ိဳးေပါ.။ ကြ်န္ေတာ္သူ.အတြက္စိတ္မေကာင္းျဖစ္သြားပါတယ္။ ခ်က္ျခင္းပဲ သူ.ရဲ.ေကာင္းက်ိဳးမေပးတဲ. ညီေလးက ေတာ. ျပႆနာတစ္ခုခုလုပ္လုိက္ျပန္ျပီလုိ.ထင္လုိက္မိတယ္။သူ.ဆီသြားျပီးကြ်န္ေတာ္လက္ဆြဲႏွဳတ္ဆက္လုိက္တယ္။
“ေနေကာင္းလား“ လုိ. ကြ်န္ေတာ္ကေမးလုိက္တယ္။
“ကြ်န္ေတာ္.စိတ္ေတြ မေပ်ာ္ဘူးျဖစ္ေနတယ္ဗ်ာ” လုိ.သူကေျဖတယ္။
“တြမ္ေၾကာင္. ပဲမဟုတ္လား”
“ခင္ဗ်ားဘာမဆုိ သူ.အတြက္လုပ္ေပးခဲ.တာပဲဗ်ာ ၊ ဘာျဖစ္လုိ.ဒီေကာင္. ကုိ ေမာင္းမထုတ္ပစ္တာလဲ။ဒီေလာက္ဆုိရင္ ဒီေကာင္ဟာ ဆန္ကုန္ေျမေလးပဲဆုိတာ ခင္ဗ်ားသိသင္.ျပီ။”
မိသားစုတုိင္းမွာ သုိးမည္းတစ္ေကာင္ေတာ.ပါစျမဲပဲလုိ. ကြ်န္ေတာ္ထင္တယ္။ တြမ္ဟာ သူ.အေပၚမွာ ေတာက္ေလွ်ာက္မ်က္စိစပါးေမြးစူး စရာျဖစ္ေနတာ အႏွစ္ႏွစ္ဆယ္ရွိျပီ။ သူဟာဘ၀ကုိ ေကာင္းေကာင္းမြန္မြန္ေတာ. စခဲ.တာပါပဲ။ စီးပြားေရးလုပ္တယ္။အိမ္ေထာင္ျပဳျပီး ကေလးႏွစ္ေယာက္ရွိခဲ.တယ္။
ရမ္ေဆး မိသားစု၀င္ေတြဟာ တကယ္.ဂုဏ္သေရရွိပုဂၢဳိလ္ေတြပါ ၊ အဲဒီလုိ ထင္ျမင္ေအာင္္ လည္းအေၾကာင္းအရင္းေတြအမ်ားၾကီးရွိပါတယ္။ တြမ္ ဟာ သိကၡာရွိတဲ. အလုပ္ေကာင္းေကာင္းတစ္ခုကုိရခဲ.ႏုိင္တာပဲ။
ဒါေပမယ္.တစ္ေန.မွာေတာ. ၊ ဆုိင္းမဆင္.ဗုံမဆင္. အိမ္ေထာင္ေရးဟာ သူနဲ. သဟဇာတမျဖစ္တဲ.အေၾကာင္း ၊ အလုပ္ဆုိတာကုိ သူမႏွစ္သက္တဲ. အေၾကာင္း ေျပာတယ္။သူဟာ တကုိယ္တည္း သာေပ်ာ္ရႊင္ခ်င္တယ္။ ဘယ္လုိဟန္.တားမွဳ မ်ိဳးကုိ မွ သူနားမေထာင္ဘူး။ သူ.ဇနီး နဲ. သူ.ရုံးခန္းကုိ စြန္.ပစ္ခဲ.တယ္။
သူမွာရွိတဲ.ပုိက္ဆံအခ်ိဳ. နဲ. ေပ်ာ္ရႊင္စရာေကာင္းတဲ. ႏွစ္ႏွစ္ ဆုိတဲ. အခ်ိန္ကုိ ဥေရာပရဲ. ျမိဳ.ေတာ္အစုံမွာ ကုန္ဆုံးေစခဲ.တယ္။
မၾကာခဏ သူ.ေဆြမ်ိဳးေတြဆီကုိ သူလုပ္ရပ္ သတင္းေတြေရာက္သြားတုိင္း သူတုိ.ဟာ အင္မတန္မွ အံ.ၾသတုန္လွဳပ္ၾကရတယ္။ သူ.ပုိက္ဆံေတြကုန္သြားတဲ.အခါ ဘာမ်ားျဖစ္လိမ္.မလဲဆုိျပီး ေခါင္းတရမ္းရမ္းျဖစ္ၾကတယ္။ ေနာက္ေတာ. သူဟာေခ်းငွားသုံးတယ္ဆုိတာသိသြားၾကတယ္။
ရုိးေျဖာင္.တဲ.သူတစ္ေယာက္မဟုတ္ဘူး ဆုိေပမယ္. သူဟာႏွစ္လုိဖြယ္ေကာင္းတယ္ ။ ေခ်းငွားတာကုိ ျငင္းဆန္တဲ.ေနရာ သူ.ေလာက္ခက္ခဲတဲ.သူ တစ္ေယာက္မွ ကြ်န္ေတာ္ မေတြ.ဖူးပါဘူး။
သူဟာ မိတ္ေဆြေတြအလြယ္တကူပဲေပါမ်ားေအာင္လုပ္တတ္ျပီး အဲဒီမိတ္ေဆြေတြဆီက အကူအညီေတြနဲ. ပဲ ၀င္ေငြေျဖာင္.ခဲ.တယ္။
ဒါေပမယ္. သူဟာ ပုိက္ဆံကုိ မရွိမျဖစ္လုိအပ္တာေတြ အတြက္ပဲသုံးတာဟာ ျငီးေငြ.စရာေကာင္း ျပီး ဇိမ္ခံပစၥည္းေတြအတြက္ သုံးတာ က သာ ေပ်ာ္ရႊင္ဖြယ္ရာေကာင္းတယ္ လုိ. အျမဲေျပာေလ.ရွိတယ္။
အဲဒီအတြက္ သူဟာ သူ.အကုိ ေဂ်ာ.ခ်္ ကုိ အားကုိးတယ္။ သူ.ရဲ.ဆြဲေဆာင္ႏုိင္တဲ. အရည္အခ်င္းေတြကုိ အလဟႆ မျဖစ္ေစရဘူး။ ေဂ်ာ.ခ်္ဟာ တည္ၾကည္ေလးနက္တဲ. သူတစ္ေယာက္ျဖစ္ျပီး သူ.ညီရဲ. ေသြးေဆာင္သိမ္းသြင္းမွဳ ၊ အေပ်ာ.ဆြဲမွဳ ေတြအေပၚ မရိပ္မိပါဘူး။ေဂ်ာ.ခ်္ဟာ ဂုဏ္သိကၡာရွိတဲ.ပုဂၢိဳလ္ တစ္ေယာက္ျဖစ္တယ္။ တစ္ခါ ႏွစ္ခါေလာက္ေတာ. တြမ္ရဲ. အမွားေတြျပဳျပင္ပါေတာ.မယ္ဆုိတဲ. ကတိကုိယုံစားျပီး သူ.ညီ အားလုံးအသစ္ကေနျပန္စလုိ.ရေအာင္ဆုိ ေငြေၾကးပမဏအတန္အသင္. ထုတ္ေပးခဲ.တယ္။
အဲဒီေငြေတြနဲ. တြမ္ဟာ ေမာ္ေတာ္ကားတစ္စီးနဲ. လက္၀တ္ရတနာေတြ၀ယ္တယ္။ သူ.ညီဟာေတာ. ျဖင္. ဘယ္ေတာ.မွ ေျချငိမ္မွာမဟုတ္ဘူး ဆုိတာ သိလာဖုိ.အတြက္ အေျခအေနေတြကဖိအားေပးတဲ. အခါမွာ သူဟာ သူ.ညီကုိ ျဖစ္ခ်င္ရာျဖစ္ လက္ေလ်ာ.လုိက္ေတာ.တယ္။ ေနာင္တအလ်င္းမရွိတဲ. တြမ္ဟာ သူ.အကုိ ကုိ အၾကပ္ကုိင္တာေတြဘာေတြေတာင္လုပ္လာတယ္။
ဂုဏ္သေရရွိ ၀တ္လုံေတာ္ရ ေရွ.ေနၾကီးတစ္ေယာက္အေနနဲ. ညီလုပ္တဲ. သူဟာ သူသြားေနက် စားေသာက္ဆုိင္ရဲ. ဘားမွာ ေကာက္ေတးစပ္ေနတာ ဒါမွမဟုတ္ ကလပ္ရဲ. အျပင္ဘက္မွာ အငွားကားနဲ. လူေစာင္.ေနတာတုိ.ကုိေတြ.ရတာ မသင္.ေတာ္ဘူးလုိ.သူထင္တယ္။ တြမ္ကေတာ.ေျပာတယ္။ အရက္ဘားမွာ မွာ အလုပ္လုပ္တာ ၊ ဒါမွမဟုတ္ အငွားကားေမာင္းတာတုိ. ဟာ သမၼာအာဇီ၀အလုပ္ေတြျဖစ္တယ္။ ဒါေပမယ္. ေဂ်ာ.ခ်္က သာ သူ.ကုိ ေပါင္ေငြအေတာ္မ်ားမ်ား ေပးႏုိင္မယ္ဆုိ ရင္ မိသားစု ဂုဏ္သိကၡာ အတြက္ အဲဒီအလုပ္ေတြကုိစြန္.လႊတ္မယ္ေပါ.။ ေဂ်ာ.ခ်္ က သူေတာင္းသလုိေပးခဲ.ပါတယ္။
တစ္ခါ တြမ္ တစ္ေယာက္ ေထာင္ထဲ၀င္ရခါနီးျဖစ္တဲ. အခ်ိန္ ေဂ်ာ.ခ်္ဟာ အင္မတန္မွ စိတ္ဆုိးတယ္။ ဂုဏ္သိကၡာ က်ဆင္းစရာ ကိစၥၾကီးတစ္ခုလုံးမွာ သူပါရတယ္။ တြမ္ဟာ တကယ္.ကုိ လြန္လြန္းခဲ.တယ္။ တြမ္ဟာ ရုိင္းစုိင္းတယ္ ၊ စာနာေထာက္ထားမွဳမရွိဘူး ၊ တစ္ကုိယ္ေကာင္းဆန္တယ္ ဒါေပမယ္. ေဂ်ာ.ခ်္က ဥပေဒနဲ. ဆန္.က်င္တယ္လုိ. ယူဆတဲ. မရုိးသားမွဳတစ္စုံတစ္ခု မွ အရင္က သူမလုပ္ခဲ.ဘူး။ သူသာ တရားစြဲခံရမယ္ဆုိ ရင္ ေထာင္က်ဖုိ.ကိန္းက ေသခ်ာေနတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ္. သူ.ညီေလး ကုိေထာင္ထဲ ဘယ္အေရာက္ခံမလဲ။
ခရြန္ေရွာဆုိတဲ. တြမ္ လိမ္ခဲ.တဲ.သူဟာ အာဃာတ ၊ အျငိဳးအေတးၾကီးတယ္။သူကဒီကိစၥကုိ ရုံးေတာ္ကုိ တင္မွျဖစ္မယ္လုိ. ဆုံးျဖတ္ခဲ.တယ္။ တြမ္ဟာ ကလိန္ကက်စ္ေကာင္ ၊ အျပစ္ေပးခံရသင္.တယ္ လုိ.သူကေျပာတယ္။
အဲဒီကိစၥကုိ ေဂ်ာ.ခ်္တစ္ေယာက္ ေငြေတြအမ်ားၾကီးသုံးျပီးေျဖရွင္းလုိက္ရတယ္။တြမ္ နဲ. ခရြန္ေရွာတုိ. ႏွစ္ေယာက္ သူေပးတဲ. ခ်က္လက္မွတ္နဲ. ေငြထုတ္ ၊ မြန္တီကာလုိ ကုိ အတူထြက္သြားျပီး ေပ်ာ္ရႊင္ေနၾကတယ္ ဆုိတဲ. သတင္းကုိ ၾကားရတဲ. အခါ သူအဲဒီေလာက္ ေဒါသူပုန္ထတာမ်ိဳး ဘယ္တုန္းကမွ မျမင္ခဲ.ဖူးပါဘူး။
အႏွစ္ႏွစ္ဆယ္လုံးလုံး တြမ္ဟာ ထင္တုိင္းၾကဲတယ္ ၊ျမင္းပြဲေလာင္းတယ္၊ ေကာင္မေလးေခ်ာေခ်ာေတြနဲ. မိန္းမလုိက္စားတယ္ ၊ ကခုန္တယ္၊ ေစ်းအၾကီးဆုံးဆုိတဲ. စားေသာက္ဆုိင္ေတြမွာ စားတယ္၊ လွလွပပ၀တ္စားဆင္ယင္တယ္။ ဇတ္ခုံေပၚကေနအခုပဲ ဆင္းလာသလို ထင္ရတယ္။ အသက္ေလးဆယ္ဆုိေပမယ္. ဘယ္သူမွသူ.ကုိ သုံးဆယ္ငါးႏွစ္ထက္ပုိမထင္ရဘူး။
သူဟာေပ်ာ္ရႊင္စရာေကာင္းတဲ. အေဖာ္မြန္တစ္ေယာက္ျဖစ္တယ္ ။ သူဟာသုံးမရတဲ. သူတစ္ေယာက္ျဖစ္မွန္းသိသည္.တုိင္ သူ.ရဲ.ေပါင္းသင္းဆက္ဆံေရးမွာ လူေတြဟာ ေပ်ာ္ရႊင္ခ်မ္းေျမ.ၾကရတယ္။ သူဟာ သေဘာထားေကာင္း ျပီး စိတ္ေနျမင္.တယ္ ၊ အျမဲတေစ ျမဴးထူးတက္ၾကြ ေနတတ္တယ္၊ မယုံၾကည္ႏုိင္ေလာက္ေအာင္ႏွစ္လုိဖြယ္ေကာင္းတယ္။ သူရဲ. ရပ္တည္မွဳ အတြက္ ကြ်န္ေတာ္.အေပၚ အျမဲတမ္း ပုိက္ဆံေတာင္းတုိင္း ကူညီဖုိ. ကြ်န္ေတာ္ ဘယ္ေတာ.မွ ႏွေျမာတြန္.တုိျခင္းမျဖစ္ခဲ.ပါဘူး။ ေပါင္ ၅၀ ေလာက္ကုိ ဘယ္တုန္းကမွ အေၾကြးဆုိတဲ. စိတ္နဲ. သူ.ကုိ ကြ်န္ေတာ္မေခ်းခဲ.ပါဘူး။ တြမ္ရမ္ေဆးကုိ လူတုိင္းက သိသလို လူတုိင္းကလည္း တြမ္ရမ္ေဆးကုိသိတယ္။ သူ.ကုိ မေထာက္ခံရင္ေတာင္မွ သူ.ကုိ မႏွစ္သက္ပဲ မေနႏုိင္ၾကပါဘူး။ သူ.ထက္တစ္ႏွစ္ပဲၾကီး တဲ. သနားစရာ ေဂ်ာ.ခ်္ ကေတာ. အသက္ ေျခာက္ဆယ္ေလာက္ထင္ရတယ္။ ရာစုႏွစ္ရဲ. ေလး ပုံ ပုံ တစ္ပုံ ေလာက္အတြက္ တစ္ႏွစ္မွာ ရက္သတၱပတ္ ႏွစ္ပတ္ထက္ပုိျပီး နားရက္ မယူခဲ.ဖူးဘူး။ မနက္တုိင္း ကုိးနာရီခြဲေဒါင္ဆုိရင္ရုံးသြားတယ္၊ ဘယ္ေတာ.မွ ေျခာက္နာရီ မထိုးမခ်င္းရုံးကေနမျပန္ဘူး။ သူဟာ တည္ၾကည္ေျဖာင္.မတ္တယ္၊ အလုပ္ၾကိဳးစားတယ္ ၊ ယုံၾကည္စိတ္ခ်ရတယ္။ သူမွာ ဇနီးေကာင္းတစ္ေယာက္ရွိတယ္။သူ.ဇနီးအေပၚမွာလည္း ဘယ္တုန္းကမွ စိတ္ထဲကေနေတာင္ သစၥာမမဲ.ဖူးဘူး။ ေနာက္ျပီး သမီးေလးေယာက္ရဲ. ဖခင္ေကာင္းတစ္ေယာက္လည္း ျဖစ္တယ္။ သူ.၀င္ေငြရဲ. သုံးပုံတစ္ပုံကုိ စုေဆာင္းထားျပီး အသက္ ငါးဆယ္ငါးႏွစ္မွာ အျငိမ္းစားယူမယ္လုိ.စိတ္ကူးထားတယ္။ ေက်းလက္ေဒသမွာ အိမ္ေလးတစ္အိမ္၀ယ္မယ္ ၊ ဥယ်ာဥ္ေလးစုိက္၊ ေဂါက္သီးေလးရုိက္မယ္ လုိ. သူစိတ္ကူးထားတယ္။ သူ.ဘ၀ဟာအျပစ္ဆုိစရာမရွိပါဘူး။ သူအရြယ္ေလးရလာတာကုိ ၀မ္းသာတယ္။ ဘာျဖစ္လုိ.လည္းဆုိေတာ. တြမ္လည္းအသက္ၾကီးလာျပီေလ။ သူ. လက္ႏွစ္ဘက္ကုိပြတ္ျပီးေျပာတယ္။

“ တြမ္တစ္ေယာက္ ငယ္ဂုဏ္ရွိတုန္း ၊ခန္.ညားေခ်ာေမာတုန္းက ေတာ. အားလုံးေကာင္းပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ္. သူက ကြ်န္ေတာ္.ထက္တစ္ႏွစ္ပဲငယ္တာေလ။ ေနာက္ေလးႏွစ္ဆုိရင္ သူ အသက္ ၅၀ ရွိျပီ။ အဲဒီအခါ ဘ၀ ဆုိတာ ဘာလည္းသူေကာင္းေကာင္းသိလာလိမ္.မယ္။ ကြ်န္ေတာ္ အသက္ငါးဆယ္မွာ ဆုိရင္ ေပါင္သုံးေသာင္းေလာက္ကုိ စုေဆာင္းထားျပီးသားျဖစ္ေနျပီ။ ႏွစ္ဆယ္.ငါးႏွစ္လုံးလုံး “မင္းေျမာင္းထဲေရာက္လိမ္.မယ္ေနာ္” လုိ. ကြ်န္ေတာ္ တြမ္ ကုိ ေျပာခဲ.တယ္။ အဲဒီအခ်ိန္ သူဘယ္လုိျဖစ္မလဲေစာင္.ၾကည္.ၾကတာေပါ.။အလုပ္ကုိေကာင္းေကာင္းမြန္မြန္ပဲ လုပ္မလား ၊ ဆန္ကုန္ေျမေလးပဲျဖစ္မလား ေစာင္.ၾကည္.ၾကေသးတာေပါ.ဗ်ာ။ “
သနားစရာေကာင္းလုိက္တဲ. ေဂ်ာ.ခ်္ ။
သူ.ကုိကြ်န္ေတာ္စာနာနားလည္ပါတယ္။ တြမ္တစ္ေယာက္ ဘာမ်ား တလြဲေတြလုပ္ျပန္ျပီလည္းလုိ. သူ.ေဘးမွာထုိင္ရင္းကြ်န္ေတာ္စဥ္းစားေနမိတယ္။ ေဂ်ာ.ခ်္ တကယ္ကုိ စိတ္ဆုိးေနတာ ထင္ရွားတယ္။
အခုဘာေတြျဖစ္ေနလည္းခင္ဗ်ားသိလား။ သူက ကြ်န္ေတာ္.ကုိေမးတယ္။
အဆုိးဆုံးထိ ကြ်န္ေတာ္ၾကိဳေတြး ထားပါတယ္။ ေနာက္ဆုံးေတာ. တြမ္ ရဲလက္ပဲ ေရာက္သြားျပီလားေပါ.။ ေဂ်ာ.ခ်္က ၾကိဳးစားအားယူျပီးေျပာရွာတယ္။
“ကြ်န္ေတာ္.ဘ၀တစ္ေလွ်ာက္လုံး အလုပ္ၾကိဳးစားခဲတယ္ ၊ ရုိးသားတည္ၾကည္ခဲ.တယ္၊ သိကၡာရွိရွိ ၊ ေျဖာင္.ေျဖာင္.မွန္မွန္ ေနခဲ.တယ္ ဆုိရင္ခင္ဗ်ားျငင္းမလား။ ဘ၀တစ္ခုလုံးၾကိဳးစားလာခဲ.ျပီးတဲ.ေနာက္ အရွဳံးမရွိႏုိင္တဲ. ေငြစုေငြေခ်း က ရတဲ. ၀င္ေငြေလးနဲ. ကြ်န္ေတာ္ အျငိမ္းစားယူႏုိင္မယ္လုိ. ေမွ်ာ္လင္.ထားတယ္။အျမဲတမ္း ေလာကပါလ တရားနဲ.အညီကြ်န္ေတာ္ တာ၀န္ေက်ပြန္ခဲ.တယ္။”
“မွန္တာေပါ.။”
“တြမ္ဟာ အျမဲတမ္း ေသာက္ေသာက္စားစားနဲ. မရုိးမေျဖာင္. လူ.အႏၵတစ္ေယာက္ဆုိရင္လည္း ခင္ဗ်ားမျငင္းႏုိင္ပါဘူး။ တရားမွ်တမွု ရွိေၾကးဆုိရင္ သူဟာ သူေတာင္းစားေဂဟာ ကုိ ေရာက္ေနျပီ။”
“မွန္တာေပါ.ဗ်ာ။”
ေဂ်ာ.ခ်္ မ်က္ႏွာၾကီး နီျမန္း လာတယ္။
“ လြန္ခဲ.တဲ. သတင္းပတ္ အနည္းငယ္က တြမ္ ဟာ အေမအရြယ္ေလာက္ရွိတဲ. အမ်ိဳးသမီးတစ္ေယာက္နဲ.ေစ.စပ္ခဲ.တယ္။ အခုအဲဒီအမ်ိဳးသမီး ေသသြားေတာ. သူပုိင္ဆုိင္သမွ်ေတြအားလုံးကုိ တြမ္ အတြက္ထားခဲ.တယ္။ ေပါင္ငါးသိန္း ၊အေပ်ာ္စီး သေဘာၤ တစ္စီး၊ လန္ဒန္မွာ အိမ္တစ္လုံး ျပီးေတာ. နယ္မွာ အိမ္တစ္လုံး သူ.အတြက္ ထားခဲ.တယ္။”
ေဂ်ာ.ခ်္ က စားပြဲခုံကုိ လက္သီးနဲ.ထုျပီးေျပာတယ္။
“ဒါလုံး၀မတရားဘူး ၊ ကြ်န္ေတာ္ေျပာမယ္ ၊ လုံး၀မတရားဘူး၊ အေရးမပါတာဗ်ာ ။ လုံး၀မတရားဘူး။”
ေဂ်ာ.ခ်္ရဲ. ေဒါသမ်က္ႏွာၾကီးကုိၾကည္. ၊ ကြ်န္ေတာ္အက်ယ္ၾကီး ေအာ္ရယ္မိ ျပီး ထုိင္ခုံေပၚမွာ အူႏွိပ္ေနရတာ ၾကမ္းျပင္ေပၚကုိေတာင္လိမ္.က်မတတ္ပဲ။ အဲဒီအတြက္ ေဂ်ာ.ခ်္ကကြ်န္ေတာ္. ကုိ ဘယ္ေတာ.မွ ခြင္.လႊတ္မွာမဟုတ္ဘူး။ ဒါေပမယ္. တြမ္က ေတာ. ကြ်န္ေတာ္ကုိ အေကာင္းဆုံးညစာစားပြဲေတြ အတြက္ ေမဖဲရ္ မွာရွိတဲ. သူ.အိမ္ကုိ မၾကာခဏဆုိသလုိဖိတ္ပါတယ္။ အခါအားေလ်ာ္စြာ ကြ်န္ေတာ္.ဆီက ပုိက္ဆံေလး မျဖစ္စေလာက္ေခ်းတယ္ဆုိရင္ေတာင္ အက်င္.ပါေနလုိ.ပဲျဖစ္မွာပါ။ တစ္ေပါင္ထက္ေတာင္ ဘယ္ေတာ.မွ မပုိပါဘူး။
ဗ်တ္ဇ

W. Somerset Maugham ၏ The Ant and the Grasshopper ကုိဆီေလ်ာ္ေအာင္ျမန္မာျပန္သည္။