In this heart-wrenching tale, a neglected child, estranged from his community, grows up under the weight of rejection and alienation. Desperate for warmth, he contemplates a fiery rebellion against the very village that pushed him away. A journey that explores the cost of indifference and the search for belonging.
How does it feel to burn when the world turns cold?
The sky above my childhood home never seemed large enough. Clouds, grey like the stone walls of the village, hung low, as if they were heavy with secrets no one wanted to share. I was seven when I first noticed how cold the village was—not the weather, but the people. There was no warmth in their greetings, no joy in their smiles, only a distant politeness that seemed to say, “You are here, but you don’t belong.”
The proverb says: "The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth." That child was Mehar, and this is his story.
I knew Mehar, not well, but enough. He wasn’t the sort you could easily ignore, even though most of the village tried. He stood out like an ink blot on a white page—wild hair that refused to lie flat, brown skin that was too dark for comfort in a place where everything was pale and neat, and a laugh that echoed long after it should have faded.
I didn’t speak to him much, but I always watched. He had the sort of energy that dared the world to push him down. And the world did. Oh, how it did.
What happens when a child is unwanted?
Mehar’s mother had left the village when he was only a few weeks old. The gossip said she ran away with a travelling trader, while others believed she simply couldn’t bear the burden of raising a son who wasn’t quite right. His father? Well, if anyone knew who he was, they kept it quiet. Mehar was raised by his grandmother, an old woman who had more arthritis than patience and barely enough kindness to go around.
From the start, Mehar was a curiosity—a living, breathing mystery that the village never solved, nor wanted to. Children avoided him, as children often do when they sense something different. And the adults? Well, they treated him like he was something best kept at arm’s length—an inconvenience they could manage if they ignored it long enough.
But Mehar didn’t want to be ignored. He wanted to belong. The harder he tried, though, the more the village pushed him away. His attempts at friendship were met with shrugs or sharp whispers. He’d ask to join in the games, and the other boys would turn their backs, leaving him to kick stones alone.
And yet, Mehar was like one of those stubborn dandelions that refused to die. No matter how many times he was stepped on, he’d pop right back up, wild and resilient. Until one day, he didn’t.
When does rejection become a flame?
It was during one of those interminable summer afternoons when the heat clung to your skin like a second layer, making it impossible to think of anything but shade and cool water. I was sitting on the low stone wall outside my house when I saw Mehar walking down the road. His clothes were dirty—torn in places where the fabric had snagged on something—but his posture was straighter than I had ever seen. There was a strange, quiet determination in his steps, like he had finally figured out something important.
I called out to him, more out of habit than anything else. "Oi, Mehar! Where are you off to?"
He stopped and turned, squinting against the sun. His lips curved into a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. "Just going to feel the warmth," he said, before continuing down the road, his feet kicking up small clouds of dust with each step.
I didn’t think much of it at the time. But looking back, that was the moment. That was when the fire inside him ignited.
Can you burn the world without scorching yourself?
It wasn’t long after that the first whispers started. “Did you hear about the barn?” one neighbour asked another over the clink of tea cups. “Caught fire last night. No one knows how. Strange, isn’t it?”
At first, it seemed like bad luck. The next night, though, it was the granary. Then the bakery. And every time, Mehar was nearby, watching the flames with an unsettling calm that made the villagers uneasy. They never saw him strike a match, never caught him holding a torch. But the fires followed him, as if the flames were drawn to his rage like moths to a lantern.
"Mehar!" I remember shouting one night as I saw him sitting by the riverbank, his face illuminated by the glow of yet another burning building. "What are you doing?"
He didn’t look at me. His eyes were fixed on the fire, watching it dance and devour everything in its path. "It is warm," he said simply. "For the first time, it is warm."
Is there a way back from the fire?
It didn’t take long for the village to turn on Mehar. Where there was once indifference, now there was fear. Whispers grew louder. Fingers pointed. And soon, the elders called a meeting, though no one invited Mehar to attend. He wasn’t part of their village anymore. He never had been, really.
But I went. I sat in the back, my heart thumping as the villagers argued over what to do. "He’s dangerous," one woman said, her voice trembling. "He will burn us all if we don’t stop him."
"Can’t we reason with him?" I asked, though I wasn’t sure why I felt the need to defend him. Maybe because I understood, in some small way, what it felt like to be on the outside looking in.
"Reason?" The head elder scoffed. "He has gone mad. He doesn’t want reason. He wants revenge."
It was then that I knew. They were going to blame him for everything. They needed a scapegoat, and Mehar had been an outsider for so long that he fit the role perfectly. The child who had been left to burn now had become the flame they feared most.
What happens when you finally belong?
That night, I found Mehar sitting alone near the charred remains of the bakery. The fire had long since burned out, leaving nothing but ashes and a bitter smell in the air. He looked up when he saw me, and for the first time, I saw the exhaustion in his eyes—the weight of years of rejection, loneliness, and anger.
"Why are you here?" he asked, his voice flat.
"Because I want to understand," I said. "Why, Mehar? Why burn it all down?"
He sighed and leaned back, staring up at the sky. "Because no one ever embraced me. Not once. All I ever wanted was to feel like I belonged, but all they did was push me away. So, I thought... maybe if I burned it all down, I’d finally feel their warmth."
I sat beside him, the cool night air brushing against my skin. "Did it work?"
Mehar shook his head, his expression softening. "No. It is still cold."
How do you rebuild a village from ashes?
In the end, Mehar didn’t burn the village to the ground. But he left, disappearing one night without a word to anyone. Some say he went to find his mother, others believe he wandered into the wilderness, seeking a place that would finally welcome him.
The village never spoke of him again. The fires stopped, and life went on. But every now and then, on cold winter nights, when the wind howls through the empty streets, I wonder where Mehar is—and whether he ever found the warmth he was searching for.
Sometimes, I think about the proverb, and I realise that it is not just about children who are rejected. It is about all of us. We all want to feel embraced, to belong. And if we don’t, we’ll do anything—anything—to find warmth, even if it means setting the world on fire.
A thought: What can we learn from Mehar’s story?
Mehar’s story isn’t just about a boy who set fires; it’s about the way we treat the people we don’t understand. It’s about the loneliness that grows when a community turns its back on someone who doesn’t fit neatly into its mould. And it is about the consequences of that rejection—the way a heart, starved for warmth, might lash out, burn brightly for a moment, and then flicker out, leaving only ashes behind.
In every village, every town, every group, every company, there is a Mehar. Sometimes they are loud, sometimes quiet. Sometimes they are the odd one out because of how they look, or where they come from, or the way they think. But always, always, they are searching for something—an invitation, a hand held out in friendship, a place to belong.
The sad truth is, we often ignore the Mehar in our lives until it’s too late. Until the flames are licking at the edges of what we hold dear, and the smoke is choking our lungs. And by then, it’s not warmth we feel—it’s regret.
Can you ever find warmth in the coldest places?
I thought about Mehar for years after he left. Sometimes, I’d catch myself looking for him in the faces of strangers, hoping he had found some other village where the walls weren’t so high and the people weren’t so distant. But the truth is, I never saw him again.
One day, after years of silence, I ran into his grandmother. She was older now, her back more bent than I remembered, her eyes clouded with the weight of her age. I asked her if she had heard from him, half expecting her to brush me off like she did when we were children. But to my surprise, she paused and looked at me with a sadness that I hadn’t seen before.
"He came back," she said quietly, her voice barely above a whisper. "For a while. But he didn’t stay long. Said he was just passing through."
"Did he say where he was going?" I asked, trying to hide the surge of hope that bubbled up inside me.
She shook her head, her hands trembling slightly as they gripped the edge of her walking stick. "No. He just said he was still looking."
What is it we are all searching for?
That was the last time I heard of Mehar. The last whisper of his existence before he faded back into the shadows, still searching for a place that would embrace him. But his story stuck with me, lodged in my chest like a stone that wouldn’t move, no matter how many years passed.
Because, in a way, we are all searching. Maybe not for warmth in the same way Mehar was, but for something. Acceptance. Love. A sense of belonging. A place where we can finally exhale and feel at home.
Statistics show that loneliness has become one of the biggest epidemics of the modern world. According to the World Health Organization, nearly 33 per cent of people worldwide report feeling isolated or excluded, and these numbers are rising. It is not just the elderly or those who live in remote areas. It is children in schools, adults in cities full of people, individuals lost in crowds but unseen.
We are more connected than ever, yet so many of us feel more alone than we ever have before.
What does it take to light a different kind of fire?
Mehar wasn’t the first child to be pushed away by his community, and he won’t be the last. But his story reminds me that we have a choice in how we respond to the people around us. We can be the village that closes its gates, locks its doors, and pretends not to see the ones who don’t quite fit in. Or we can be the ones who open the gates, let the light in, and offer a space by the fire.
As for me, I have spent my life trying to be that space. It is not always easy—sometimes it is hard to open up to people who are different, to look beyond what makes us uncomfortable. But every time I’ve managed it, I have found that the warmth I have given has come back to me tenfold.
Because the truth is, we all need warmth. We all need someone to say, “You belong here.” And maybe if we were better at offering that, there’d be fewer fires, fewer hearts turned to ashes.
What happened to Mehar ?
I like to think that somewhere out there, Mehar found his place. Maybe it wasn’t a village like ours, with its narrow minds and cold hearts. Maybe it was a place where the fires burned brightly, not out of anger, but out of love and acceptance. A place where he could finally stop running, stop searching, and feel the warmth he had been denied for so long.
Or maybe he never found it. Maybe he’s still wandering, still lighting fires along the way, hoping that one day the world will understand him the way he always wanted it to. I don’t know.
But I do know this: his story is far from unique. There are Mehar’s everywhere. In your neighbourhood, your workplace, even in your own family. The ones who feel left out, pushed aside, forgotten. The ones who are always on the outside, looking in.
And the question is—what will you do when you meet one? Will you be the village that shuts them out, or will you be the one who opens the door and says, “Come in, you are welcome here”?
What is the legacy of those we lose?
As I finish writing this, I am struck by the weight of Mehar’s absence. He is, in so many ways, the embodiment of what happens when we forget to be human—when we forget to care, to reach out, to embrace,to be empathetic.
His story isn’t just a cautionary tale about a boy who set fires. It is a reminder that we are all responsible for the warmth in our communities, in our homes, in our hearts. It’s easy to ignore the ones who are different, to push them away and hope they disappear. But when we do that, we create the very fires we fear most. The ones that burn too hot, too bright, until there is nothing left but ashes.
If we want to change that, if we want to stop the burning before it starts, we have to be the warmth we wish to see in the world. We have to be the village that embraces, rather than rejects.
And maybe, just maybe, we will find that the fires we light together, in kindness and love, are far more beautiful than anything anger and rejection could ever create.
What questions should we be asking ourselves?
As you reflect on Mehar’s story, here are a few questions to ask yourself:
- Have I ever been in a position where I felt like I didn’t belong? How did I handle it?
- Do I know someone who might feel left out or isolated? How can I help them feel more included?
- What role do I play in my community when it comes to embracing or rejecting others?
- How can I create a more welcoming environment for people who don’t “fit in” easily?
- What can I do to prevent someone from feeling like they need to burn something down to feel warmth?
Tushar Mangl is the author of The Avenging Act. He writes on topics like mental health, Vastu, and the art of living a balanced life. With titles like Hey Honey Bunch and Ardika, he seeks to create a greener, better society.
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