Every journey is a new
experience, no matter how often, no matter how short they tend to be. It’s not
the journey that matters, not as much as the people we get to meet and life we
get to experience. Every dawn and every dusk brings along with it a hoard of
experiences that are just waiting to be discovered. This is the story of just
one of the many interesting people I got to meet in my numerous journeys that
made me realise that life is not something sacred; it is what happens right in
front of our eyes, everyday. Don’t for one second think that I am an adept traveller, the sad truth is that I started travelling out of necessity and
though I prefer the familiar comforts of my writing desk it has given me a
chance to experience life as it is, raw and unadulterated.
It must be in one of those dreary
Friday evenings that keep coming up every week, offering a strange intoxicating
mix of anticipation, relief and happiness that this happened. I was supposedly
going home after a week’s hectic schedule and it was literally killing me that
I had to wait further for it to happen. I have had a practise of going with a
couple of really goods friends; we have been travelling home together since we
were travelling home at all. But today they had to pack and they were late,
late enough to let me fend on my own. The necessities of the travel insisted
that I find a suitable mode of transportation, an autorikshaw ( for those of
you unfamiliar with the word, it is a three wheeled public transport vehicle in
black and yellow or either, refer any Bollywood flick to know more . It’s easy
to spot and hard to forget, for us it’s just a way of life like taxi is to New
Yorkers.) is what I had in mind. It was not hard to find one, certainly not on
a Friday.
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| Okay! That matters too! |
Soon I landed a certain driver
who was more than just willing to take us to the railway station that we needed
to get, but since my friends were still packing I had to wait for them to come.
Poor chap readily agreed to wait along with me; I must say he was a jolly good
fellow to spend time with. Now just for the record I had to wait a good 45
minutes for my friends to come and hence being late for all the right trains.
But then again that gave me this rather valuable lesson in life.
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| The little ones knows much more about little things than us! |
The long wait let us on the
streets with nothing much top do but talk, though a practical lover of silence
I would always like some company at times. He insisted on talking as he would
occasionally blurt out some random question or the other (like does every one
speak English in the campus) and so and so. I did take a liking to him. Things
didn’t get any interesting till a friend of his dropped by and they got
talking. The truth is I never intended to eavesdrop on those guys as I was
happily trotting away in my own imaginary world. The startling reminiscence of
innocence in their routine chat drew my attention to them and their
conversations. He was talking about his luck and I was instantly interested in
knowing what lady luck has bestowed upon him, the truth was it was me, rather
us. I realised then how much it meant for them to have the weekly trips that we
made, our travels were more essential to them than it were ever to them.
In their casual conversation lied
an unmistakable scent of innocence that is otherwise unseen and unheard of
today. He was talking about how lucky he was to have gotten customers that day
and how he and friends were celebrating in their free time yesterday and so and
so. Its not what they talked that made it important, its how is said it, how
with a smile and a attitude to match he made it seem that the very basic things
in life were something else entirely. Its how his words and the sentences they
formed transcended what would have been just a ordinary life into a story worth
talking about, a life worthy of mention. In the simplest sense he taught me how
life is in every little thing we do. And what I learnt sitting under the
bright evening sun on a concrete sidewall by a rather crowded piece of asphalt.