The Other Side…

“Living like a free bird. What a life he must be having!”, he thought, looking at the guy smoking in the balcony of the hotel opposite to his one room flat. “He must have visited more cities on the world than I can imagine, seems like a traveller to me.”

He too had the dream to do that — to visit the world like a nomad.

His dad could never afford that when he was a kid. When all his classmates returned after the summer vacations, everyone had a story to tell. Imtiaz didn’t. His father could hardly manage the fees of the English medium school, leaving his vacations and tours limited to the second-hand bookstore at the corner of the street.

Imtiaz knew the world through the likes of Ruskin Bond and Mulk Raj Anand.

Through the years, he nourished his dream to see the world he read about. To know it first hand — to camp in the Himalayan foothills, to have a homemade lunch in Sicily, to gamble in Vegas and to drink in Bordeaux.

Maybe he settled down too quick. He should have waited, his father did not wait for his marriage, he went away anyways. It was his last wish, but he would have actually wanted him to be happy not just married.

There is not much to do when you are running just to make the ends meet. Gauhar was a beautiful girl and now a caring wife. She waits everyday with a cup of tea ready, with a hint of ginger just as he likes it, not too much to make the tea bitter and not too less to lose the flavour to the Assam tea which he brought from his last trip there.

What a trip it was! He was alone there, Gauhar had nothing to do on a business trip. He visited Majhuli, the floating island made him felt disconnected from the shackles of his life.

In the small moment of detachment, Imtiaz had found his real self.

But he had to come back, there was a family waiting for him. A four-year-old son, who wouldn’t go to sleep until he tucked him in and a loving wife who wouldn’t eat until he had been served hot chapatis.

“The guy must be so lucky to come back every day to a place he can call home, to people he can call family. I have been running away from myself the whole time just to find a place like that. I should have said yes to her, we would have had a kid just like his.” wondered the guy putting down his cigarette in the balcony of the hotel.