In the eyes of the little boy, the early twenties seemed like a far away age. A time when he would wear a tie and a shirt and carrying a brief-case, go to work in a huge company. Earn lots of money because that’s the way it is to be. There is no other way. Then there would be nothing but playing sports on weekends… spending lavishly and doing all that the heart would desire. It was a given. There was no doubt. But then there wasn’t much doubt about a lot of things either. Sixteen meant the start of the golden age. High-school meant freaking out and being ‘the’ coolest kid around. Eighteen meant falling in love. The kid had all that he could want, given the freedom few his age got and allowed to be who he wanted to be. But time and again he felt he was wasn’t reaching the pinnacle of every age he had imagined about. But he was still happy, content…. Maybe a little silly… but good at life anyway.
Life changes you with experience. Sometimes you experience some things so powerful and so strong when you aren’t ready for them that they might affect you in ways you might never have deemed possible.
The boy wasn’t little anymore. Back now in his homeland but away from home and family. With his brother in tow, he lived his life on the second floor of a hostel in heart of the city. Pampered and used to a perfect life suddenly he was out in the open. Everyday seemed like a fight living amongst strangers. Not all were friendly and everyone wore masks. The loss of innocence started then. But he managed. He tried to be strong. Though he never said it and it might have even been silly. But he felt responsible for his little brother every second of every day. He had to be strong. He had to stand tall. He had to be tough so that in those lonely moments at night when they would remember home, the little brother could feel at peace that he had someone to count on sleeping on the upper bunk.
Days turned to months and months into years. It wasn’t all fight though. The boy made many friends. Fell in love and started leaving his mark in his new home. The last year of school had to be perfect but the ways of the hostel were different. What should have been the last hurray marked the turning point of his life.
The boy was a kid in his heart. Naïve and stupid. Many nights he would wonder why the girl that said she liked him was suddenly running away from him. He ran after her. Never blaming her but trying to understand. What it was… why…. He knew a little… but all he wanted was for her to stop… take a second and just tell him herself.
She didn’t and the last time they spoke, his heart was crushed into a million little pieces. It was puppy love… infatuation they told him. He hoped so… but he was shattered none the less. That night sitting with his best friend he felt for the first time his heart harden. He had cried hugging a friend that morning. That was it. That was the last time he would be weak. That evening his brother had asked him if he was ok… his little brother was concerned… he seemed unsure… The boy wouldn’t let that happen to his little brother. He was a rock for his brother and he couldn’t be weak! Silly? Maybe… but it made sense to him then… His best friend asked him again… He dismissed the notion of sadness… he was ok he said…
But not all can be fooled… and some things can take forever to get over… The next few months he spent without a smile… it didn’t come to him… he wanted to be happy but every time he saw her he would break a little inside… it might seem that you might reach a threshold sometime, but there are fools and then there was this kid. Such a hopeless romantic that he kept on breaking inside while rarely ever sharing his anguish with the people closest to him. They had to think he was strong. His brother had to know he was there for him.
School passed and he got back to home… this time in his homeland. But somehow the kid that his mother had sent away was different now… He wasn’t very open about things. The more she tried the more irritable he got. He had a wall around his feelings. Rarely letting the most intense ones out. The more he closed up the more the difference began. He thought that if he showed his broken self that lived inside him… the people around him… his family would make such a fuss that he wouldn't be able to handle it. He didn’t want to live through the memory of it with others. That was his own.
He lived two lives after that. One where friends and family knew he was difficult but didn’t know why. The other where he bared his soul on a cloudy Saturday night, standing on the terrace to most un-likeliest group of people who from then on became his secret keepers. To one he would be curt and at times rude just so that they couldn’t peak into his melted soul and to the others he would tell his dreams, hopes and wishes.
That group became the friends he could count on to show him a ray of hope in the most crushing hours. They might not meet or talk for days and months but whenever there is sorrow, one call and you are in the company of angels. Years passed and everyone went through their ups and downs.
The wall around the kid’s heart now was permanent and as much a part of this character as anything else that defined him. He also managed to develop an air of arrogance. He was argumentative. He never let his guard down. But he found reasons to be happy again. Over the years as he grew, though he still remained a kid, he wasn’t unhappy any more. Time they say heals everything. He wasn’t sure… but he wasn’t sad… he might not be who he saw himself to be, when younger, but defective as he was now… he was alive again.
But he had strained a lot of relationships and even his own character while trying to come out of the deep dark hopeless place where he had nothing better to do than to cry and wish her back. “I liked myself when I fist returned back to this country”, I once heard him tell a friend, “but I loved myself before I left for here”.
“I was everything I wanted to be”.
“My soul felt pure”.
“I had no secrets and no walls”.
“but most of all… I knew that the perfect life lay ahead.”
Maybe it was wishful thinking. Maybe it was childhood innocence. But the hopeful fool that he is…. He wonders still if it is possible. And everyday, he just wishes that there was some way to simply tell people around him that he loved them. To tell his mother he was sorry to be what he had turned out to be.
But the wall still stands guard.
A bunch of average Indian idiots
