Life......predictable....yet weird.....beautiful....yet
ugly....boring yet sensuous. Its full of question marks and
exclamatory signs...sometimes comma...but never a full stop in my
opinion. What befuddles me about it is....its so very abstract....so
very full of duality. Some say the hardest thing about life is the
truth of death....some say its the desire.....but I say...its the
decision making part that is hardest of all, the choices we have to
make are the hardest things about life...and since our choices define
us.....the hardest thing in life is to find out who you are....the
hardest thing in life is to be satisfied in the definition of
ourselves...and not to look forlornly in the direction of the
neglected choices.....be it about ur beleifs...about ur career....or
about ur love life...
I am pretty
close to my daduvai....and our favourite pass time is chatting over a
cup of coffee......daduvai is a good story teller....and his life is
so full of incidents he does even have to use his imagination to keep
me hooked to his evening tales. One night over a cup of coffee he was
telling me stories of his childhood.....all of them were fascinating
but the one I m going to narrate here is a bit different from the
rest. This happened when my dadubhai was like 18 or 20.....my great
grandfather had just passed away....and daduvai was the only earning
member of a family of 15....he had just joined his office and the pay
was hardly enough to support the whole big family. So one day he woke
up in the morning to hear from my great grandmother....that is his
mom....that there s no food in the whole house...and no money
either....in a fit of frustation his mother cried out saying...”what
is the point of living if you cannot feed your family?”. My daduvai
was a brave heart....but that day his poverty....his mothers'
tears...and the crying voices of his brothers and sisters pushed him
over the edge of depression. In a moment life lost all its beauty to
him.....he wanted to get over with life...it felt like a curse to
him.....because to him at that point...life meant hunger....life
meant fighting....... and he was too tired for both. So he decided to
give up the gift of life....he was planning how to commit
suicide......when his friend shown up.....Robin Bhattacharya ….who
considered dadubhai as family. Dadubhai never told him what he was
thinking....neither did he tell him the condition of his
family....but his friend sensed it perhaps....or there were some
unseen words suspended in the atmosphere......Robin Bhattacharya
emptied his savings and handed over 250 bucks to my didima.....250
bucks in those days meant may be say 10000.....dadubhai had not asked
for it....neither did he had the means to pay his friend back....but
Robin dadu just gave him the money and said....”this feels like the
right thing to do”. With that money my daduvai bought food that
day.....with the money left he planned to go to kolkata to find a new
job....he also cleared some of his debts.....and most important of
all....he regained his faith in life.....mentally he was knocking on
the doors of death and Robin Bhattacharya brought him back. And you
kno what happened to this friend of my dadubhai??? He died the very
next day because of the sudden fever that hit him after he had left
my dadubhai's house...
I am a practical
person....i donot believe in fairytales...i do not believe in
ghosts....i do not believe in demons....and I do not believe in
angels......but here ...in this story.....my romantic heart wants to
believe.....Robin Bhattacharya was an angel....or a farrista...or
debdut.... He was sent by fate....by universe to give a second chance
to my daduvai......that was his purpose...and he went away after
completing what he was meant to do.....he was that deity we worship
in temples.....that khoda we sing our namaj for.....that God we pray
to before going to sleep. I do not do any of these things....but if I
had made the choice of being a beleiver...its this soul I would pray
to.....
And thus I return to what
I started with....life is hard because of our decisions.. I have made
the decision of being an atheist....and I have done this because the
thought of a deity...an external unseen force...makes me feel like I
have no control on my tomorrow....and I hate that feeling...my
practicality makes me feel less like a puppet..and more like an
actual human being.That I am a atheist helps me be focussed.....but I cannot help reconsidering now and then cuz it does
not allow the romantic inference i drew earlier...it does now allow the shiver I
felt after I heard this story....it does not support my little wish
that I get my angel when I am about to give up.....
