A Tale of Two Cities: Part 2

March 2016. It had been a year since he had moved to the new city. He sat and brooded over what had happened in those twelve months. So many changes in life – filling his heart with a blend of fear, sadness, curiosity and joy. But all those milestones were seemingly placed on a curved path. As he had traveled that road, he had found himself in a similar scenario to where he was four and a half years back. Life had come full circle.

The city had seemed to welcome him with both hands when he had moved there. At first, everyone had seemed friendly. He had greeted everyone with a smile, tried to befriend every person he met. But as the days went by he realized that not every person in the city was how he portrayed him or her to be. There were hostile know-it-alls, sweet-talking backstabbers, selfish tricksters in this city as well – as there were in every other city in the world. They were just people, not angels sent from heaven.

Then there were conflicts he had not imagined before, and situations he would not have found himself in earlier. New variables had come into the equation of his life, and he was not at all prepared to deal with the dependencies and responsibilities. Answering one question posed another, and burying one hole opened up many more.

When he had visited his college, there was no trace of the serenity he remembered. The reality was not even remotely familiar with the image that was embedded in his memories. The trees around his old house had all been cut down. Gone was the playground, replaced by more concrete buildings. The tea-stalls and small dhabas he used to frequent had all been supplanted by Café-Coffee Days and chained restaurants. He couldn’t recognize the teachers, and the students came across as arrogant and cavalier. That was when he had realized that it was neither the playgrounds, nor the dhabas that he missed, but the friends who had helped make those ordinary places special.

He had built an image of the city from the viewpoint of the twenty year old boy. The sandcastles of his ideas were built during  those small intervals of time when the tides have receded - his brief visits to the city during the past few years. But the thirty year old man understood that there was no such thing as perfect in this world. Perfection is like that mountain peak you can only admire and aspire to reach, but you never can. It only drives you to make the journey, to put in the effort – that is its sole purpose. If someday you did indeed manage to reach the top of the mountain, instead of the magnificent view you had envisaged, you will only find your vision blocked by the shrouding mist, and your body frozen in the bitter cold. That is when you will understand that it was your perception of the place that made it perfect, not the place itself.

It then dawned upon him that it was he who had changed, and not the city. The city was where it was ten year earlier, and may be where it will still be a hundred years from then. But he had moved on. His beliefs and take on life had changed. And that change was irreversible. He could not go back to being the twenty year old him again. As he pondered on, he could not help but remember the lines from a movie - one he had heard for the first time, ironically, in the same city, as a twenty year old:

"How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on... when in your heart you begin to understand... there is no going back?"

A Tale of Two Cities: Part 1

It was the 31st of December – New Year’s Eve of 2016. At a time when every one of his friends would have been busy gearing up for a great night, here he was, reminiscing about his past with dreamy eyes. His thoughts went back a year – how things had changed in such little a time.

That year had easily been the most happening year for him in a long time. He had changed jobs, switched cities. He had got his own house, his own car. And then he had become a father to a beautiful and healthy baby. Not many would be able to boast of so many accomplishments within such a short span of time. But there was still a void within his heart; an uneasiness too difficult to comprehend, and even more tedious to explain.

He had been living away from his homeland for five and a half years. The City of Dreams had awed him at first with its vastness and complexities, had then made him fall in love with it with its enchanting modernity and lifestyle, and had finally disgusted him with its squalor and hostility.

He had then moved to a neighboring city – a beautiful place – the perfect combination of flair and tranquility. He had taken to the city like a fish takes to the water, and everything had seemed so impeccable at first. But slowly but surely, the realization had crept in that nothing’s perfect. The city had its own share of shortcomings. Little by little, his had dissatisfaction grown, and then one day he had finally decided that this could not be the place he could settle down for life. He had longed for his homeland, nostalgia of his graduation and post-graduation days taking hold of him.

For the next four years he had looked for opportunities for coming back home. But luck was not on speaking terms with him. His line of work didn’t offer many conductive jobs there. Towards the end of 2012, he was presented with one of the most difficult decisions of his life – an option to choose between a high paying job in the same city and a low-paying one at his preferred location. For reasons he understood much later in his life, he had chosen the former, and stayed where he was. He had regretted it like anything in the initial days. But then he had made peace with it, before finally accepting it as destiny. He knew that the chances of getting a good job in his homeland were remote, and had lost all hope of getting back.

Then, on November 13th, 2014, the unthinkable happened. He got a job offer from his previous employer, and his joy knew no bounds when he saw the work location as the one he wanted. The next one and a half months was a blur – muddled in resignation formalities, joining formalities, closing out the lease on his current house, getting a lease on his new house, packing up household things accumulated in four years, transferring his vehicle and so on. But amidst all the chaos, he was happy as ever. God had finally answered his prayers. A new life was set to begin in 2015.

Being an emotional person, he had expected that he would feel at least a bit nostalgic to be leaving a city where he had stayed for the past four years. But to his surprise, there was absolutely no trace of any emotion, not a semblance of wistfulness. There was nothing in this world he had wanted at that moment than to leave that accursed city. And when time came, he left for good, swearing never to come back.

Now, a year later, he was in reverie, dreaming about New Year’s Eve of 2015. It had been one of the greatest nights of his life. A last memoir of the life in that city. Since then, so much had changed. Friends had come and gone; and he had been left in solitude in the very day that no one wants to be alone. It was then that he realized that that city had ingrained something within him – something that could be taken away by neither place nor time. In his haste to leave, he had not gotten closure. He had slammed the door on her face and run away, instead of kissing her goodbye. That day was the first time in a year that his mind had wandered about the place lost in time; about moments buried beneath the bones of fleeting joy; about memories forgotten amidst the chaos of life. It had taken a whole year for him to miss the city. It had taken him seemingly a lifetime to be reunited with nostalgia.