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?"