Gripping the ends....

The journey, a seemingly long one is now suddenly at a close… for a long time, I couldn’t see it, but now it looms in front, like when you suddenly see a signboard saying you are a few yards away from your destination… it jerks you awake, and for a few minutes you try to decide whether you were better off knowing or not knowing… For the last few months I have been complaining in my head of the stagnant nature of the world around me, the work, the scenarios. And now that I know its going to end, I feel like I have not had enough. This feeling of not wanting to let go was increased since my transfer to head office. I had been asking for it, but I didn’t know how much I loved my district home till I started packing. My life had been shaped into that tiny world space of 10 square kilometers, Sehore, my world for two years. Its funny, but the way a place and people become home often goes unnoticed. But when you say goodbye to the milkman and the grocery shop owner, the chai waala and the office boy, it comes in a flash. Here is a comfort that is about to be broken.

I always felt I stood out there, a city person in a district. I looked and spoke differently, my mannerisms were different, and we both knew it. My lone walks after 8 and morning paper reading in the yard were regarded with amusement, even skeptism. But now that I leave, I realize that I had been accepted. Slowly.

In Bhopal life is queer. Like I should've been uprooted earlier, or not. I'm somewhere in between, trying to grasp the sparse threads that connect me to this place. Its like being woken up from the dream too soon, and made to keep awake before you can connect to reality. My sleep should've been broken only when I had to go home. But these two months will have to pass in a surreal state. I miss the regional office but don’t have the spare time to think about it. It’s a withering process, like the leaves turning color.

The next step is another question altogether. When you have your life meticulously planned out, and one thing doesn’t go as planned, it leaves you in a vacuum; not knowing what next or where next, before the step after that. On a stairwell, u can jump the missing level. in life, you just have to figure out something else. I know what else I can do, but the certainty of purpose is not the same. And the feeling of going wrong is more than that accompanied by the original decision…

Then again, good uncertainty is probably the best there is... A chance to do something unplanned may actually join the dots somewhere in the future...  And I guess it is important to live in uncertainty for a while, knowing and not knowing at the same time. Maybe the wheel of fortune isn't a bad idea after all...