Skip to main content

Saying goodbye

"What's the toughest task in the world?", asked the teacher to her class. The kids came up with answers, and slowly she could she her turn approaching. What would she say! she didn't want to act like a fool by being dumb. See could see the teacher glancing at her, so she took a deep breath and said, "saying goodbye".

She could hear her heart beat aloud, as she stood facing the class. No, she didn't want to give any explanation but the class had demanded to know. She had no means of escaping and to her relief, words started escaping her lips.

Why is bidding goodbye so difficult? she asks a rhetoric question to which she waits for a second to let the class absorb the question and then she begins telling a story.

The story of a little boy who knew not what separation meant. He had the best of things for himself. A loving family, a bunch of good friends and all the luxuries that the world could afford. He saw failures but his spirit never sank for he knew it would all pass. He could always run back to his dear ones and there what assured him was everything could change but his little world would see no changes. Came a storm which changed the course of his life, he woke up amidst puddles of blood. Blood of his loved ones!

They said it was death , that death was the ultimate leveller ,that it spared no one. Those hollow words couldn't satiate his burning heart. He wanted to howl, there were a thousand noises deep within but his eyes refused to shed a tear. He wanted it to end, the whole world to end but what ended were the lives of his dear ones  and what stayed were their memories.

They pleaded him to cry, to express his grief but something within him had cracked, never to melt again. He refused to obey the world, he refused to say "goodbye".

She hears a pindrop silence as her words brush against the wind. She stops, draws a deep breath and says, the reason she chose this answer was the fact that however deep the problem, we can sort out solutions but one task that still makes us go through numerous deaths while we are still alive is bidding "goodbye".

For when we bid goodbye, we also bid away the possibilities of meeting that person ever in our life. What can be more painful than forsaking the person who once held the power to revolutionise our world.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reading between the lines

"Read between the lines",  I heard our professor say. We were in midst of a Victorian text. I looked at her point blank. She had spoken about something which I had no clue about. "Ma'am,  would you please elaborate? ",  I tried framing this sentence in my mind but my introverted  self overpowered my inquisitive soul like everytime. I hopelessly waited for an explanation. Ma'am started explaining about how beyond the surface meaning of any written text, there lay a wide plethora of meaning which wasn't explicitly stated. She talked about finding a void between the written words and our imagination, that void which shapes our interpretation. That explanation opened doors to my perception of reading a text. It wasn't that I had never considered about the possibilities of meanings that lay coated in words until then, but, what perhaps I lacked was to look for that void where I questioned the layers of meaning, where I put myself in those layers of wo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Life on wheels

The one thing that I always had dreamt of as a kid was to have a caravan that could take me to places.I always wanted a gypsy styled life. The idea itself mesmerized me to the extent that I kept dreaming of it the whole time not even realising how it was time which kept on rolling but I stood exactly at the same place, my dreams could never concretize. What was laughed at as a childish game was so important to me that I keep doodling it in my memory till now. I see a meadow, lush green with those small daffodils growing by, perhaps Wordsworth's daffodils! Then I see a girl, her wild unkept hair sailing in the gentle breeze. She has a smile which speaks of solitude, and her heart , well that's swelling with happiness as he looks at her caravan, after all she finally has a life on wheels. What more could she wish for, what more  can anyone wish for? It's not always that we get to live a life we conceived as a kid, life keeps on deciding our track. From what we liked doing...
2 comments
Read more

What do you want to be?

While I was in my 10th standard, almost everyone I met wanted to know what I wanted to be. This question always perplexed me. From the lens of a fifteen year kid who was not yet sure of the changes which awaited in the near future, this question gave me nightmares. I would constantly sit by the mirror and ask myself, what actually would be my answer. My friends always had fancy answers at their disposal. They would confidently chirp whenever any one asked about it. What amused me most was, my friend who had no inkling to study Biology wanted to be a doctor and another friend who detested the idea of even cooking noodles, wanted to be a chef! But whenever they spoke about their wishes, they would always sound confident. And there I was, fumbling for words which refused to escape my lips. It was not until I entered Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya to do my plus two, I found my voice. The teachers there have a different way of viewing life. For the first time, I no longer felt the classroom...
2 comments
Read more