This is a true story.
The stability of the mountain of unexpressed pain crumbled down. All the leaves fell and the environment turned scary. My friend Gyanu lost his job. His grandmother died an unpleasant death. Death pulled down the possible right of her living and she went away never to return.
He was serious since the time I knew him. He stared at the sky and put all his efforts together bring his life back to bear on reality. Gyanu was unable to make happiness his own and, therefore, he found himself jailed within every kind of circumstances. He felt desolate in a collective sense and discovered himself all alone as if thrown into the street. Perhaps his past days brought and left him at such a turning point of life where he has gone on poverty and now he is living in protest shaping his tears into his own form. On that day, he cried quite a lot and the crying of his relatives surrounded his grandmother’s body made his soft heart painful.
Terrible was the night. Dogs were barking and there was a conversation of people somewhere in the midst of silence when his grandmother had left him and the same day he lost his job. But even when he knew that he was responsible to protect the life of so many persons, he forgot it all and continued to cry staring at his mother. Perhaps he was petrified by the thought that he had now no other option but to carry on his own life without the presence of his grandmother. He had to live any way even without his grandmother being at his side to guide him and so he began to make preparations to continue his life. He was great and so he didn’t let his life scattered hopelessly about it.
Life is a hard journey and a journey as such is limitless. He used to relate to me the talks of his life’s journey from time to time. He said that he linked to fly, when he was very young, and wanted to become a glorious and renowned person. But poverty and the way of life full of wants made him unable to achieve success in his own life. Therefore, with a view to making his life bright he had run away from his village. His mother had cried. But he was full of understanding. He had been married in the village before his escape. He had to choose one between the two sides, marriage or life, and he obviously chose life at this age of 12 with a dream of becoming a great man and ran as fast as his legs could carry him through the wild forest. At times he remembered his mother and at other moments his mind was occupied with the thought of his newly married wife. Even if his thoughts occasionally went back to his younger brothers and elder sister, he set them aside and continued running away further. Life is a struggle and he began a journey of continuous struggle. He hadn’t started a crazy journey nor had he saved himself from innumerable and imbalance just in rain. He continued running and fighting his endless battles with the obstacles that tried to impede his advance.
Slowly his life began to take a turn. He had already spent many years in condition of success and crises. He didn’t forgot his wedded wife and started to love her. Perhaps he was hungry of love. He therefore, threw away the narrow bond social customs and began to spend a married life of his own choice. He was soft and he became a respected person because he is now respected by people in the society as a kind individual. He is living in a limited happiness. He is living as a person unable to cross the high wall of mental worries.
He had fancied great happiness in life and had studied something about life with a beautiful small home where he would follow a lifestyle with a peaceful family guided by thoughts full of struggles. But the journey he began was completed. These days he weighs himself every time in his endless struggle of life. He stares at the sky. He sees the moon. His pain is as incomplete as his journey. And in the preparation of struggle in his incomplete life and waiting for the early morning – chunks of his life have slipped away from him as he for ever goes on preparing to live.
Journalist, Poet and Story Writer Kamala Sarup is specialising in in-depth reporting and writing on Freedom, Human Rights, Peace, Women, Anti-terrorism, Democracy, and Development. Some of her publications are: Women’s Empowerment (Booklet). Prevention of trafficking through media (South Asia, Nepal Book) Efforts to Prevent Trafficking in for Media Activism (Media research). Two Stories collections. Her interests include international conflict resolution, cross-cultural communication, philosophy, feminism, political, socio-economic and literature. She also published several stories, and poems.
