Au Revoir?

Back on the blogging ways!With a short fictional article.                        

          "It was a quarter past noon, when the last & final announcement was made for Mr. Singh, for the departing flight of Indigo Airlines. I was sitting on the corner chair of the group of connected plastic chairs, placed right before the plasma television of the domestic terminal of Indira Gandhi International Airport. Considering the increase in the usage of the aerial route by the standard Indian middle class, the dense population of passengers struck me by no surprise. Albeit in this noisy place, sitting beside my best friend, my mental presence did not corroborate with the physical counter-part. It was lost in thoughts, or rather, in memories. It has been seven years since I first met him in high school. It has been a joy ride with him through the junior college & the four years of Engineering.  It has been too long a journey with him to just end it with a goodbye right then. What else could have been done, I was flying to my home town where as he was going to Mumbai to catch a connecting flight to the United States, where his family relocated to recently. I haven’t exactly thought of that moment before, not while filling the placement form, not while choosing the career path and not even during our last discussion about our life ten years from then. For once, I wasn’t my usual sense of pre-determined thoughts. For once, Ignorance wasn’t bliss.

We weren’t talking to each other, but instead, my soul was taking a nostalgic walk down my memory lane. It was a slide show of happy moments going across my brain. The crazy celebration of a cent percent score in high school maths, the thrilling experience of double rafting through the biting cold water of Rishikesh, the foolish prank we played on a guy who was trying to bully us, the ecstatic occasion when we were awake well past midnight to watch our beloved football clubs take on each other in a cup final, the eureka moment when we figured out what went wrong in a project execution, the countless beaming smiles as a result of instances when we completed each other’s sentences , the summer trip spent on the sidelines of the west coast, the cheerful & elated celebration after a well-fought win in a volleyball match, the strange yet hilarious dance performance he put up on the fresher’s day. It was like smiles all along the journey, the kind of which was then present on my face as a result of this contemplation. This was when I realised, that he too was smiling. The same smile to which he has held on to throughout his life. The same one which demonstrates his ease in reading my mind. The same one which re-ensures my memories.   

This bitter farewell has hardly kick started with a conversation when the boarding call for his flight was made. May be words weren’t meant for those moments.

Unlike the previous times, without any alacrity, I reluctantly rose, enacting him. With a low-toned goodbye and a small hug, he just smiled and turned away. He picked up his cabin bag and started making his move. When his stride-less walk was trying to gather some pace, a solitary me was answering the self. If it was any other situation, I would have gladly recollected the famous quote of Paulo Coelho, when someone leaves, it's because someone else is about to arrive. But it wasn’t ordinary. It was one of those moments which made me remember that growing up is all about facing the inevitable with a heavy heart. After all, it was meant to happen. Amidst this dense contemplation, I could figure his hand waiving at a distance. I couldn’t help but think, was it a happy ending? This tech-savvy era wouldn't even consider it an ending. But this rational explanation couldn’t reach the heart. At the end, it was birds of a nest flowing in two opposite directions, letting the destiny decide about the future."