And as I stepped off the metro today in an unplanned early return to my country, feeling limited by my passport and small due to the events of the last few days, I headed home. My head hurt, my heart ached, and I was dizzy with a mixture of skewed and screwed up emotions involving a sad kind of happy and a happy kind of sad. As per my usual returning-home routine, I popped into my regular local grocery store for a quick Cola stash and ran into Rajesh, the ever smiling delivery boy who is also probably the only person who has been privy to exactly how far my cola fetish has progressed (read : regressed) over the last few years.
With a sad smile, he asked about my travels and joked about my frequent acts of disappearances from the city. He was clearly perturbed and I was honestly in no mood of listening, but having been on the other side of a communication firewall wall since the last 72 hours, I asked him what was wrong.
Sad Rajesh urgently recounted tales from his impoverished rural village in Haryana of a scandal involving a boy and his sister-in-law, both underage, who were in love and ran away. A friend of theirs promised to lend enough money to get them to the nearest city—either Calcutta or Delhi—to find any work. But something went wrong at the decisive moment. As they left the village for their new world, the friend had no money to spare. So the young couple, chastened, doomed, had no choice but to return. They were separated on arrival and beaten mercilessly for their transgression, and their families were each ordered, by the village council, to pay a hefty fine, compensation for the lost honour. I asked him how much money they needed in order to start their new life: It was nothing more than twenty American dollars. Rs 1300 INR.
Sad Rajesh urgently recounted tales from his impoverished rural village in Haryana of a scandal involving a boy and his sister-in-law, both underage, who were in love and ran away. A friend of theirs promised to lend enough money to get them to the nearest city—either Calcutta or Delhi—to find any work. But something went wrong at the decisive moment. As they left the village for their new world, the friend had no money to spare. So the young couple, chastened, doomed, had no choice but to return. They were separated on arrival and beaten mercilessly for their transgression, and their families were each ordered, by the village council, to pay a hefty fine, compensation for the lost honour. I asked him how much money they needed in order to start their new life: It was nothing more than twenty American dollars. Rs 1300 INR.
After considerable persuasion,I handed him the money and we both laughed about me adding a cola tab for him so he could reduce alcohol but retain the detrimental effects and effectively save more money for such life altering situations..
I walked back home, ruminating in silence at the things I had lost and gained. My glass was not half full nor half empty, it was twice as big as it needed to be.
