Tinge of Salt.

And then something happened...

The clock applet dropped a minute after 6.35p.m., and I shuffle my legs,pushing the blood into those limbs, running the mental prep of 'what to do next', not really expecting an answer. I don my jacket, pick up my bag, and waving a quick 'Au revoir' to my colleagues, I step out onto the wooden verandah, to breath in the fresh green air into my smoke-free lungs. I have been smoke-free for more than a commendable 2 weeks now.

I dribble my feet down the wooden steps, and my mood has swung into an altruistic nook. Ruminating my thoughts, mulling over the troubles of a friend, I pass by the local bakery, mentally rejecting the thought of an expensive croissant, feeling the embossment over the coins in my pocket. I walk by the usual thinker, who must be in his late thirties, who sits by the road, puffing away to glory, drinking a bottle of cranberry juice, and muttering unaudibly to himself.

I have seen him sit there by himself everyday, with the usual berry juice in his mud-stained hands, clad in an unclean shirt, and a matching denim to go with. I have seen him polish his light brown shoes with newspaper folds, and pull up his socks for an unchallenged day. I have seen him dutifully put 40 cents to use the public toilet, rather than ease himself on a wall nearby, for free. People walk by, throwing their extra change in front of him. He is not begging for alms, he is reading his newspaper, commenting on the current affairs unaudibly.

I am standing on the left side of the cross-walk waiting for the lights to turn green so that I can walk by. The light turned green three times, probably or more, as I continued to observe my thinker. On closer observation, I see his slightly wrinkled face beneath the sage like beard, telling me an untold story. He is not a beggar by choice, actually, he is not a beggar at all. Those coins could fool anybody, it fools him as well. I wonder what is it that happened that brought him to this stage, and what is it that he plans to do to walk the rest of his long remaining life.

The light turned green again, and I crossed the stripes. I glanced back again, to see him staring at me; uncomfortably I kept walking on, and musing over his situation. Why would he polish his shoes, why would he not use the walls to take a leak, why would he not drink alcohol like a normal wastrel but cranberry juice? If I spoke French well enough, I would have asked.

I often used to wonder, why am I in a position where I am right now! Was it where I had planned to be, according to my 5-year plans, five years back.

5 years back, I was sitting at the local tapri, with a short stubble, grieving over a then-lost-now-forgotten girlfriend, didn't drown myself in alcohol, but numerous cups of chai, smoked cigarettes on credit, read the Times cover to cover, watched every friend of mine doing exactly what they wanted to do or so I thought, and I looked at myself and sighed.

I put out my cigarette, blew the filthy smoke in streams down my nostrils and said to myself that even this shall pass. The future is not entirely in my hands, some people chalk a framework, some keep the scaffolding ready, and most of them like me then, lived in the past, but atleast they were worrying about their future, trying to stitch a net, and there I was, sitting unconcerned. Many of them, continue to worry even now, since I haven't done anything to change or save the world as yet. Luckily, I chose to differ and never turned back. Awakening from my grieving grave, I walked into another land, and it didn't just happen one fine day. That was 5 years back.

Those wrinkles behind that beard reminded me of a story that I hadn't asked for. I walked on, fiddling my keys in my pocket. I toy with the idea of defining what is 'present', for by the time, I savor the present, it's already become the past. With every passing moment, the past continues to move away from the present, and a moment in future becomes now. I had just seen what I could have become, and I shudder, and I find myself more at peace at what I am now.

A better tomorrow depends on how you choose to define it. Life does not end with the loss of something, as Robert Frost has said, 'it goes on'. You have to realize that it is your birthright to enjoy every moment of it, to savor and relish the delight of being what you are right now. You may not like the situation that you are in right now, but go easy on yourself and think about the fact that you are better off than many unfortunate souls.

It was time to put my cribbing and anxious mind in the backseat, when I see friends pick sandwiches out of the trashcan, sleep on the sidewalks with a book on their face, the temperature plummets to a minus ten degrees celcius, and he re-defines 'open house'. I consider myself lucky that I am not driven to that state of hunger, when there are no rules anymore. In the dead of night, as I walk back to my apartment after a binge, I see a soul digging his hand into the trash bag, searching for a morsel of food to apease the obvious hunger. I climb down with some remaining food, but I don't see him any where in sight. I try to offer the food to another lady, who refuses my gesture politely. With the growing concern for psychopaths who kill by feeding poison, it is better to eat from the trash than from an aluminium foil. Her concerns are not unjustified. I place my food carefully in the trash, and walk back home. What must have been their 5-year plan, if they had one, ever. Did they see themselves like this before? Where had they gone wrong? Are we not lucky? I eat food everyday and many a sight prove to be the salt for the best sauce I have ever had.

(To be continued...)