July 2005.
Bus stand,South Extension, part2, New Delhi.
The landscape bore a look unfamiliar to him. Everywhere, there was an urgency.Every road in his view carried swarms of people, with different gaits, all thrusted with some purpose in their life. The melee only shored up with the buses plying to and fro , coupled with the odd vehicles whooshing past by. The sky was dull red , that soon beckoned to turn into a fading scarlet-the setting sun.He gazed at that sun. He simply gazed.
In this overwhelming insecurity, in an unknown place, all in his own elements, he felt scared.
He didn't want the sun to set, he wished something miraculous to happen, that would perpetuate that last scarlet lining in the sky. Somehow, he felt a closeness to that light, somehow he felt safe.
The fear of the advent of the darkness loomed large upon him. Insecurity has never been so overriding, so gripping and so terrible ever in his twenty two years of life ever. Then, Delhi scared him. The enormity of the city , for someone who was marooned there, on that fateful day with a letter of disgrace was way too much for him. He knew not a single soul here and his first visit there, he thought, was a bad omen, that only with every faint of the passing reddish hue of that day, would accumulate. He missed his home, his friends from school, his few hostelmates, his colleagues. He missed his lost grace.
The vastness of the city seemed too overwhelming for him. Suddenly, life took a cruel turn and unleashed a chain of events that pulled the rug under his secured and short-lived days of contentment.
His last flicker of dying hope diminished as the reddish hue on the sky melted and gave way to an immenent darkness. He could not go back, he could not proceed ahead. Sitting at that bus stand, he was alone, he could feel it....
