Life..

“How I wish, how I wish you were here….” The mesmerizing songs by Pink Floyd played out one by one on his phone. He lay calm and still on the roof, just staring at the stars, as he had been doing for the better part of the past two hours. A sudden noise brought him back to his senses, and moving to the edge of the roof, he discovered it was yet another birthday celebration, yet another guy being kicked and shoved for having made the cardinal sin of having being born into this world.

He returned to what had become his pastime months ago, when he had simply climbed up the roof while talking to a friend, and had come to like the peace and silence prevalent there. “Lost in thoughts, and lost in time..” started another song, and he smiled at the words which aptly described what he had been doing there, ignoring other matters that demanded his attention, but ignored for the time being, till he had had his fill of doing nothing. Nothing was wrong with him, he claimed; he just enjoyed the silence as much as the time spent with his friends, but deep down inside, he knew what had been haunting him.

It was his last year in that college. In a few months time, he’d be free of the place he had loathed for the past four years of his life, finding faults with everything, and pretty much everyone. He knew he’s probably never return to that place, and was happy about it. He would not miss the place. Yes, he would miss his friends, but then what are phones, e-mails and Facebook for, he wondered. In fact, he would probably not even miss his friends, except for two or three close ones, with whom he’d stay in touch. The rest would be forgotten as soon as he stepped out of the college.

Flipping thru the images on his phone, he came to stop at one. There they were, the two of them, great friends since school, standing together in the pouring rain, completely drenched, laughing their hearts out at some joke when Snehil had clicked this pic. A faint smile crossed his lips, the next moment replaced by a frown and a complete change of mood, as he remembered the day the two of them had been out for a movie and dinner, when his life changed forever.

One moment she was standing there; the next, she was flung a hundred metres in the air, and the immeasurable distance between life and death. The explosion threw him off balance; shrapnel struck every part of his body. Wincing in pain, he just lay there, as smoke filled his lungs and people shouted about. Somewhere, he could hear a child crying, probably besides the lifeless body of her mother. He did not know for how long he lay there, in that beautiful sensation between life and death, between consciousness and sleep. When he came to his senses, he was still lying in the same puddle of mud and blood. A bodyless arm lay across his chest, which he shrug off, recoiling in horror, as the reality of what had happened dawned upon him.

He found her, rather what was left of her body, lying among scores of other dead and dying. The wailing siren and flashing lights was the last thing he saw before he passed out, only to wake up in a room with huge machines and his anxious parents looking at him. He had survived, but many others had not, and she was one of them. The only solace he could offer himself was that at least death came quickly to her, unlike many others, who suffered before the angel of death mercifully took them under his shelter.

His right hand instinctively came to feel his left arm, which at one point he was afraid he might lose. But then, it would have been nothing as compared to the loss he had suffered. He fumbled for his phone, chose another song, and lay back again. That had happened three years ago, and yet it felt as if just a day had passed. Snehil too was no more; his dead body was found 5 km from the point where he had slipped into the river when out on a trip with friends.

The hostel was by now still, the silence broken only by faint sounds of laughter and singing. Probably a party was going on in the other block. And he still lay there, just thinking about his life, how he had lost two of the people closest to him in a span of an year– one a friend, the other his brother. How often had he thought of jumping from the very same roof, landing on the barbed fencing below, ensuring he would not survive, knowing that freedom from misery would be painful but quick. What had stopped him each time had been some words Snehil had said once when they were just sitting and talking about life. “The living are more important than the dead. I do not understand why people spend their entire lives thinking about those that have left them, ignoring those still besides them, alienating them. Why do people fail to move on in life, when they know that the person would have wanted them to do so. Why do people kill themselves on the death of a loved one, when they know it would cause further agony to the others”. Every time he had thought of ending his life, he had been reminded of those words, and every single time, he had banished the idea from his mind, only for it to resurface again after a couple to days, and the process to be repeated.

He lay there for some more time, thinking about nothing, pondering over everything, feeling sleepy, when his phone rang. Swearing at the person who might be calling, he picked up the phone, only for a smile to drift across his lips as he read the name. The two of them had become good friends in the past year, and he thought he even liked her, but was not very sure. She was one of the few people who could pull him out of the worst of moods in a moment, and he held the same power over her. She always called him when feeling low or needing any kind of help, and he had never disappointed her, and never even intended to do so in the future. In an instant the true meaning of Snehil’s words dawned upon him. He knew why he had survived the blast that evening; he knew he would be absolutely fine, he instinctively understood he wanted to spend the rest of his life with this girl; he knew he would be able to survive anything that life threw at him. With a smile, and a glad heart, he accepted her call, knowing fully well that it would be at least an hour before he put down the phone and went off to sleep. But he did not mind it today, for today was the day that he’d come to know what his life actually was all about.