When the Crab meets the Crow

 

"Most of your friends will leave you eventually, will get busy in their lives, and you will be on your own."

I was furious when the campus mentor at the Infosys Mysore campus said these lines.

I was in my early 20s and was not able to digest the fact that my friends, who were sitting beside me, with whom I just came back from celebrating my birthday party, will eventually leave me or maybe I will never be able to see them again in my life, let alone celebrate my birthday with them.

It was not that I had not heard this sentence before in my life from several other people on several other occasions. I was angry with her because she was saying something that my then state of mind - which was euphoric, my then life events – which was like utopic, my then understanding of human affairs – which was naively unrealistic, did not allow me to take it inside of my conscious mind.

I stood up and started walking out of the seminar hall as I could not take her words anymore, leaving behind my friends who were eagerly listening to her. I stopped at the door and looked back at my friends who were still pointing their heads toward the campus mentor, unaware of my absence. I looked at the mentor, who was smiling at me. Closing her eyes, she nodded her head in agreement, as if saying, “It’s okay, but you will remember me one day.” I then walked out alone.

I went into my room, crashed onto my bed, and closed my eyes thinking I would never leave my friends.

“ ”

“Bro, when did you come back? We were looking for you. You should have at least told me if you wanted to sneak out.”, Punit shouted at me shaking me vigorously to wake me up.

I rubbed my eyes to see him searching for something in my drawer while Raj was standing at the door of my room.

“Should I invite you to do the honors, Raj? Just take the bucket of water and throw it at him, only then he will get up.”, Punit continued his wrath.

“We have to get back to the beach, get yourself ready.”, Raj instructed me to hurry.

In a flash, I found myself at the beach, playing volleyball with my friends. Sajal, as always, was mischievously pulling the legs of Tejas, standing on the other side of the court. And Suchi, being the shortest yet the best in the game, took care of the smash shots and we easily scored points in our favor. Punit, the hotheaded, shouted at Tejas and Raj for losing the point, while we laughed and threw sands onto them. This was our happy group.

At a distant shore, the crows were playing ‘catch me if you can’ with the ocean, running away when it advanced towards them. Seagulls hovered above the water searching for some luck to get a fresh catch of the day. Crabs, not in a hurry, played hide and seek with the ocean, digging into the wet sand and hiding within when the ocean came rushing to catch them.

Taking a break from the game, Sajal and Suchi went to take a dip in the ocean, while Tejas, Punit, and Raj circled to form strategies to score points in the next game. I rushed to a nearby coconut stall to quench my thirst.

While the seller was preparing the coconut for me, a smile spread on my face finding all of my friends with me still together after all these years. “My friends would never leave me. I knew she would be wrong.” As this thought came to me, a sudden sharp sound started to alarm me. I closed my ears with my hands and looked around to find nothing to the source of that sharp sound, only it to be getting louder. I looked towards my friends and they were nowhere to be seen. I looked for the coconut seller. He was gone. I saw seagulls diving into the ocean one by one. I saw crows slowly walking into the ocean. I saw crabs rendering themselves to the ocean. The sound of the ocean, crushing at the shore, went roaring. The sky started getting darker and deafening thunderous clouds covered the sky as far as I can see. I ran to search for my friends but the more I move forward in the sand the more I kept sinking in. I shouted for them. I kept shouting the name of my friends. A crow came to me hearing me cry and sat down near me, cawed once, as it saw me sunk down slowly into the sand.

“ ”

I woke up at the midnight, sweating profusely and breathing heavily. I sat down quietly for a while with several thoughts running in my mind. Switching off the alarm as I took my phone, I searched for Punit’s contact and thought of calling the ‘group’, but something held me back, held my fingers from dialing the call button.

Life, for all of us, has been a rollercoaster ride showing different faces of it, be it relationships, support, betrayal, struggle, love, or friendship, giving us various learnings and experiences along the way. We have progressed well in our careers, and eventually, every one of us got busy in our lives, with our own sets of priorities that life has bombarded us with. We never realized how and when we got entangled in our own aspirations, struggles, and choices. We walked on our separate paths following our dreams and desires.

We, though, exchange 'hi' on WhatsApp and call one another sometimes but that connection has been lost, the bonding, that we had once, has been eroded. We have moved on and maybe have grown up in societal terms, and I don't know if we could ever meet again to relive those moments once more. For now, what I am left with is just nostalgia and memories of our good old times.

I got off my bed, made myself a strong ginger tea, headed to the balcony, sat down on the chair overlooking the vast darkness of midnight with owls hooting in the background, and then I wondered if that mentor had said the bitter truth that I am realizing now.

…

“Consider the path of your life as a train journey. Your co-passengers are your friends, who board the train at different stations at different times and have different destinations. During the journey, you laugh, share, play, eat, and experience everything together. They move and leave as and when their destination arrives.”

. . . . . .

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