“Regretting might increase one’s guilt but it won’t undo the wrong anyway.”
“Maybe life was not designed to be that way and even otherwise, how many come to reflect upon their lives before their end?” he said. “The fact of life is that you’re the only constant of your life and all those who enter into it through its revolving door are its uncertain variables. While the warmth of a given relationship could be cherished as a lived-feeling even after the relationship itself ends; how stupid it is to expect eternal love, eternal friendship et al and feel bitter when confronted by the reality of life, sadly we tend to defuse the past feelings with the change of personal equations thereby making our life a zero-sum game. So as our false sense of superiority brings our tryst with warmth to an avoidable end, still we wouldn’t be able to feel our loss in the euphoria of success and if ever, one realizes the folly, as I do now, one feels lost.”
“Either way, it amounts to the same thing, isn’t it?”
“Needn’t be, as your genuine repentance helps you to discover the limitations of life,” he said. “But before I lost out on life in the middle, I had so much of it in youth; it was as if to provide me a larger canvas to picture my adolescence that my father moved to a bigger town, where my cousin Raju’s parents lived. How elated were our elders at the prospect of a prospering friendship between us; Raju’s father pulled all the stops to see that I was admitted into that school Raju was in but to no avail as by then there was no scope for further admissions. But still, Raju took me to the headmaster who said that though he had earlier turned away the parents, he had no heart to refuse his pupil’s plea to further his cousin’s education. Why not put down his name to posterity as Devanandam.”
“By what you said of Raju, it’s possible that his persona was at work as much as Devanandam’s love for his pupils.”
“Why it didn’t occur to me, surely it could’ve been the case,” he said a little embarrassed. “But then, to start with, I was not interested in joining that school for its regimen began with the Christian prayers and the very thought of participation in those made me uncomfortable; why I was equally averse to the idea of joining any RSSsakha in the town that I just then left; maybe I was born with a secular mind; it was only after Raju assured me that the prayer was a voluntary affair that I had relented and if not, I wouldn’t have had such an Alma Matter headed by Devanandam, a venerable product of the times when teaching was a noble profession and not the commercial proposition that it had become; why won’t this apply to the medical practitioners in equal measure.”