Pursuit

"Any deed is justifiable if one is chasing one’s dream."-Anu.

He checked the baggage one last time then slid it under the bed, stashed it in darkness. He did not want his mother and elder sister to see it. He opened his computer and started browsing through the internet. He checked his mail box. Signed in to chat room, and found one of his friends; a girl. She was some one with whom he wanted to go beyond an ordinary friendship. But he could not. That relationship never took off, he thought.

“What’s up?”—she asked. He had nothing to say. So he said—“Just chilling.”

“I thought you have something to tell me. You disappointed me.”—said the girl.

“There was a gasp from the young man. He drew enough air into his lungs to feel at ease and to try lower down the sudden rush of adrenalin. Her words were inviting. There was an opening, a door opened for him. He could enter now. This was the time. But how? He was confused. He then decided not to confess his love to the girl. Instead, he opened his mind, and the crucial decision that he just took in his life.

“You know how badly I want to be a singer. But no one from my family seems to understand me. Today, too, I wanted to practice my songs, but my mother and my father wanted me to accompany my elder sister for an exam that she was writing. Even though I protested and said I would not, no one listened to me and I was forced to escort her. But I could not hold my self there, alone outside the exam hall and I skipped from there to the city and went for a film that was completely musical. And now my father is about to return home from his work. He might be angry, for my mom had already told him as she learned from my sister that I left her in the exam hall. I am sure; he will reprimand me and will say terrible things.”

Nothing came as reply and then hopelessly, he noticed that the girl was signed out. What a pity! What a moment! On one side he wanted success for his plan and on the other he was brutally slapped by the fate. How cruel this fate thing is.

Where freedom is a fleeting illusion, the desire for freedom clutches like an iron hand cuff. No one can escape from it. And his iron clutch of infinite desire for freedom swallows up all the other thoughts, ruminations and desires. Some celebrate freedom, like ministers who distribute their email ids among the common public in an attempt to prove the transparency of their political life and the worth of being free.    

He had only one way to save himself from the linguistic harassment of his father: to stuff himself deeply within the Web, hiding himself in front of the while gleam. He had his plans for the other day, Sunday. His father would go to church, and his mother would go to the temple as she was a Hindu. And his sister would follow any one of them regarding the direction of the maximum pressure. And then he would leave the house, forever, for good. He had packed his baggage and hidden it under his cot. There was no question of concern over the family in the absence of their only son. It was high time he took this decision.

But he still felt obsessed with a grave concern; waiting until the Sunday morning.

He could not bear with the torturous words from his father. That would be worse, he thought. His mother and sister remained quiet and he knew what it meant, exactly: the silence before the storm.

He closed his mail box, and then reopened it through an Anonymous Proxy site. Then typed in a message and filled in an email id with the subject line: WARNING. The email read:

“Mr. Minister of internal security, I am from a suburb in one of the cities of your state. I know you have a personal relationship in an area in Kannur. Be careful.

Yours truly,

Stranger.

P.S.: My intent is not to cause you any danger.”

He counted time with a frenetic heart. It was half of an hour when the home phone rang. His mother took the phone and listened. After she hung up, he pursed his ears. She was telling her daughter: “father is busy with some emergency case, with minister of internal security.”

He was a police man: the Inspector in the city police station, Kannur. It was not a secret that the minister of internal security had familial relationships in Kannur.

It was seven pm. And he was sure his father could not return home that whole night and he also knew that the origin of the email could not be traced by the Kerala police, because they were never competent enough to tackle crimes involving technology. Anonymous proxies, he knew, would take his message through different other computers on line before reaching the destination. He just wanted to be safe that night.

He still waited in front of his computer, the only escape from others in the family and their questions; the questions he was tired of answering, the dream he was tired of explaining. Then it was sleeping time. His mother slept first and then his sister, tired of the days journey to the exam and might also be due to the stress she faced in putting all the pressures on him, he thought. The iron grills covering the front door were not locked expecting the arrival of his father at any time. But he knew father cannot come back home that night. There was an issue of security over one of the relatives of the Minister of Internal Security in Kannur, and no police man in the area can sleep that night at home. And he found his opportunity there, though that was bit earlier than what he had already planned.    

He fled.