If I Were You... - Kalai Selvi Arivalagan (chrysanthemum read aloud .TXT) 📗

It took some time for Vel to realize what has happened. Without understanding the good wishes of the other person, he had turned down a good opportunity that would have made his life a successful one.

Vel could not take his eyes away from the middle leaf of the morning newspaper. It talked about the precious opportunity that made a person famous. The hitch here is that Vel missed that opportunity and it has gone to the other person.

He felt embarrassed to think how he missed a wonderful opportunity that came to him even without asking for it. Whenever Vel took things emotionally and reacted on an impulse, his friend Vinay have always asked him to be patient.

Even if it is a small thing, Vel always looked narrow and took every thing personally. This attitude made him shrink inside and took time to be normal once again. After marriage, Dora also found out this and she always advised him not to react like that. Yet, he found difficult to control and think with reason.

It happened right after one year from the marriage to Dora. Their son was only three months old and every day looked brighter and brighter with the arrival of their cute little baby son. Vel felt more happy now-a-days and he understood how babies can make a person’s life happy and cheerful always.

Vel wanted to name his son the name of his father. Dora agreed with him and she let him have his choice of name. Vel’s mother looked after their son, when both of them went for work. Things went on smoothly, until the time came, when Vel read about the news in the newspaper and realized about his missed opportunity.

Vel called Dora and told her how he had missed an opportunity. Dora also felt bad and asked him what the need for him to react like that. After pondering much on this, Vel started to feel that it must be the deep lying male ego in his mind. Probably, that may be the reason why Indian males react so much to a female at all situation and wanted them to be always under their limits and did not want them to move forward and achieve something great.

The reason is once again the mothers in the Indian society, who right from the beginning give the maximum freedom to their sons and help them to grow along with the male ego. The beauty of this situation is that they never realized how it can affect their lives after they grow into a man and enter adulthood.When they move into the next level of setting up a family, these men treat women with scorn. Unknowingly, they start to treat their wives like slaves to them and want to get things done according to their whims and fancies. Though Vel does not fit into this any more, he still had some lighter traits of those qualities. Just like a devil, these traits come up to the surface once in a while and spoiled every thing around him.

Vel slowly started to forget all these things, and he became deeply involved in his routine life. One day when he went to the office, the Time Keeper handed over to him a well packed parcel, with his name boldly written on it. Vel wanted to open the parcel and check what is inside the parcel. Without much interest, he kept the parcel in his cabinet in the cloak room. He decided he will check after his shift hours and he does not want to get disturbed by anything during his duty time.

From the handwriting he could not tell who has sent it. Vel can see only the ‘To’ address in the front cover. Probably, the sender must have written the ‘From’ address at the back side of the cover. Wondering who must have sent it to him, he locked the cloak room and walked toward the bus depot.

More than fifteen days passed. Vel totally forgot about the parcel in the cloak room. One day at night while he woke up suddenly from his deep sleep, he remembered about the parcel. He cannot go to the bus depot at that hour, and promised himself not to forget the next day. Yet, he did not remember on that day about the parcel.

Two days later when he saw someone carrying a big parcel to a vehicle at the side of the road, Vel remembered about the parcel. After completing all the winding up chores at the office, he rushed to the cloak room. He opened the cabinet and took out the parcel. He did not have the patience to wait till he reached home. He tore open the parcel at the cloak room itself. To his surprise he found a beautiful golden color wrist watch packed inside as a gift.

Vel quite surprised with the gift, checked from where the gift came. He could not make out anything from the name as it looked scribbled and he could not understand the name. But he could make it out that the gift posted at a post office from Adyar. Vel did not know anyone from that area as most of his friends lived in the area in which he lived. ‘It is a gift for the help you have done.’ He can read only these words and could not understand anything out of it.

Whole of the next week left Vel wondering who has sent the watch to him. He has no friends to gift him with such a wonderful watch. He has not participated in any competition to win a prize like that also. When Dora asked Vel about the watch, he told her the truth. She also could not find out the person who has sent the watch to him.

Vel wanted to wear the watch. But at the same time, he did not want to wear it without knowing who has sent it to him. The watch has an inbuilt alarm within it which sang a beautiful tune every hour. Dora liked the watch very much and so she asked him to wear it and go for work. Vel told her that he will wear it the next day and went for work.

After three chartered trips to the nearby college, the time keeper asked him to go in another bus. The bus became too crowded within 20 minutes. As the earlier bus suddenly broke down, the stranded passengers thronged the bus and even he could not find a place to stand. In the crowd suddenly he heard the same tune that his watch played. Vel listened for a while and looked for the person who wore that watch. In the crowd, he can see only heads and shoulders and he could not see the wrists of the people.

Vel decided to check when some of the crowd cleared the bus. But the person who wore the watch has got down along with the crowd. After the floor of the bus became little free with a few passengers, Vel frantically searched for the person, but he could not find.

Disappointed he sat down in his seat and started to fill down the trip sheet. Though he felt intrigued by the tune of the watch, he had some hope to find out who it must be.

Giggling youngsters thronged the floor of the bus. The school has reopened after Christmas and New Year holidays, and teen aged girls and boys overcrowded buses. School kids with their heavy bags with books literally squeezed into the little space and made the fellow passengers murmur with discomfort. The floor of the bus came alive with their giggles and laughter and sometimes such noise made others to complain about headaches. These youngsters not worried about anything in the world, laughed and enjoyed their travel even if it is for shorter distance.

Vel frowned at the sight of these giggling youngsters. Until they got down from the bus, they made him have a splitting headache. Particularly on that day, something or other irritated him and his tongue slashed at the passengers who provoked him to get angry. To heighten his already irritated mood, he heard the tune that has been haunting him even during his sleep for the past two days.

Even in that bustling crowd, he could make it out that the sound came from the front side, but could not spot the person. Unusual crowd blocked his way, and prevented him to move to the front. People passed on the money for the tickets and it forced him to sit at his place.

After two stops, the bus stopped at a main bus stand. The unusual crowd of the day dispersed with a hurry. As usual, the ticket checking squad waited there and they started to check the passengers who got down from the bus. One of the members of the squad who got into the bus caught hold of a young girl with a phone on one hand and a ten rupee note tucked on the other hand. Busy over the phone, and with the money in one hand, she forgot to get the ticket. The squad member asked her to get down from the bus.

The girl started to shout at Vel. “It is your responsibility to give me the ticket. You can’t blame me. Why should I pay the fine?” In another two minutes, the bus echoed with their heated words. The crowd curiously listened to the word duel, and one group supported the girl and the other supported Vel. To make things easy, the squad member asked the girl to get down from the bus and pay the fine. He made her got down the bus with his stern order and whistled to the driver to start the bus.

Vel felt quite embarrassed for a moment. The whole conversation that went around the bus targeted on him and he always hated such moments during his duty hours. Working with the crowd is always tedious. Sometimes it may look interesting and challenging, but most of the time it is really difficult to handle the impatient crowd in the bus. Every one has their own problem and every problem erupted in a different way.

People who are always at the brink of emotional outburst easily picked up the quarrel and made him feel irritated and deprived of all the energy for a while. Yet, something interesting always happened in his life to get him move on.

The parcel he received had been always at the back of his mind, and he desperately wanted to know who sent it to him.