A Ticket To Happiness

A Ticket To Happiness
I couldn’t help staring at the porcelain beauty before me for a long while even as she stood by a stall selling magazines. There were a lot of people around the railway-station vying for railway-tickets to their dream destinations. Quite a few wanted to go to their hometowns for the upcoming vacations, I wanted to go to Delhi; practically, everyone was looking for a bit of happiness in life.

All of us want only a bit of happiness from our life and we go to all ends to get it. The quest eventually turns into one for tons of happiness, and we are never satisfied with whatever we get. Although we do get a bit of what we are out for, it always seems to be less than what we bargained for with life. We have to be content and happy with whatever comes our way. I bargained with life for a whole lot of happiness, but I have to be content with whatever came to me, and it does seem to be quite less than what I bargained for. There are many others who don’t even get whatever little I have, and they blame their fate for not giving them a bare minimum of happiness.

The point is there isn‘t a single recipe for happiness that can cook a sumptuous meal that satisfies everyone. There is no single meal that is palatable to everyone, and the same quantity never fills all stomachs. Apparently, there is nothing that makes everyone perfectly happy. All of us need different amount of stimulation to make ourselves happy, and all of us make our best efforts to get the desired stimulation in whatever form whenever we can.

There are many of us who are stimulated by getting to climb high mountains, while others find the same amount of stimulation in reading books. A comparison of the two reveals varying amounts of adventures that lead to almost a similar amount of satisfaction. This is all that counts. This is what everyone at the railway-booking-counter was out for that day, a ticket to happiness.

Everyone wanted a page from the book of happiness to be written for them in a language and script they can easily follow. The script used to transcribe sounds for different people is different because everyone of us uses a different language for communication with our hearts. Most of the communication is at a metaphysical level.  I did wonder if she knew the language of my heart while she stood before me near the railway-booking-counter.

I didn’t know anything about her, and yet there was a typical femininity about her that bewitched me in a few moments. She seemed to be looking at a bag kept near me, but secretly, I wished she was looking at me. I began to wish I could fit into her need for stimulation if only for a while. It was like a dying wish within me. Nothing was more important for me at that moment.

 I was sure she had dark black eyes. There was the depth of a bottomless pit in them. I badly wanted her to look at me with her dark eyes at least for a while. I wanted to gauge the depth of the dark eyes. I’m sure the moment her gaze fell on me, it would have transferred my being to paradise. I badly wanted to be in paradise at that moment when everyone around me was trying to get a ticket to a place they deemed to be paradise. I did wonder what place she deemed to be paradise, and if it collated with the paradise I knew of. She didn’t seem to be interested in looking my way when, fortunately, a child crossed my way, and she turned to look towards it with a maternal instinct.

For a while, I began to wonder if she owned the child as its mother. She had a buxom body, and although her face drew collations with a young child, I did begin to cast doubts on her celibacy. There was no way of knowing for sure, there were no cultural symbols on her to declare her marital status, and I realised the worthlessness of this bit of knowledge in a while when she produced the first linguistic sounds before me.

The language we use in our daily life is moulded by our experiences and our lifestyle. As revealed by the language used by the lady, she belonged to a different social class. We have different backgrounds to our present moments. Our different backgrounds had moulded us into different individuals, and the difference brought out her real self despite the gaudy clothes she had on. There was a lot more to be discovered about the lady, I knew, but I didn’t want to know anything more about the beautiful young lady who had, for  a while, tricked my heart to follow her dreams. She was headed for a destination different from the one I was headed for.

I still wonder what value the differences in our beings held. We saw a different kind of dream when we slept because our sleep was a bit different from that of the other. A different stimulus pushed us to our feet every morning; we were satisfied by different amounts of stimulation while we were on our feet through the day. We held different ideals in our minds that pushed different and varying amounts of efforts to get the ideal amount of stimulation.

There was very little of commonality between the two of us. There has to be something in common between two people to know each other beyond the strangers we were. Apparently, there was nothing in common between us, and this is how a story ended before it could have even begun. Should I be grateful for the beginning that never was or for the end that was?