My trip to "Dewas"

Its’ been almost three months I had gone home…the office seemed to piss me off completely. I finally took a day’s off and went home…long awaited trip…

Each time I go home and step out of the train, the very sight of aai baba (thats what I call my Mum and Dad) searching for me and change in those facial expressions when they “actually” find me…is priceless….but at the same time I am so filled with the guilt of leaving the two most important people of my life alone…people whose life revolved around their kids…whose thoughts, actions, plans…everything was centered at us…but then the satisfaction on their faces proves all my guilt wrong…strange feelings…aren’t they!?

Dewas, my home town, a "kasba" ("kasba" as in a place just slightly bigger than a village) thats what my friends call Dewas and tease me!!!…but I feel so thrilled whenever I go to that place…a place where almost everyone knows each other…a place where if I walk for even 5 minutes, I meet people who know me since I was a kid…a place where people are more genuine than what I see here…a place with small shops and no "malls"...a place that have small bunglows and colony culture unlike multi-storeyed buidings in townships...a place where I have spent most of my years…

Whenever I go to Dewas, I make it a point to meet a few people for sure…if not in person, I call them up…Khanuja aunty who lives across the lane always asks me to come home…this time I couldn’t go and meet her; when I was finally leaving, she just came out and gave me a box, said, “I had prepared some stuff yesterday…tu aayi hai to leke ja "(now that you have come, take some stuff with you). I opened the box and found “mathri” and sweets…on my way back I wondered that for some 3-4 odd months I didn't even know who my neighbours were when I shifted to my flat in Mumbai...!!! I thought about the difference in the lifestyles of people living in a metro city and the ones living in a small town…not that one is good and the other is bad…but then there so huge a difference in the way people live, people behave, people feel…

Its’ been almost an year and a half I have lived in Mumbai…enjoyed the lifestyle of a “metro”…been to places that I hadn’t even thought of when I was in Dewas…but down in my heart, I still think, feel and behave(most of the times) like a girl from a small town…even today I’ll enjoy sleeping on a terrace in summers than in a closed room with AC…I’ll enjoy dropping in at aunty’s place who lives across the lane without a prior appointment…I’ll enjoy to go to one of the fields in the outskirts of my town with family and friends in one of those winter afternoons with a lunch box than going to a pub or disc…enjoy a glass of "ganne ka ras" (sugarcane juice) than having a glass of COKE in a Pizza Hut joint…somewhere down in my heart I have kept an option open of settling down in a small place rather than a “metro” city…I don’t know how correct and practical it is or what will be the repercussions of the decisions I take…whatever that decision may be....keep waiting;)...even I am waiting....