KAHIHI

My niece and I visited an amusement park last weekend. She had been after me since many weeks. Not able to further confront her frowning face, we packed our little bags with the essentials, and drove to the amusement park that had recently opened on the outskirts of the city. More than imagining about the fun we were going to have at the park, I was jollied with the enthusiasm my niece had in her. She was singing all the way, waving her little hands to the kids on the road side, licking the chocolate bar, crunching the potato chips et al.

We reached the destination as per our schedule. It was fun. Lots of joy rides, games, ice creams, and bites of sandwiches. At midday, we took little rest on the lush green lawn under a widely spread banyan tree. I noticed my niece had fixed her gaze on something else. Bright colourful balloons floating in the air had become her fancy. She had instantly fallen in love with the red, blue, yellow, pink, and white shades of the balloons. I bought her one of each colour. With strings of those balloons tightly clutched in her left hand and the right hand gripped in my left palm, she walked hopped all through the way till the parking area. We were heading back home.

My niece had become very possessive and protective of the balloons. She had tied them to a corner of her bed. She took a look at them at least ten times in a day. She kissed each colour once in her every visit. Worried that someone might steal them, she never took those balloons out to play with her friends. Yet she rushed back to her room often while in middle of the game to check if her balloons were in place. She use to go back with a smile. She was so much in love with them.

Eventually with each passing day, she noticed that the balloons were getting smaller and smaller. The smile on her face was making a reverse curve now. Finally one day, she found all her balloons have disappeared and only pieces of rubber remained. She cried a lot that day. She insisted that she wanted the old ones only. I had to surrender. Though it was too mature a statement for her tender age, I had to irrevocably explain to her that nothing is permanent, nothing lasts forever, and one day everything fades away and so on. My niece told me that she will buy new ones, if she wants to, when she grows up; till then she will just be happy about the moments of happiness she had had with those five balloons. In a span of one week or so, my niece had graduated from a series of emotions – happiness, obsession, insecurity, sadness, mournful, and finally maturity.

While returning from office that evening, crammed in the traffic jam, my words to my niece that afternoon resonated back to me. I could draw many analogies based on that, most principally about our interactions or relationships of our day-to-day life. I kept thinking to myself that every relationship in our life is like those little balloons spreading color and joy and making a difference to what we are.

Some relationships leave everlasting impressions in our lives and give us the strength to lead our life till the end with just the fond memories of those relationships. Like how those balloons introduced my niece to different shades of emotions, relationships too take you on a trail of feelings. At times, relationships give you a reason to experience fullness, make you feel stronger, guide us through the difficult times as support, strength and aid us physically, emotionally and perchance spiritually. Some relationships become an integral part of your existence.

Sometimes, we feel that a particular relationship and the things happened to us as they were like a God’s gift especially for us. They are in our lives for the reason we need them to be. They make an impact and difference to who we are.

Yet eventually, no matter how strongly we tend to hold on to it, the relationship hits a roadblock and everything turns into a void. Worst is the fact that sometimes relationships end for no fault of ours, like the balloons disappearing at their will for no fault of my little angel.

People simply walk away. Sometimes they force us to stand up and put a period to the relationship. The fancy of “my world ends at you” soon turns into a fallacy when the same person ends up everything, and you are left staring into the infinity about the next step. You stumble, your crawl, you drag yourself but the person had walked away, too far, too soon.

Relationships sporadically teach us something we have never done before. The mourning and the pain might lessen if we accept the fact that every act has a reason. All we can do is accept the reality, love, and cherish every moment spent. Though it may seem like the end of the world, in reality it is not. Just that it needs some courage. There can always be a new beginning. Though a particular relationship is irreplaceable, a new relationship may be on its way that will shower happiness and love on you all over. You need to welcome it smile, optimism, and little caution perhaps. Don’t shut yourself because something did not work earlier. Open your heart to new ones and embrace the beauty of life, the beauty exists because of every relationship. So let’s love and respect what we have while we still have it for it is certain that “Nothing Lasts Forever”, so before it exhausts live it to your fullest.