Unknown Hands

While leaving the town Sahibganj forever in order to start my new journey, I was subjugated by a lot of fear. It felt as if I was to die a life and take birth to another one. ‘What will happen next?’ was the inevitable question. How life in a big town is, or how is the lifestyle of the people living there- I simply had no idea. Sahibganj is a small yet beautiful town- with the Rajmahal hills on one side and River Ganga on the other. There are neither wide roads nor modernised super bazaars, and needless to say, no multiplexes or malls.

It would, however, be wrong to say that I never had visited any big city earlier. I often had visited places like Durgapur or Kolkata during holidays. But during those days, things were different. I was a minor, and whenever I went out of house, a hand always held me. A hand that I knew- I trusted upon. Now, things were different. I neither was a minor, nor was going to just visit there. I was going to live there.

But at that time, what did not come in my mind was that in Durgapur also, I was going to stay with people of flesh and blood itself. Be they however, they are human beings.

I put my feet on the new place. My new life had begun. Things didn’t seem that complicated as I had thought of. The town with its vast area covered by the steel plant, the huge constructions, modernized markets, etc- had people no different to us. As time passed, I gathered new experiences. In Durgapur, cycle-rickshaws were not that common. The most common means of transport was the ‘minibus’. In Sahibganj, buses could be seen once in a year or so- mostly owing to some marriage ceremony. So, the experience of travelling regularly in this vehicle felt awesome! Apart from this, I got many new experiences- each experience backed by a new lesson. I learnt to get lost. I mistakenly chose wrong paths. And when I realized it, I then looked around and asked the people there for help. They guided me and I ultimately reached my home. Every time I lost my route, I discovered a new one. And then I realized that now I didn’t need any known hand to guide me. There were several hands. Unknown hands.

I joined college. I was again afraid as I recalled what I had heard about college. Warnings like ‘Be careful, your seniors will rag you’, ‘they may force you to smoke and drink’, and so on, coupled with the fact that I would have no mate from my past and everybody would be new- made me nervous. But as I went inside the college, I found the atmosphere very different. I was welcomed with a rose by a senior. While I stared around at the campus building, somebody asked, ‘what is your name?’ I replied, ‘Souvik Mukherjee.’ ‘Wow! You are Souvik Mukherjee, and I am Souvik Aich,’ he smiled and extended his hand. Within moments the unknown hand became a known one, which stayed with me till my last day at college.

I had presumed, things would be different. But what I saw was that things were the same. Only the dialect was different. The building was same, just the paint was different. I rarely found titles like ‘Verma’, ‘Paswan’ and ‘Gupta’, where as discovered some new ones like ‘Aich’, ‘Gorai’ and ‘Hati’. I missed the hills and the Ganges, but discovered multiplexes and plazas.

The main thing that I learned in this new life is that others are no different to us. Their hands may be unknown, but once we extend outs, they immediately will extend theirs. As we are looking for more and more friendly hands, they themselves also are looking for the same.