Confession of a dying man!

"Dad, I want to be an Engineer”. Says a prodigal son aged 16 ,just passed his senior secondary examination with distinction unaware of things coming ahead.
Dad replied “Go ahead Son..the whole world is for you to conquer” . And there you go. The boy starts his journey of becoming what he had wished. As was expected ,the start was for everyone to see. Its an old saying that the road to hell has the doors of heaven in the pathway. The boy gets good marks in the competitive examination and here he is ,starting the journey as his Dad tells him “Son , you are going as a boy , expect you to come back as a Man”.
Its believed that people from East suffer a lot in the western countries as things are supposedly quite different over there. “Alien” is normally the adjective given to such places. For him , this new environment was nothing less than West, and yes ,the adjective “alien” was befitting for that place as far as he was concerned. He was amazed , shocked , frustrated and traumatized to think that the placed which he had such high regards for , for which he sacrificed his 2 years just to get into, could be as haunting as it has been for him.After a week , he had just one thought in mind, “1 gone , 207 to go”. But frustration was no solution, nor was anger , and the fighter that he was ,he could see just one solution to this problem ,and that was “resilience” and moving forward. He took the pain , and carried on . He changed himself and when the time was appropriate ,he tried to change the world that surrounded him. Feelings changed, people around him started looking at him differently and by the end of the year he had pouched many a jewels in his tiny pocket . He used to call them his “Friends” . And suddenly everything was falling right into places. All his old days glory were back. The giggles at night, the parties, the addabaaji, the “dekh lenge” attitude, the debates and yes which were very seldom on meaningful topics were a common phenomenon. The charmer had just found his charmland.
In his whole approach of providing companionship, sometimes his self-interest got a beating. But who cares, there’s always plenty of time for one’s self, at least that was what he was thinking. But in this whole Dolby time of yaarana or dostana or whatever you may call it, he forgot a major issue which he thought about latter “What was the MAN thing that Dad told me about”. He had absolutely no idea that solution to that problem was lying somewhere else.
Spinal Cord, they say is the organ that controls your senses. That why it’s included in the “parts of brain” category. Cancer, is some thing which the dictionary describes as “a disorder which arises due to abrupt growth and decay of living cells” but trust me, it’s a lot dangerous, haunting and grievous than what the dictionary says. So, what if a person has cancer in his spinal cords? The boy may not have the answer to his dad’s question but he certainly has for this one.
Because as he was sitting nervously in front of the Doctor’s chamber which he had gone to complain about a minor backache and was expecting the Doctor to prescribe a regular doze of anti-biotic, the Doctor had some other plans. “I have to carry an endoscopy of your spines”. Though the engineer was quite alien to these biological terms, but endoscopy was certainly listed in his dictionary as a diagnostic test for cancer. The endoscopy results came and the inevitable was there in front of the Doctor on a piece of paper. The boy had cancer in his spinal cords.
After knowing the fact that the disease was in a stage where no resilience, no strength and no fighting spirit could tarnish it, the first words that came out of his mouth were “Don’t let anybody know this” . The boy has finally had the solution for his father’s puzzle. The guy who went to the college as a boy, is finally a MAN now.



Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction .Any resemblance to any person living or dead is purely co-incidental.