Sam Rai

Rummaging through old letters, a mail with a familiar writing caught my eyes. It was from my best friend. As I read it, I soon got lost in reverie of bygone days. Those were the days. We were the best of friends, called the twin-souls, inseparable as we were, and we talked like anything. However, we had different ideas. She used to be girlish and I grew up a tomboy. She stressed on getting married one day, pursuing me to think otherwise, as I was looking forward to live a spinster. And I know that was the best part in our friendship; we both had our opinions and still got along so well standing by each other through thick and thin.

But I always had a premonition that she was more intelligent and luckier than me. Intelligent because she was right about marriage — having a company to last long enough — and I was stupid to think I could live all by myself. Lucky she is as she met the love of her life and even got to marry him. She has someone to share her dreams with, someone who will be by her when she needs to talk at times of depression. Indeed, I have stood by my words and stayed unmarried but I now regret a lot for the choice I made. I have a dazzling career, I earn a lot but I don’t have anyone to share my accomplishments with. After a hard day’s work, I return to my empty and lifeless apartment.

There are days when tension engulfs me and I have only myself. I often wonder as to how wonderful it would have been to have someone alongside in this bumpy journey of life. Solitude is what I had in mind while deciding to stay single, unknowingly it turned out to be loneliness, sucking away very happiness out of my life.

I was shaken when I read it: “Dear Sam,” she wrote, “…You must be enjoying your days in the US. Single-life, that’s what you have always wished for and I am wishing the same as well. I envy you a lot, the way you have managed to settle all by yourself in a foreign land. You were so right back then and even now. Married life is nothing but endless compromises.

“My life isn’t just mine any longer; it’s linked to so many people. It seems I didn’t marry Ravi, but whole of his family. Just imagine going through all those hard years studying and accumulating certificates and then ending up a housewife, where all you do is cook, wash, et al. I feel somewhere in the process of being a wife, I have lost the grip over my identity. Oh! How I wish we were together like in old days…and if only I could turn back time, I would undoubtedly decide to stay single, just like you…Forever friend, Premu.”