Mohammad Hassaan Akram is a mechanical engineering student from Lahore who is passionate about writing. He is deeply in love with football and quite crazy about other sports as well, and has been a parliamentary debater his entire school and university life.
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The little girl smiled at her father, waving back at him from behind the confines of the car window. The father held back a sigh and put his best face on to wish his child goodbye, as the girl’s mother sat in the driving seat, trying not to look in his direction. The little girl’s expression changed from the smile to a straighter face when she realised her fears were real: her father wouldn’t be going with her. As the car started crawling, her waving became less enthusiastic and more lost, waving like one does to clear thick mist or haze. She cocked her head in the direction of her father for as long as she could. When the car turned a bend, she was gone.
The father let a tear drop down his cheek. He had never thought it would really come to this. Every time in the past that separation had seemed a possibility, he had felt as if such things happened only to people in movies, and not normal people like him. Normal people went to the office, worked hard all day, came home to a beautiful wife waiting, a beautiful daughter to tell stories to – things for these people seemed perfect. Perfect, but all of sudden they’re made to realise that life wasn’t a perfect tale. Things could go wrong all of a sudden, and things could stay that way. Happy endings weren’t a compulsion.
He turned his back to the road, almost making a statement as if to never get out of seclusion again. But picking up his pieces was the important thing to do, and he knew. Yes, it would sting. But it had to be done. He would see his daughter again, maybe in a few months, but she would never be the same. By then she would know she could live without her father. She would have understood that he was never an essential part of life for her. And then, he would remain a mere nominal figure in her life for the rest of his days. She would perhaps still call him dad, but wouldn’t be with him. How unlucky was it to have someone who could care, and have to let them go!
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Going inside the house, he gazed up to his wife’s picture, still hanging on the wall. Her flowing mane of hair, which had taken his heart away the first time he had seen her years ago, now brought back only painful memories. Her eyes in the picture were fixed beguilingly at him, though now he knew they had stopped looking for him any more; her nose, her lips – all that belonged to him once – now seemed part of a distant, beautiful portrait. In the picture, her slender hand was placed underneath her chin, casually, gracefully. He remembered that hand from all the long walks through endless webs of streets, intertwined with his as they had pointlessly roamed around. He remembered the hand from the time he asked her to marriage, from the first ring he gave her, the first day she had taken their child to school; but most of all, he remembered that hand as it signed that heartless sheet of paper which decided his damnation. He hated every part of that picture as much as he loved every part of it.
How heavy it was to hold back all these thoughts! The walls listened to him in silence as he let his tears flow, sliding down his cheek and around the slit of his lips. He stumbled into the armchair, half-embarrassed at his weak self, at his helplessness. That moment he was ready to question all his beliefs about ego, self-respect, or was it his selfishness? That moment, he wished he could turn things back, and he would be more careful this time.
But he knew that life didn’t give two chances to everyone. He had burnt all his ships, and the ashes were being swallowed by the sea of time. One day he would probably learn to live with it, but that wouldn’t be a solution. It would only be another kind of damnation.
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good composition!