The Thriving Engineer

It was a cold winter morning in Kolkata. Rebanto sat on one of the familiar wooden benches of his favourite neighbourhood shack, sipping a steaming cup of his usual morning tea, staring gloomily at the old woman at the opposite side of the road pampering the stray dogs with two packets of chocochip biscuits. His thoughts wandered somewhere he himself was trying to figure out. Was he happy with this life? Could he keep his family happy with whatever he was doing? He knew it was stupid and utterly unreasonable for a successful electronics engineer like him who earned a seven-digit salary to come across such illogical insecurities, but alas , the human mind is always unpredictable...

By the time Rebanto had jumped back to reality from his hazy thought loop he realized that the city was starting to get a little busy. The bus stand just beside the tea shack had started to get slightly crowded, the auto-rickshaws on the road had increased, the nearby shops were gradually openning and last but not the least the old, caring woman with the chocochips on the opposite footpath was replaced by two teenage boys wearing school uniform attempting to cross the road. Rebanto watched as they did a near perfect catwalk rather playfully on the painted zebra crossing and seated themselves just beside him. They ordered tea and 'butterfly' biscuits and probably were talking about what they were planning to do after their school-life ends. Rebanto was impressed by the matured,career-oriented behaviour these two boys were displaying and pressed his ears to listen into the details of this conversation. To Rebanto's surprise, instead of hearing words like JEE,NEET, B.Tech,M.B.B.S he heard alien terms like History,Political Science,Sociology and the like. These boys were definitely chooshing elementary standard subjects which lost its value after your secondary examinations. Rebanto now made up his mind to teach these boys a life lesson as a responsible adult.

" You see boys, young adulthood is indeed a crucial time in your lives where the decisions you make now affects your entire life by twists and turns. If you choose career as a priority in life,which most dont then you must learn to walk on a secured path which is backed by fresh currency. You must think thoroughly before delving into this uncertain and unpredictable road led by the arts subjects you were talking about...",but somehow this whole process of coming up with a bigshot speech to set an example to these children was interrupted by a distracting memory in Rebanto's mind.

Suddenly, Rebanto was a sixteen-year-old boy again standing in front of his small,old library which at present was his domestic workstation. During his teenage years that old library hosted one genre of books-history. Rebanto remembered that time in his life when he was absoluely a fanatic of history. Starting from Rohsen Dalal to Gibbon, Thompson, Thapar etc. the library was truly unique. But all this, wasnt the distracting part of the memory. The part that was truly distracting to Rebanto was when his father one day, just before his JEE exams had ruthlessly burned the entire library down because it was "diverting his attention to a subject unsuitable for high profile secure jobs". Back then, he had not one bit of courage to resist his father's wishes and thus that dusty library of the failed historian was replaced by a shiniy,polished and tidy workspace for the thriving engineer. Maybe all of Rebanto's deep seated insecurities that this beautiful morning was able to extract a while ago was because of that one,dark incident in his young life. Quitely, a long-awaited tear drop trickled down from Rebanto's cheeks. He swiftly wiped it off with his handkerchief before anyone noticed. Next,he kept the glass with a few tea leaf sediments remaining in it, paid his dues to the shack owner and checked the time on his smartphone. It was time to go to work, it was time to go back to becoming the thriving engineer that Rebanto always wanted to be.