Takkunu Oru Tale - 5

He was tagging along with her. He hated traveling - especially by air. He was used to living quite an indoors life, except for the annual December vacation which was a certainty in Varshika's life. And being in the US meant that most of his travels were by air - where he felt mishandled and cramped. He could not help think about his days in India - Though dusty and dirty, the personal touch was more there, he felt. People were always happy to see you, with the obvious expectation of what you'd brought for them. Thinking about India, that was where they were going. 26 hours of agony for him and perhaps for her too and then they would be home.


He could feel her fingers twitching and her palms sweaty. Whoever said that the face is an index of the mind forgot that there existed something called hands. He knew that she was holding onto him more for a sense of reassurance than anything else and he knew that she was going to lose that reassurance soon enough - perhaps within the next 2 minutes. And with him he carried more than what Varshika could manage on her own. He liked being a source of physical and moral support for her. After all, she had retrieved him for the dark abyss that his life was in India when she first started her college life in India. He always felt that Varshika had made his life a lot better, a lot cleaner. But for her, he would definitely not go through the mistreatment that he'd be going through for the next 26 hours. He knew he was huge - in fact more often than not he was proud of his height and size. But the same size now was a bad thing to be - especially if you were travelling by air.

"Hello Ma'm, you would mind weighing your check-in luggage?" said the airline staff as Varshika lugged her huge box onto the weighing scale - feeling desolate. She had felt reassured holding onto the thick handle as she was lugging it till the check-in counter and now, it was gone!