parallel lives

bhiaaa...khana milega??????????
i was skeptical of a positive reply even though i stressed hard on the last word of my sentence at half an hour before midnight.
haanji milega.....aao baitho...
oye bahadur... uth aur saab ke liye 4 thaali lagana.
i glanced on the wooden table lying in front of tandoor, an around ten year old nepali kid lay there, sleeping, unaffected and unprotected by the shrill winters of Dharamshala. He was wearing a patched T-shirt and some worn out jeans. His brown monkey cap was doing a rather poor job in covering his ears.
well, hearing the words of owner, we made our way through the haphazardly placed chairs towards the corner table of the 'dhaba'.
it was our republic day today and being an holiday, it was a welcome break from our sucking office schedule. we had spent whole day thronging the streets of town during whole day and had a rather extended session of boozing at a local bar.
uth ja oye.... tu utha ni abhi tak.....jaldi uth aur sahab ka khana laga.
perhaps, this high pitched rebuke interrupted the sleep of kid, turning towards his left, slowly he got up with a big yawn over his fluffy cheeks.
Fresh from an interrupted sleep, he stood there, guessing why that bald uncle was shouting at him at this hour of night. Looking around, his eyes met ours, and he understood.
Seeing this, suddenly, i remembred mine school days. In those days, Mom used to wake me up at 4 am for studying and believe me, nothing beats in irritating you then being awakened in the middle of your sweet dreams by someone to do something you don't wanna do. Whole day, i did my mini revolts by not doing what she told me to do, just to avenge my morning trauma. This kid was of same age as i was in those days and surprisingly he didn't showed any such anguish on his face.
Instead, he appeared to me as in same mental state as we are in now. After serving two years in this goddamned professional life, i have seen many aspects of life. I had never imagined that life would be so different as compared to our student days. Here, every decision seems a compromise personally for appeasing seniors. Now,i had understood to supress mine self at expence of so called bigger causes. Life teaches all and everything.
3 years earlier, while in collage, we had seen Amir khan in RDB saying that, 'gate ke iss taraf hum life ko nachaate hain aur gate ke uss taraf life hamein' and laughed at it. Now, that made sense to us.
This kid seemed to be in same state of mind, only difference was that, it was not his time to be here. He should've been lying somehere on this planet next to his siblings on a comfortable bed, in the warmth of his mother. But here he was, having bypassed his childhood, trudging towards the makeshift wooden cabinet for fetching our plates,
placing water on our table, he asked.
saab, kya loge... kadi-chawal, rajmah, ya dal makhni.
2 rajmah aur 2 dal laga de... robin said....
hearing this, he left.
Ashish, who knew that after 4-5 pegs, i became sort of senty towards such things, said :
It happens. Our lives can be parallel, but they can't be same.
But they should be same, i replied in the same monotonous tone. Alcohol has some uniqueness about it. it catalyses the man inside of everyone.
it can't be, someone has to be there, working at dhabas in nights, sweeping the toilets , digging the roads, scavenging the dustbins for plastic bottles, roaming every street of cities for scrap in temperatres above 45 degrees. society can't run without this, he replied.
yeah, someone has to be there for running the society, while someone else is busy doing nothing and fucking up all the resources. said me.
Then why don't you do something. For making a change, why not adopt this kid and free him of all this shitty mess.
That one was enough for neutralizing the alcoholic man inside me. Maybe, i'm not that much a spiritized drinker, or maybe i'm too afraid to do such heroic things or maybe i am just an talking ass like majority of homo-sapiens here or maybe this ain't the right time to do such a thing as i have no means even to support myself fully.
Robin and raveesh were also listening to this, but they were not so keen to start a new debate after cursing their project managers for three hours at Bar.
well, food arrived and as we sat there, eating silently, chottu stood there, nearer to his table, waiting for us to finish, so that after cleaning the plates, he can sleep again. Din't mattered if it was a republic day, for him, at thousand rupees a month , every day is a same day..... and every hour is same hour.