Letting go...

His eyes remained glued to the Lufthansa Airlines flight that had just taken off from the International Airport and followed it till the same diminished into the horizons.

While on way back home, sitting in the rear seat of his car, tears swelled up his eyes as he managed to hide them from the driver looking through the rear view mirror. 

His thoughts drifted back to the cold winter night of December 23^rd when he received a call from his wife’s gynecologist asking him to rush to the hospital as his wife had to undergo an emergency procedure to have the baby. Alisa was born at 2.10 am local time. As he held the baby in his arms while wife recuperated in the operation theater for a few more hours, he had decided that he will not have any more kids. 

The one-child norm had been a part of his philosophy him from his early twenties. ``Children are responsibilities who need to be had as per your means and requirements,’’ he had once argued with his wife. While, Simran had always craved for at least two kids, she had to go with Amar when he said that they had just enough means to support and bring up one child in a good way.

Alisa slowly became an inseparable part of Amar’s life; he simply could not bear her go through any hardship to attain a certain end. ``Why don’t you give her that glass of milk at her table, rather than asking her to make an effort of coming to the dining table while she is studying,’’ he would ask Simran. 

His affection for the child grew to the extent that he changed his entire concept of having just one child. Whenever asked, he would simply say, ``I could not share my love for Alisa with any other child, even if it was my own.’’

One fine day, Alisa came home with news of this boy who was a batch-mate at her medical school, and he was planning to do specialization in a foreign country, ``So, you too are looking at such an option? What’s wrong with Indian institutes? You need not apply and my words are final,’’ declared an obviously jealous father.

In his single-track-thinking with respect to Alisa,  Amar had stopped realising that the girl had actually grown up to have a thinking and a mind of her own, she was 24 years old! He was deeply hurt, when the letter accepting Alisa’s application in an American University arrived, while he was rushing out for office and he simply took the u-turn towards home. 

Before Alisa was back from her college that day, Simran and Amar had finished rounds of discussions regarding the fact of life – one that of LETTING GO! An act that all of us have to do at some point of life or the other, and it is not all that difficult when accepted as a way of life.

Having handed over the letter to his only daughter, Amar had walked out of the drawing room leaving Alisa with Simran.