A Journey with No Return

Wintry morning. He'd seen many mornings like this one before. When he'd helped his father deliver milk to townsfolk and steered his cattle towards the unsullied pastures for their daily grazing. 

Yet, this morning - he was feeling different. The air felt cruel on his cheeks that were already cracked from cold water splashes earlier. He stood under the emerging shade of the village's bus-stop - where buses to and from the capital halted to transport aspirations. 

He held an old, ragged duffel bag, probably acquired by his now-dead father where there had once been a prospect of him going to the city and continue his education beyond 10th grade, before that year's crop mocked them with abysmal buyout prices - like it had happened earlier and later, many a time. 

He had been to the city before. On multiple occasions for short visits - each visit punctuated with a sense of home he'd had left behind as buses that carried him gruntled ahead. Rides back home filled him with an increasing sense of aplomb with each mile closer, for he and his village were one and inseverable. 

This morning, all that was about to change, and he was painfully sound of that. He was making a one-way journey to the city. To start a new inning - as a watchman at one of the newly-constructed apartments, to break bread with people who spoke an incomprehensible dialect of his mother tongue, and used things he didn't know existed. 

He boarded the bus, and the bus lumbered towards his new home. 

At that moment, was he aware that: 

• He'd find a partner for himself and form a family in the years to come? 
• His kids would suffocate in the city for their smallness and in his village for its smallness? 
• He'd no longer spot pigs around - uninvited, yet unfailingly present around him in the village that were considered disgusting in the city and had no habitat to live and breed in? 
• He'd forge friendships that would enrich and belittle him at the same time? 
• He'd be slapped by one of the homeowners in the apartment for standing up for his inalienable dignity? 
• And he'd take it lightly by washing it down with a quarter of whiskey - something his old, village self couldn't have? 
• He'd grow gaunt, burdened with 15 cars to clean and 5 floors to sweep & mop before the sun rose every morning? 
• He'd forget how pristine the fresh air in his village felt to breathe? 
• He'd spend long, unending afternoons swatting away flies and salesmen from the apartment? 
• That he'd die in the city, amid his daughters, their partners, and kids - none of whom knew about that morning, its weight, and its irreversibility in his life? 
• And he'd be made a part of the city's soil, alongside tens of thousands of other, nameless, forgotten dead - who made the city it was and will be, on their backs and with their hands 

He wasn't.