like burns

Once you get out of school, get out of home and plunge into the drudgery of colleges and hostels, you know you're out for good. The years you've spent rollicking at home, yanking your sibling's hair and getting caressed by mum are now days of halcyon, far behind you; and they're days never to return. Even before you realize, the world wants you to give up your boyish countenances, and face, embrace, a life at hostel I often end up calling coyote-ugly. You pilot the wallet, the bad food, the surly teachers (so not in unison with the parental figures at school), accidents, fights, a room, its elements, laundry, mid-night meals, and then it hits you; you're no longer going to be what you were, you are going to be what you are, may be even worse. Your hostel life and its smiles that come patched (purple or blue) and blotched is what it is going to be from here on. The buck stops here, at you, and it halts like a tenacious virus of a terminal disease. This new avatar shall be as lasting as the whiskers and the moustache that had finally cultivated on the brink of school, on those 'hitherto barren lands'; the first shave then was quite the last leaf at home. Of course, some things never change; you still love your mom the most, your dad continues to inspire you more than anything else, you still fight with your sister (over the Graham Bell), but...for some reason, a lot changes. It's a kind of growing knowledge seeping inside you, that not every road will lead home, from here on. So if you fall down, from a bike or from a building, there is no turmeric milk at your disposal, or a mother to coddle you (or a father to goad you), or a sibling to (a)dress your wounds; for they are miles away, anxious, clutching arms at every drop of hat, and cannot be bothered. Your wings have taken their own flight, you're on your own now, sometimes like a free bird, sometimes like a misguided one, trying to find its own way into an unchartered territory, but one that has to carve his own niche, its own nest, for the years to come...