Sam’s Little Life

Conventional family backgrounds typically don't compel a person to go full tilt into worshipping and live the idea of being a bachelor, whether self-inflicted or not. However, family circumstances might sometimes cause that familial disorder, and in the case of Sam A, it undoubtedly did.

His voyage from his home in Kerala to Chennai marked the beginning of his frugal way of earning a decent living as if he was quitting home permanently and never wanted to return. After earning his Bachelor's degree, he pursued a hotel management program in Chennai before embarking on a career in the hospitality industry. Writing became his sole reprieve from relationships where he was mistreated and taken for granted; it was a creative and rich emotional experience, which was what he needed. An occasional reading or two of English Literature Classics like Moby Dick, Robinson Crusoe, etc., and Indian Classics such as Mahabharata and Ramayana, most especially at his rented hovel, became a getaway of sorts from the constant din of expectations of his estranged family and friends.

These days, he enjoys comparing and contrasting the allegorical information presented in these Hindu texts, often discovering connections or drawing up philosophical and ethical examples to real-world circumstances of the politically violent reality of our day.

Beyond his little corner, he also found a world that was turning into one that was cruel, angry, full of rage, and even more wicked and sadistic than he had previously believed. For a few years afterward, he gave in to the longing anguish of his past and newfound willpower he thought he didn't possess: his newly discovered resolve, which both inspired and broke him in equal measure. Chennai instilled in him the survival instincts he needed to continue exploring new territories and gaining much-needed real-world experience. Far away from home, he promised his wounded self that he would go back when Christmas came, but not just yet, and gently thought of his mother while also thinking of his tyrant father, who had been the main reason he had fled his home in the first place.

Soon after, Sam grew bored in Chennai. Chennai treated him well, but he was beginning to be restless again and apprehensive about something he couldn't quite put his finger on, even as he was thinking of what he regularly read about in the papers or browsed online: "New Knowledge Economy" — the post-liberalized economic frenzy of Information Technology (IT) in Hyderabad.

Packing up his meagre suitcase — seemingly atavistic and negativistic about established customs that his estranged family would not have expected their astute son, frequently overlooked and underestimated that he was — to follow anyway on his yet another life-changing displacement to a rapidly transforming Hyderabad.

A change of air, scenery, climate, time, and place would help ease a persistent bit of trouble he felt he continually faced; it bothered him even before he escaped home.

Over time, odd things resulted from living a lonely life in a foreign place and time away from family and friends; after his mother passed away, their son became reclusive, more like a solitary hermit going about solo in a strange and unfamiliar city, while his father, an unfortunate egocentric, acquired economic assets that he, before he passed away, providentially divided between his two young sons and daughter. Before long, their sister was married off, but Sam and his brother preferred to stay lifelong bachelors, fancy-free and eventually unmarriageable, with no one left to check their marriage prospects, if at all there were any.

Sam took comfort in the thought that he had only been gone from home for a few years, not a very long time. He never gave up on returning home. He had matured much and had come a long way since that day years ago, when all he had done was merely pack his things and leave for Chennai where his sister was, with the unwavering goal of proving his worth, if not to his Keralan ancestry and the rest of the unforgiving world, then at least to himself.

And life went on; without it, there would be no story to tell, nothing to prove to anyone, and no individuals such as Sam — who would never have experienced the kind of family life that his mother, and not so likely his father would have wished for him — would, with all his dead weight of that emotional baggage from the past, exist.

Sam is better off staying exactly how he has been throughout his state-of-being-an-unmarried-man days as he continues to live up to his well-earned and finally much-praised reputation as an eternal bachelor. No questions asked, and none answered.

By Arindam Moulick