BusKing!!!

ONE

Ch 1 [The Truth]

How powerful can music be? I always asked this question to my father as a child. He never answered it properly.

"When you feel like someone is summoning you but isn't visible, you'll understand." He said that. I didn't understand what he meant by that. I remember he was a part time singer. Singing was his passion, that's what he used to say. I doubted it very highly back then, because he was professionally a teacher and that too a math's teacher.

"Why didn't you become a singer or at least a music teacher?" I asked him one day when he was sweeping the shop's floor. The shop was hereditary from his father, my grandfather.

He turned and looked at me, "Satvik, why do you ask?" He asked me.

"I'm just curious. I thought you persuade what you love." I replied.

He smirked and then chuckled, "Brave of you to assume that I don't love math." He continued with his work.

I shrugged. I didn't want to ask any other questions because his way of answering told me that he didn't want to be questioned either. It was evening and the time of closing the shop. My father had an obsession with clean environment. He used to sweep the floor two times a day. After that, he closed the shop and carried me. I was nine years old.

Our house was a street away from the shop. On our way, we used to see our neighbors whom we used to greet. Father had a naturally smiling face. Even if he made a straight face from his perspective, one would feel like he's smiling. I remember he had cancer and he got cured. As a child, I always heard my relatives call him brave and blessed. They thought he was brave, courageous and always smiling but the truth was only known by me. When we reached home, he used to cook food for me, feed me with his own hands since both of mine were paralyzed because of an accident three years ago. After he fed me, he used to eat alone. Alone, while sobbing.

"He must be missing mother." I thought lying on the bed facing the wall. He thought he was crying quietly sitting at the edge of the bed but what about the kid behind him? He might not realize it but his son knew what he was going through.

Early in the morning at 5 am, he stepped out of the house after kissing my forehead thinking i was asleep which i wasn't. I always wondered where he used to go. Until one day, my curiosity led me where he was. I was seven back then when I found out that he used to play flute on the streets of our town for two hours. He used to do all those stuffs to meet the end of the days, i realized. 

We weren't that miserable before. There was a time when we also had a beautiful healthy family. My grandparents, my mother and a younger sister. I was too young to understand what happened so suddenly that broke all of us into pieces. I only knew that it all happened because of a friend.