K is for a Kind of a strange Happiness

This monsoon, I was already drenched with the sweat of strange happiness. While I was able to reunite with my family after a suffocating separation for the last eleven months owing to my studies, the pleasant reunion was decorated with a series of misfortunes. It has cost me a lot of things.

In the event of that idyllic homecoming, while trying to inflate the undernourished tires of my car at Olarongchu automobile workshop in Thimphu, my wife has declared that her purse went missing. She has just managed to pay Ngultrum 20 as a payment to inflate my tires.

On hearing her cry, we tried to hunt for its whereabouts but to no avail. The half-naked window of our car was declared to have served as a runway for the flight of that thief’s hand to take off at a lightning speed.

As I was about to enter the car, I noticed the eyes of my wife sunken with fear and hesitation because she is very much aware of the tsunami of my temper. But I avoided yelling to her on this very first face of our meeting and consciously shunned to inaugurate any dispute.

As we drove almost a kilometre towards our home, I begin to interrogate them about the stuff that she stacked to obese her purse. She told me that the house rent which she withdrew to pay for the last two months was there in the purse. That loss was at least O.K for my ear to accept because losing money is often not a very giant deal. But as her list went on from ATM to driving license and from Citizenship Identity Card (CID) to some bills, her sober cry then was rather getting on my nerves.

The smoke of my temper began to strangulate me after hearing the loss of so many documents. My brain could not design a proper roadmap on how to recover those documents. Rather, 50 percent of my driving concentration was eaten seeing some hallucinations of running from office to office.

Two days after our arrival at our home, we went to apply for a driving license because without it we would be handicapped for any movement. We were asked to come after a week but it was still not ready. We got it only after visiting the RSTA office thrice. It was so surprising that the same pest of procrastination was found to have infested even in the process of getting the ATM cards. This is not a complaint but at times I find our people trying to over-promise and under-deliver. They are ignorant of the time, energy, money and other resources wasted by other people for doing the same thing repeatedly.

While I could finally recover all my documents, I discovered my academic works still slumbering in the cradle. The official correspondence could not be done in time because of the sterile network in my place. Even my blog has been left barren without farming any articles for almost a month.

Yet, I feel happy for being within the arms of my family circle. But as I think of my academic works remaining stagnant, I find this happiness something unusual. I find myself already experiencing a kind of strange happiness.    

“There is only one way to happiness, and that is to cease worrying things which are beyond the power of our will”- Epictus