Last Day Aboard

• Kamran Khalid, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2016

7th Feb 2016

It’s 2am, and the streets are motionless outside. We’re in our room, the whole family, everybody is sharing stories, and I’m sitting here relentlessly nursing thoughts about how absent I will be without these people. Everyone is laughing, partaking in stories about all my previous visits to the exclusively pious country, Pakistan. Nevertheless, I am able to comprehend that everyone in the room is equally as distressed, at it being my final day among them.

It’s 5:30am now, and we’ve lodged my bags in the frivolously scant, Suzuki Mehran, which struggles to hold the load of the excessive amount of luggage. Everyone slowly achieves to come out from the room, all sleep deprived and fatigued. The neighbors have woken up now, and join everyone to say final goodbyes to myself. There must be at least 20 of us now, all standing on the dark, gloomy street, which smells putrid, owed to the open sewage system.

It’s hit 6am now, and the prayer call starts on the loud speaker, “Allah-u-Akbar…” Everyone is quiet, everything and everyone, lost in there own individual thoughts, waiting for the call to stop.
“…La ila ha ilal aa” and that’s the final call to prayer.
I find myself hugging my favorite aunty, my eyes burning with the warmth of my watery eyes. I blink to hold my tear back, but it escapes and dribbles down my cheek.
I tell myself, “This isn’t right, you need to be brave.”
I continue hugging and saying my farewells to everyone else, that have made last-ditch efforts to come meet me.

We fit as many people in the minute Mehran, leaving a handful to resort walking down the rocky, grimy street, avoiding the disproportionate amounts of rubbish and litter laying on the street and the stray dogs roaming the streets trying to find a serene area to sleep for the remaining night. We all, once again, unite at the bus interchange and all gather for the last time. The luggage is accumulated and stored in the diminutive compartments of the bus, located on the bottom half of the automobile.

Its 7:30am now, the bus roars as the driver starts the engine and it’s at this moment I realize that I have actually left, and will not be returning anytime soon; years maybe. The sadness due to this miserable thought follows through my veins and deadens my mind. It’s poisonous to my spirit, killing any other emotions until sadness is all that is left. I feel as though, black mist has settled upon me and refuses to leave. The bus continues to drive along the broken, uneven road and no matter how bright the sun gets as it rises from the conservative land, I feel as though there is no sun. The world is lost to me as I sit there alone on the bus, wondering about how I’ll have to manage to live alone and catch up with the colossal amounts of work awaiting me back at school. It seems as though nothing will bring me back to focus.

I look outside and observe my surroundings; cultured, conservative, panic-stricken, lawless, nosy, undisciplined, untrustworthy, deprived and above all very hard to live. It is than I realize, how grateful I am to be living in a country which is not deprived of the legal system, is healthy and cares for its people. My self-centered and egoistic thoughts had positioned me in a state were it felt as though there was no hope left.

It’s 6pm now; I’m on the plane. My Pakistan journey is over, and a whole new journey awaits me on my trip back home. I will miss home, I will miss family and I will miss being on holiday, but I knew from the start that my holiday wasn’t for eternity.