Ways of Life
“Your attention, please. We will be landing in Paro in twenty minutes. The weather is bright and sunny.”
I wasn’t paying much attention to the pilot’s words being preoccupied with thoughts of my family and friends. I’d been away for three years on an engineering course in Australia. As the Druk Air BAe 146 landed at Paro Airport, my pulse raced as did my breath. I was home.
I was given a warm welcome and hearty congratulations and, in a social whirlwind of dinners and parties, the weeks whizzed by.
Then one Saturday, a month after my return, a headline in the Kuensel caught my eye: “Notorious Killer Kinley Sentenced To Life.”
I read on: ”The notorious killer Kinley, 25, who robbed a woman of her dZis and stabbed her to death, has been sentenced to life imprisonment. Kinley, who comes from Kabesa village in Dagana, has been arrested and detained for juvenile delinquency on a number of occasions since his early teens. During his twenties, he was arrested for numerous robberies, rapes and attempted murders and had served a five year sentence.”
Startled out of my wits, I stared agape at the photograph. It was my childhood classmate and close neighbor. He was, I remember, a pampered child but bright as buttons. His poor and deprived family background left him with a burning desire to rise above his circumstances.
“I want to become a Dasho,” he once confessed to me his cherished dream. During our cow-herding days, he used to fasten a wood patang at his waist, Dasho style, and jokingly order me about.
His father deserted his mother and her three children to take up with a younger woman. Kinley, being the eldest, had to shoulder the responsibility of his household at the tender age of ten. The domestic situation deteriorated when his mother married again, this time to a no-account drunkard, who sent the children out to work in the fields. Within five years, three more mouths to feed were added to the family with no livelihood.
Kinley, who was brilliant student and a favourite of the teachers, had to quit school. Soon after, he ran away from his unbearable surroundings to seek his fortune. The years went by, I lost all contact with my childhood companion till that headline hit my eyes and stunned me.
Could the blame for the dastardly deeds he committed be laid at the doorstep of his traumatic and tragic childhood? What strange twist of fate finds me at the beginning of a bright future and him at the mouth of a dark and endless tunnel?
By: Gopal Hingmang, Source Courtesy: KUENSEL