Outside the station, I stood in the hot afternoon sun, scanning faces and roads, waiting for my friend. The heat clung to the skin like a second layer—dry, sharp, almost aggressive. People passed by in all directions, dragging luggage, waving hands, arguing over fares, or just looking plain lost.

Just beside where I stood, there was a small stall—aged, rusted tin sheets for shade, a table stacked with snacks . The man running the stall was in his fifties, thin as a bamboo stick, with a face folded in layers of lines—wrinkles that spoke of decades, of sun and survival. His bones poked through his skin. Forehead like old maps that had seen too much.

What caught my attention wasn’t his appearance but his behavior—he barked at people who unknowingly paused in front of his stall, as if guarding some invisible boundary. “Hatt ja bhai! Dikh nahi raha kya?”(Can’t you see just stand somewhere else) he scolded one man, not out of anger but out of reflex, as if the world had been unkind for too long, and this was the only defense he had left.

I watched him, quietly.
I thought—this man had probably seen every flavor of life’s bitterness. Maybe he had never stepped foot outside his city. Maybe he had never tasted the calmness of being home without worry, or the sweetness of sitting in silence without the weight of survival.

And it hit me—how birth decides so much.
Where you’re born, to whom, in what environment.
How drastically different the course of your life can be, just by that one roll of fate.
He must’ve been a boy once too—with dreams, with laughter . But somewhere along the way, life happened.

Just then, my thoughts were interrupted.

A familiar figure appeared in the crowd—eyes darting in every direction, scanning the faces.
My friend.

I raised my hand slightly, calling out, “This side.”

He spotted me, and just like that, both our faces lit up. It had been months—maybe longer—since we saw each other . We had been classmates, even benchmates—side by side, period after period, year after year. Our bench was notoriously the first one—just a hand’s gap from the teacher’s desk.

After 10th grade, I had moved cities, and life changed gears. We barely saw each other—maybe once or twice a year, sometimes even less. And even when we met, it was brief—just a day or two. But the bond? It stuck. Time hadn’t really touched that part.

He pulled up beside me, and I hopped into the vehicle, tossing my bags in with a relieved sigh.. He was the same age as me, with just the difference of a few inches in height—but the same energy.

“Are we heading home or somewhere else first?” I asked.

He looked at me, shrugged, and said, “You tell me.”

The sun was high, the day was long, and my body wasn’t in the mood for adventure.

“Let’s go home,” I smiled.