Creative Writing: My Hero's Journey

4:02 AM.

Furtively a hand slips out of the mosquito net, fumbles at the cane side table by the bed and swiping its index finger across the glowing mobile screen silences the humming guitar ring.

Retracing the arm back in, he turns side, switches off the AC and taking his younger daughter’s palm in his fist glances at her face wondering places she would be wandering in the world of sleep. At the far end of the bed his wife slumbers unaware of shrieking alarm and the tribulations and excitement of the day, he had waited with bated breath since last 2 weeks, or may be for more than an year or so, worrying how it would go.

In the month of April, on its 21st day, last year, he had completed his first 5k run.

Except for some wayward attempts,

“I will catch you.” Was all that she could manage. In between her coughs and her face red.

Picking up speed, he wondered whether he would be able to survive the distance as his chest heaved.

Every next step he thought would be his last. Every next 100 metre he promised he would stop. His feet laggard, his breath heavy, he kept moving measuring the steps of the runners ahead of him.

Often his mind would go back to his elder daughter, diagnosed with allergic bronchitis, someone who loves to run—she had only recently won two silver medals at school in sprinting events—walking in the company of her friends and their teachers perhaps at the farthest end .

Body lugging the legs and the legs lugging the body, he went on grabbing a water bottle from a helping hand while forcing smile on the cheer ‘kids’ as they jived to a well-rehearsed motion picked up from TV and practiced at school in shimmering liveries fluttering pompoms in their gripped hands.

Somewhere midway, a man, slightly portly but keeping envious cadence, lugs by his side.

“Where it would end, what distance they still have to go?” he wants to

Some minutes later, marked by time he felt had stopped, they reached the vicinity of Swarna Jayanti Park in Indirapuram (Ghaziabad District in Uttar Pradesh, part of Delhi NCR), a heaven, he thought, where his agony would end. A sprawling complex, that it was, his mind juggled how near or far the organizers had planned the finishing spot.

The lungs heaved, the heart panted, the body beseeched and the mind helplessly implored them to last a while more as they together trundled on. So it went on until they turned left, and lo behold, they sighted the finishing line. 100-150 metres was all he had to go. The torture would seem like a distant memory. The joy would be once more by his side.

So he made a dash. And his companion followed. Though he was heavy, but he went past him. As he crossed the finishing line he found himself lost in the melee of runners, and a few of those making it on two-wheelers, it brought a pang in his heart.

Glancing at his phone, tapping the App off, he made a mental note of the details.

Time: 32:00 min. Distance: 04.76 km. Pace: 06.46