My younger brother, Jitender aka Tinku, has been in the United States for the past few years. While he followed my footsteps in every step of life—from the first school in Burla to the next school in Sambalpur, the engineering college in Bidar and landing up a job in Infosys—there is one thing in which he managed to overtake me. He got married before me. My NRI brother visits us once every year. The last time he was in India was for the occasion of my wedding.
Then, surprisingly, one day I found Sushil on Facebook! We relived the good old days online, until, when I was in Kolkata for a day, he visited me at the hotel where I was staying. In those couple of hours that we spent together, we took a trip all the way back to our past—to the schooldays and beyond. We also updated each other on what the others from our class were doing now. It felt good to know that everyone had settled down well in life.
While I have moved from Orissa to Chandigarh in search of my destiny, my father still believes that Orissa is his ‘karma bhoomi’. Despite Punjab being his birthplace—where his roots are—and despite my willingness to move to North India, my father finds it difficult to leave Orissa. For him, it’s a place where he has worked hard for more than thirty years, and where he has seen his children growing up. As I complete this book now, I also want to say sorry to Dad for hating him at times through the years—the time when he took me to school for the very first time, or each time he took me to get those injections. I cannot imagine what my life would have been today, had he not done all those difficult things!
My mother spends half of the year with me, and the other half with my father back in Orissa. This is her way of sharing her love with both of us. I love to see her smiling, because I am aware of the sacrifices she had made, for years, for my brother and me. If she wouldn’t have given up everything for us and our education, we certainly would not have been what we are today. I’d like to thank her with all my heart for it.
And what’s my status?
Well, I have picked up the profession of storytelling and I am enjoying it thoroughly. By the time you read this line, I would have started writing yet another story …
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my wife Khushboo for always being with me on the journey of writing this story; and for throwing some very interesting thoughts at me each time I was stopped by writer’s block. How we laughed together when you narrated the story of your schooldays in the capital city of Delhi, and I picked up topics to relate to them from my own schooldays in the remote town of Burla!
I give my sincere thanks to Vaishali Mathur, Senior Commissioning Editor at Penguin Books India, for always standing by my side to take care of my work and improve it further; and for all the patience she invested in awaiting the chapters from my side. And yes, you are super fast with all your work on my books. Indeed, without you, this dream book would not have been possible.
I would also like to thank my editor Monidipa Mondal for jumping into the chaos of my world of work and finding some of the brilliant logical mistakes. I hope someday we would reveal those mistakes as part of ‘the making of this book’.
THE BEGINNING
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PENGUIN METRO READS
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First published in Penguin Metro Reads by Penguin Books India 2013
Copyright © Ravinder Singh 2013
Cover photograph © Getty Images
All rights reserved
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-0-143-41880-1
This digital edition published in 2013.
e-ISBN: 978-8-184-75946-4
Ravinder Singh, Like It Happened Yesterday
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