The Experiment Called Happiness

    Ten years from now, I want the world to change what they define as happiness.

    Picture this:

    Stunted trees and the cerulean colours of water that turn aquamarine from the apricots and peaches your mother asked you to pluck from your garden. Wet soil clinging to your feet, brimming with slush and gusto that brings your father’s cotton plants to life. 

    Your mother’s downstairs, poring over the little stitches she pedals onto your torn shirt. You open your eyes to a seething ray of the purest, most golden light. A hue of spectra that makes platinum pallid and glass glimmer.

    “Son, I think father needs you down at the mill!” Your mother’s voice floats into the greenhouse and you scamper into the mill barefooted, welcomed by grains of crushed flour and wheat.

    Ten years from now, I wish that we would go through the trouble of building greenhouses on our roofs with elaborate bird feeders our children make or crouching next to the home-grown carrots in rubber gloves, with soil up our sleeves.

    Your father takes you to the city one day. There was something mesmerising about the way you travelled on roads that looked like it could take you to the ends of the world. You’d never seen so many people in your entire life. 

    The clothes, the ice-cream, the posh restaurants with twinkling lights that looked like bottled dragon flies. You felt small and intimidated. Still, you couldn’t help but dream of the city.

    “Father, why are the fruits so expensive? Don’t we sell it for much less?”

    He smiles at you, “of course, we do. The villagers can’t afford to pay a lot.”

    Maybe that’s where we’re going wrong. We look at the city and their posh fairy lights, quasi-adornments and laughter as tall skyscrapers and we think—is that happiness?

    You run the place like your parents did. Leaving a small box of strawberries at Ms Deidre’s door (her children love them) and thanking her for her vegetable stew whenever she brings some over (which is often).

    We’ve lost a beautiful tradition to the past. In the next decade, I want people to try to grow everything they might need in there homes. The resilience behind cultivating your own food is brilliant.

    Often people like you and Ms Deidre get taken advantage of. People like you value sentiments and agree that the world is nothing if we don’t share it. You don't put a big price on your hard work but they do, the people with the trucks. They come in from the city. Everyone’s saying that they’re making quite the money off your fruits and cotton. You feel this new information like a chip in your shoulder.

    You don’t know what made you want to leave. To want some of that liveliness from the city. A childhood friend scores you a job. As a waiter. The hands that have only known tilling are going to learn to bus tables.

    Half of the village comes to see you off and your neighbour is a blubbering mess. You cry on the train but you believe this will be the beginning of a very prosperous life. You believe you’ll be happy.

    Sometimes, we absolve our inherent greediness by calling it ambition. The city is a metaphor for everything and nothing at all.

    You’re restless at night. Insomnia, the doctors call it. Your phone chimes with messages from vendors. Its been years since you bought the restaurant chain you once worked for. The money you make annually is four times what your parents have ever made.

    You want to believe that this makes you happy. Your so-called “success”. That you followed your gut-feeling into the city. You’re not sure what you followed, but the loneliness is crippling.

    In ten years, I want us to read books that tell us things like, “there are no mistakes in life, just lessons,” or that , “happiness is a journey, not the destination.” We need to internalise these simple truths. We’re going to make the mistakes we’re meant to make. Some blunders are fated.

    You feel out of place in your department store clothes. The patch of loam soil where you father planted jute is light and airy. Dried. You think of how he walked through these fields—shoeless—soil stuck between his toes. You’re not sure what you expected to see when you came back home.

    Maybe you were hoping that your mother’s laughter would ring throughout the house again, or that your father would engulf you in his warm embrace the moment you walked through that door. Perhaps you thought that Ms Neelam would rush out of her fenced home to welcome you or that anyone, just anyone, would hug you like they meant it.

    It feels hollow, their smiles. Your people, your family—they look at you and they see a business tycoon and not the boy they raised.

    Sometimes, family—or what’s left of it—feels strange when you’ve been gone for so long. And for what? Why did you leave? For a crooked definition of happiness?

    “Are you happy?” Your friend asks suddenly.

    “Happy?” Perplexing. Even the air doesn’t feel the same anymore.

    “Are you happy with all this?”

    This question comes like knocks. Once. Then Twice. Thrice. When you don’t answer, it pounds against your consciousness.

    In the next ten years, I want people to bravely experiment with their lives. Try on countries like gloves. Stay when it excites you. Never be afraid of questions and say yes, whenever you can. Hand-pick friends so that they are nothing but joy. Never settle for less.

    Even though you’ve come far east from the old town, you can feel it in the wind here. The mornings are lush with new beginnings. You feel a familiar warmth climb up your fingers. 

    You look at the untilled land in front of you and can’t help but split into a smile at the poeticity of life and its tendancy to teach you profound lessons in easy strides.

    In the next decade, I want us to understand that happiness is inherent. That we can only find it within ourselves and the good, passionate and selfless things we dare to do.