The flight was ready to take off. My joy knew no bounds when I realized that I had finally broken out of the clutches of family bonding ,parents,relatives and more relatives to face the world independently. New place , new house and not to forget a house of my own,new job-the one that I had dreamt of and new people not the same old so called 'blood relatives'. I was euphoric slowly slipping into my imaginary world which was now going to turn real when I heard a mellow at the same time an irritated voice asking me to fasten my seat belt. I turned to take a look at the person who had in humanely distracted me when I saw a puny girl with pear shaped nose and twinkling green eyes. Even though she looked quite cheerful something told me that deep inside she was filled with immense grief.

We were flying at 100000 feet above sea level when I finally gained the courage to ask her name. After a brief moment of hesitation she reluctantly told me that her name was Adele and that she was flying to Milan to host the Fashion week there. That left me aghast,smacking my head by reminding me of how not to judge a book by its cover and how appearances were indeed deceptive. Before I could say anything in reply she broke out and this as expected started gaining a lot of attention from my co-passengers. My face turned into a battlefield where feelings of embarrassment,confusion and anger struggled for mastery. I somehow managed to quiten her but don't assume it to be an easy task. IT takes a lot of "its okay, I know, that's alright,I get it and I'm sorry" but once you are done with it you'll be filled with the same kind of pride that tenzing Norgay was filled with after climbing the Everest.

Anyway at the end of all this I learnt the root cause for all her anxieties. Adele's parents had passed away when she was 5 years old in a fatal car accident. Since then she was being raised in an orphanage where in she grew up with not even the faintest idea of life with parents, motherly love, a grandma to force food into your mouth, a grandpa to take a walk with you in the evening, a sister to have fun with, a brother to protect her. To put it all in a nut shell the last 14 years of her life were spent craving for all the above with every day increasing her feeling of loneliness, isolation and not being loved by anyone till one day an elderly people whom she believed to be god in disguise came to adopt her, to love her, to share their lives with her, to make her a part of their little nest.

But how could anything go on right in her life? How could she afford to be happy when the same God had something else equally good in store for her? How could she embark on this journey and make use off this opportunity by building a good career for herself when all she vouched for was to love and to be loved lying on the lap of her mother with her father by her side?

She was destined to live alone is what her sponsor has told her in an unsuccessful effort to calm her down when she came to know that her soon to be adopted parents had found their daughter whom they believed to be dead? How cruel could God get? When I was attempting to answer all these questions of hers I realized how gifted I was to already have a wonderful set of parents and relatives who loved me, cared for me, cried when I cried, laughed when I laughed and spoilt me with gifts whenever they had done something wrong. Even though living together with them did have some demerits. But they seemed to be silly when compared to her qualms.

At that time a tear trickled down my eye and Adele was startled when she felt my hand on her shoulders and heard me calling her 'sister'. This time around she didn't cry but started screeching so loud that a passenger in the adjacent seat who was busy snoring woke up with his eyebrows arched up staring at us with his inquisitive eyes. Unware of all this we were busy planning to book tickets back to India to reunite with 'our' family like two crazy little children trying to touch the clouds.