Can Love Happen Twice? Read Online Free PDF

taken place. Unable to cope with the misery, I was looking for a big change. Fortunately, an on-site opportunity for a project in Belgium gave a ray of hope to that much-needed change. I availed that opportunity.
    It was the month of January and Brussels, the capital city of Belgium, was witnessing the last few weeks of winter. It was noon, I guess around 12.30 p.m., when I walked to my hotel room in Brussels. It was indeed a delight for me to walk into that beautiful room with lovely interiors, beautifully textured walls and an excellent lighting scheme. Even the air in there was very refreshing. It was warm inside and quite calm as well. I went ahead to explore that room, which was going to be my temporary home for the next few days, in greatest detail. As I walked in, my leather boots made that aristocratic tapping sound on the wooden floor.
    The wall on the other side of the room was hidden behind a giant curtain. There was a long string dangling beside the curtain. On pulling it, the curtain parted. And the next moment took my breath away.
    From behind the glass wall of the room on the eighteenth floor of the hotel Tulip Inn, Brussels looked mesmerizingly beautiful! I could see almost the entire city. My eyes were glued to the panoramic sight of a serene and cold Belgium afternoon. Scores of skyscrapers—which, while standing solidly right in front of me, also seemed to compete with each other to kiss the sky—filled my view from left to right. White smoke from various massive chimney outlets, installed on the terrace of the buildings, was coming out dreamily. Far down, I could see various road networks with the traffic racing on them.
    The glass wall seemed soundproof as I could hear nothing. Yet, I imagined the sound of the fast cars on the road. I imagined the whistle of the wind that was blowing outside at that level. I imagined the voices of the people walking on footpaths. I imagined it all. I stood there for a while in the pin-drop silence of my cosy room imagining all kinds of noises. I was enjoying being there; being there almost in the sky and with the beautiful city stretching out below me.
    In a few moments nature started painting everything white. Tiny flakes of snow whirled right in front of my nose. The sky at that altitude was getting swathed in a sheet of white snow. And I watched that sheet becoming gradually more dense. I could feel the magic of the weather outside. I wanted to capture the moment in pictures, but I couldn’t. Then and there I wanted to write a few lines of what I was experiencing, but I couldn’t leave the focus. I didn’t want to lose a single second of it. Everything out there was turning to white: the buildings, the roads, the air and everything else!
    I stood with my palms stretched against the glass, frozen like a statue, and watched those flakes swirling down, till they lost their individuality and became a part of the homogeneous cluster of white. I don’t remember how long I stood there.

    A telephone ring on my room’s phone broke my reverie. It was Sanchit, a colleague as well as a friend, who was the only Indian whom I knew in Belgium. While he was the development lead for our project, I was the test lead. Sanchit had come on-site a month prior to me and this helped me to easily settle down in Belgium.
    ‘Okay, see you then in half an hour,’ I murmured in a daze.
    Religiously following the Indian tradition of procrastinating, the so-called half an hour was stretched to one and a half hours before Sanchit finally knocked at the door.
    ‘Hey! Hi-i-i-i!’
    We were glad to see each other. We shook hands and gave each other a boyish half-hug though we’d never met this way ever when we were at our office in India.
    Things change when two Indians meet abroad.
    Sanchit was clad in heavy, warm clothes from head to toe.
    ‘Wow!’ he said as he walked towards the glass window and turned back to see the rest of the room, smiling appreciatively.
    ‘How much? Hmm …