Dei machas, how about catching up tonight for a quick round of drinks followed by some dinner at my place? Both drinks and dinner are on me…The big day has finally arrived. I am free.
I hit on the Send button on the Whatsapp group with a couple of my best friends and my cousin as its members.
I was quite sure that they would be shell-shocked at the sudden invite, that too on a weekday, given my propensity to plan all such drinking sessions well in advance and the tendency to schedule it only on weekends when all of us would have a chance to indulge in a drinking binge, if required, and wear off the hangover the next day when none of us would have to go to office.
But today was different, and tonight’s celebrations were for a special reason. After a good two decades of slogging my posterior off in a job which provided me with no sense of achievement (except probably for adding a moderate sum of money to my savings account at the end of the month), I had finally managed to achieve a substantial break-through in my life. I had finally finished off all the substantial financial commitments of my life and today was the day when the last of them had been fulfilled. I had finally paid off my daughter’s tuition fees for the last semester of her Post-Doctoral studies. I was now a ‘free man’, at least when it came to having to earn money to live.
Over the last five odd years, my living expenses had catapulted to all-time highs with my daughter’s medical course fees and her marriage expenditure on top of my regular household expenditure. It was in these years that I thanked my wife for having instilled a high degree of financial discipline in me and having run a tight ship financially since the time we got married. All these years, we curtailed all unnecessary expenditure and had strategically invested our savings in a manner where the outflows more or less matched all the significant financial milestones in our and our daughter’s lives. And today, finally, a lifetime of this discipline had reaped rich dividends, both literally and figuratively.
After having paid the last installment of tuition fees for my daughter’s medical education, my wife and me were left with enough savings which yielded a more than sufficient stream of monthly income for us. We had finally reached a stage where I didn’t necessarily have to work for a living, per se, at least financially. I finally had time to pursue my own passions without having to worry about whether I had enough money to sustain my family for the rest of my and their lives.
This called for a celebration. And what better way to celebrate than by having two of my best friends and a cousin over to dinner and drinks? After all, they had stood by me through all these years and understood what it is that my wife and me were trying to do all these years.
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This post is entirely hypothetical in nature, although it contains more than just a small amount of ‘wishful thinking’ on my part. This post was written for Project 365 : A post a day where the intention is to publish at least one post a day based on the prompts provided. Today’s prompt was to write about how I would celebrate some wonderful, improbable, hoped-for-good news.
