The Crumpled Newspaper

Rrrrrrinnggggggggg.........

The shrillness of the bell sounding the end of a period cut through my reverie.

The sound of students tumbling out of the classroom on to the stair case seemed like the desperate flutter of the wings of a flock of birds released after a long custody. I shifted myself at the farthest end of the steps of the main entrance of the faculty building leading on to the narrow road along the edge of the football ground.

First to come out were the “Grasshoppers”, a gang of four who were inevitably always high on grass.
“Must have been a class test”, I wondered to myself, “No other earthly events can make these guys attend class”.
True to their spirits, one of the guys fished out what looked like a reefer from his jhola, while another rustled a matchbox from the sagging hip pockets of his frayed denims. The producer of the reefer lit it standing on the middle of the road and took a long drag in the typical style of ganja smoker and passed the reefer around holding back exhaling the smoke till the other person have completed his drag.
By this time the others also came out in groups. Some sat down on the steps relieved that the ordeal was over and discussing the futility of learning about entropy and enthalpy, some urging others to go for a cup of tea in the canteen while a few wandered from one group to another trying to coax somebody for the class notes which they have not attended.
The one-dimensional, cadaverous form of the Professor was the last to emerge out of the building. He walked down with measured steps, turned ninety degrees on the road with the precision of a military general, paused, took out a packet of cigarettes, stuck one between his lips, struck a match, cupped the flame expertly with his palm and dipped the cigarette in the pool of flame.

It felt strange that nobody asked me why I was missing from the class, but I was too deeply engrossed in my own troubles to give it more than a fleeting thought.

Where is she ?

I was sure that i did not miss anybody. If this period was important enough for the Grasshoppers to attend then it was highly improbable that she would miss it. I decided to wait for some more times before asking somebody about her. I had been the butt of many idiotic and juvenile jokes when I had expressed my interest for her in public and she had hated that. So I wanted to play things a bit more cautiously.

Sitting on the steps, my eyes fell upon the goal-post on the football ground on the edge of the road. The first day of engineering college came to my mind. It was about nine months ago. I was just about to enter the building for the first time with a feeling which was a queer mixture of reverence and awe. A group of about five or six seniors had surrounded me and after the initial questions about my identity, I was taken to the goal-post, ordered to hang from the crossbar and recite Ohm’s Law. I did remember Ohm’s Law fluently but every time the seniors found some mistake and I had to go on repeating. After some times, my palms were burning from the effort and I was almost on the point of letting go ...........and then I saw her.

The sight of me hanging like a bungling monkey and shouting incoherent words made her smile as she quickly lowered her head and rushed inside the building. I had wondered on many occasions, her smiling at my situation should logically be very insulting for me, but strangely it was not. On the contrary, I was thankful that the circumstances have provided an opportunity for her to notice me.

Then on, everything went like a breeze. The monstrosities of raggings didn’t touch me. The perennial back bencher during school days, I started coming to classes early so that I could manage to seat in the second row of desks right behind her. We talked about school days, about rain because she loved Rain, about engineering drawings - a subject she hated.

Once she didn’t come to college for two long days. Time seemed to stop. On the second day, I managed to coax and cajole one of her friends to show me her residence. When the classes were over we both went to her place. My companion showed me the building where she lived and went on his way while I sauntered up and down the pavement in front of the building hoping for her to show up. Hours passed and when the lights of the building started to go off one by one, I hiked my backpack higher up on my shoulders and despondantly trudged my way back home.

My parents’ rebuke “college e uthey dana gojiyechhey” didn’t deter me as the next morning I was again doing my walking exercises in front of her house. But that day I was rewarded with the site of her carrying her college bag and getting into a car presumably to be driven to college. I ran behind the first bus available jumped on it and reached college late ........ And walked into a firing squad !!!!!!! She was mad at me for going to her residence and in the face of the firing - left, right and centre - I had no option but to wilt, completely decimated !

Thoroughly dejected, I took a seat at one corner of the last bench in the classroom and took out my note book and started to doodle a portrait of her - of whatever I could see of her- from my position. I didn’t notice the end of period, the lunch break and ultimately the end of the classes that day as I was engrossed on adding my imagination to her portrait. My concentration was broken by a pat on the shoulder. I looked up at her and before I could apologize for my earlier deeds, she sternly said, “ I need your note book - I will copy the notes of the classes I have missed”. I dumbly handed over my note book to her, she gave me a dazzling smile and walked away stuffing the notebook in her bag. “Yesssssssssssss....” i screamed in silent joy, pumping my fist, once she had turned round the corner.

When she came to return me the notebook she simply said, “ That portrait which you have drawn - I am keeping that with me”.
I had never been happier in my life.

For the second time I was woken from my day dreams by the screeching sound of the buzzer signalling the day’s end.

She didn’t come to college. I am sure now.

I felt that sense of desperation rising inside me. For the last two days I had been sitting outside and by now I was sure that something had happened to her again, like she was absent for two days last time. I decided to go straight to her home tonight.

Dusk was slowly covering up everything in her purple-to-dark envelope. She loved Jibanananda Das. I loved the way she used to recite -

Shomosto din er seshey Shishir er shobder moton shondhya ashey
Dana e roudrer gondho muchhey feley chil

The headlights of a car blinded me as I started to walk down the street to her house.

All sorts of confused ideas crossed my mind as i was walking. I thought of the invitation to her birthday party. “You should not wear that dreadful pair of jeans and that same black tee-shirt. Otherwise ..........!!!!!!”, she had said with an impish smile.

She had asked me out for coffee, for the first time in so many months. I thought she sounded a bit strange when she asked me but I was never going to decline any offer for coffee with her.

We had sat at the table and she took out an envelope from her bag and handed to me. I opened the envelope. Inside there were bits and pieces of paper. I dumped the entire contents on the table. The torn pieces of her portrait which I had drawn lay in front of me like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. I looked up at her.

“Father”, she said and averted her eyes.
Something exploded inside me. I jumped up sending the chair crashing back. Ignoring her pleadings, I violently pushed open the doors and ran out. Everything was a flaming red inside my head ...... in front of my eyes.

That was three days ago.

I shook my head to clear my mind. So long I could not muster enough courage to tell her what I wanted to say. But today has to be the day. Today I will tell her how much she means to me.

There was the building - the front entrance was open and somebody was standing outside. I walked past and the person did not seem to notice me. It was strangely quiet inside.

I pushed open the door of her room and walked in. She was slumped on the study table under the big mirror. This was where she had cut her birthday cake. There was so much fun and laughter then. But now she had her face buried in her palms, her shoulders shook uncontrollably as she cried silently. I bent down to hear something she was muttering.

“Why did you leave me like that”, she was murmuring between her sobs.
“I am here. I never left you anywhere. I never will”, I screamed as i took hold of her shoulder and tried to shake her back to her senses.
It was weird, as if she never heard me.
My eyes fell upon the crumpled newspaper on her table. The headlines seemed to scream back at me

TEENAGER RUN OVER BY SPEEDING TRUCK. DIED ON THE SPOT.

Shocked, I looked up at the mirror in front of me. Only the pink wall behind me stared at me through the mirror.

Rain

It was raining this morning. A soft silent rain that covered everything with fine silvery pixiedust. I went for a walk on the trail behind my house. It skirts a long narrow lake that winds through the meadows like a slender blue-green snake. The trail traces the curves of the lake, twisting and turning like the swaying moves of a belly dancer.
I was the only person on the trail. The houses lining the trail appeared to be asleep still, wrapped in the quilt of the blue grey morning light. The sky was a uniform grey, thick and heavy, like curd set in a clay pot. Rain fell incessantly covering my glasses with a filigree of droplets. The world seemed hazy, dreamlike. Like a watercolour painting coming to life.
I walked slowly enjoying the complete absence of human voices, lulled into meditation by the sounds of birdsongs and the steady, unchanging rhythm of my own footsteps hitting the paved trail.
Just around the corner there was a firangipani tree, bent in three places like an Odissi dancer in tribhangi. As I passed under the tree, a flower started to swirl gently towards the ground. I automatically reached for it. It landed on my palm like benediction, the yellow spots gleaming on the pristine white petals like dots of freshly applied turmeric. I stuck the flower in the buttonhole of my t-shirt and continued my walk. A brilliant green parakeet darted from one tree to another like an arrow piercing the sky.
The rain fell on the jade waters of the lake creating pretty concentric whorls that expanded and faded. I increased my speed breaking into a gentle run, rivulets of water running down my face. I ran two rounds, secure in the silence of people, lost in the language of birds and finally plonked on a bench under a gulmohar tree, tired and panting. The sky was clearing up slowly now, the greys were being replaced by large chunks of white.
A big grey heron came fluttering its giant wings and landed gently in the lake, rearranging the water into delicate wrinkles. It settled down, quietly waiting for its prey. I stretched my legs, taking a minute to enjoy the delicious self-inflicted aches.
The rain continued to fall in soft, barely audible whisper. All my thoughts settled down gradually. 

For a few wonderful moments I became the rain.

the miracle

once upon a time as winter set in, a large flock of flamingos were migrating to warmer places...

they were flying over a harsh arid desert when one of the flamingos spotted a beautiful oasis in the midst of barrenness....

the flamingo was feeling tired and thirsty and decided to fly down to the waters for a short rest.....

the water was so refreshing and the flamingo enjoyed the tryst with the oasis so much that he did not want to join his flock up in the sky. He did not heed the calls of the other flamingos, he was so engrossed with the oasis. His thirst satisfied, he broke into a flamingo dance to express his liking for the oasis.....

days dissolved into nights and nights rolled up their curtains to usher in newer days and the flamingo's liking for the oasis grew stronger.
other bigger animals came to the oasis to quench their thirst and this always made the flamingo angry....
'why do u allow these beasts to make your water muddy with their dirty hooves?' the flamingo would scream in his bird language.

the oasis would laugh as the gentle ripples of the water played around the legs of the flamingo
'oases are born to help the thirsty and tired'.......she seemed to say.
one night as the moon shone on the oasis, the flamingo realized that there was nothing to be seen beyond the shimmering waters.....everything apart from the oasis was frighteningly dark.

it was a feeling of peace......satisfaction......love....it was an inexplicable bonding..

that night the clouds gathered and there was a violent thunderstorm.....
the flamingo stood on one leg near the bank of the oasis and wished silently........
being a flamingo he could not pray, so he wished that may the oasis come to no harm......
he tried to spread his wings to protect the water from sands but the water became choppy and the flamingo had to shut his wings to stay up as if the oasis did not want him to fight her battles......

that was the last rain in many years....
the unforgiving sun beat down mercilessly day after day as water dried up slowly....

the animals started to abandon the oasis as water dried up.....
the oasis bed slowly cracked up under the scorching sun.......

the flamingo did not leave his beloved oasis.....
the shrill calls of flying flocks of birds went unheard......
the flying birds shook their head in dismay....
'poor flamingo is so out of practice and can't fly now', they discussed among themselves....
when the last drops dried out, the tired, thirsty, defeated swallow stretched his wings as wide as possible and laid himself down on the dry cracked bed of the oasis....

when he opened his eyes against the sun rays he could not believe his eyes....
a small tuft of grass has grown on the parched earth.....

'where did the water come from?' he thought closing his eyes as a strange comforting coolness from the dry ground seeped into his body......


since then it has rained again.....
new animals now come to the oasis to drink water ......
the flamingo also drinks water but only from a crack where he had seen the grass grow when everything was dry.......

the flamingo always thought about that magical comforting feeling from the oasis bed when everything seemed to be lost and there was no hope for life......
'i will not leave till i resolve the mystery', he decided.......'the oasis had saved my life'

of course flamingos can never be geologists....
so flamingos will never know about Artesian Wells.....
flamingos will also never know that although oases are born to quench thirst of others, all oases do not have artesian wells within themselves.....
so this flamingo will not be able to solve the mystery and will stay till the end....

A LUCKY FLAMINGO INDEED !!!

one of my favorite O'Henry stories

The Skylight Room

First Mrs. Parker would show you the double parlours. You would not dare to interrupt her description of their advantages and of the merits of the gentleman who had occupied them for eight years. Then you would manage to stammer forth the confession that you were neither a doctor nor a dentist. Mrs. Parker's manner of receiving the admission was such that you could never afterward entertain the same feeling toward your parents, who had neglected to train you up in one of the professions that fitted Mrs. Parker's parlours.

Next you ascended one flight of stairs and looked at the second- floor-back at $8. Convinced by her second-floor manner that it was worth the $12 that Mr. Toosenberry always paid for it until he left to take charge of his brother's orange plantation in Florida near Palm Beach, where Mrs. McIntyre always spent the winters that had the double front room with private bath, you managed to babble that you wanted something still cheaper.

If you survived Mrs. Parker's scorn, you were taken to look at Mr. Skidder's large hall room on the third floor. Mr. Skidder's room was not vacant. He wrote plays and smoked cigarettes in it all day long. But every room-hunter was made to visit his room to admire the lambrequins. After each visit, Mr. Skidder, from the fright caused by possible eviction, would pay something on his rent.

Then--oh, then--if you still stood on one foot, with your hot hand clutching the three moist dollars in your pocket, and hoarsely proclaimed your hideous and culpable poverty, nevermore would Mrs. Parker be cicerone of yours. She would honk loudly the word "Clara," she would show you her back, and march downstairs. Then Clara, the coloured maid, would escort you up the carpeted ladder that served for the fourth flight, and show you the Skylight Room.

It occupied 7x8 feet of floor space at the middle of the hall. On each side of it was a dark lumber closet or storeroom.In it was an iron cot, a washstand and a chair. A shelf was the dresser. Its four bare walls seemed to close in upon you like the sides of a coffin. Your hand crept to your throat, you gasped, you looked up as from a well--and breathed once more. Through the glass of the little skylight you saw a square of blue infinity."Two dollars, suh," Clara would say in her half-contemptuous, half- Tuskegeenial tones.

One day Miss Leeson came hunting for a room. She carried a typewriter made to be lugged around by a much larger lady. She was a very little girl, with eyes and hair that had kept on growing after she had stopped and that always looked as if they were saying: "Goodness me ! Why didn't you keep up with us?"

Mrs. Parker showed her the double parlours. "In this closet," she said, "one could keep a skeleton or anaesthetic or coal ""But I am neither a doctor nor a dentist," said Miss Leeson, with a shiver.Mrs. Parker gave her the incredulous, pitying, sneering, icy stare that she kept for those who failed to qualify as doctors or dentists, and led the way to the second floor back."Eight dollars?" said Miss Leeson. "Dear me! I'm not Hetty if I do look green. I'm just a poor little working girl. Show me something higher and lower."Mr. Skidder jumped and strewed the floor with cigarette stubs at the rap on his door."Excuse me, Mr. Skidder," said Mrs. Parker, with her demon's smile at his pale looks. "I didn't know you were in. I asked the lady to have a look at your lambrequins.""They're too lovely for anything," said Miss Leeson, smiling in exactly the way the angels do.

After they had gone Mr. Skidder got very busy erasing the tall, black-haired heroine from his latest (unproduced) play and inserting a small, roguish one with heavy, bright hair and vivacious features."Anna Held'll jump at it," said Mr. Skidder to himself, putting his feet up against the lambrequins and disappearing in a cloud of smoke like an aerial cuttlefish.

Presently the toxin call of "Clara!" sounded to the world the state of Miss Leeson's purse. A dark goblin seized her, mounted a Stygian stairway, thrust her into a vault with a glimmer of light in its top and muttered the menacing and cabalistic words "Two dollars!"

"I'll take it!" sighed Miss Leeson, sinking down upon the squeaky iron bed.

Every day Miss Leeson went out to work. At night she brought home papers with handwriting on them and made copies with her typewriter. Sometimes she had no work at night, and then she would sit on the steps of the high stoop with the other roomers. Miss Leeson was not intended for a sky-light room when the plans were drawn for her creation. She was gay-hearted and full of tender, whimsical fancies. Once she let Mr. Skidder read to her three acts of his great (unpublished) comedy, "It's No Kid; or, The Heir of the Subway."There was rejoicing among the gentlemen roomers whenever Miss Leeson had time to sit on the steps for an hour or two. But Miss Longnecker, the tall blonde who taught in a public school and said, "Well, really!" to everything you said, sat on the top step and sniffed. And Miss Dorn, who shot at the moving ducks at Coney every Sunday and worked in a department store, sat on the bottom step and sniffed.

Miss Leeson sat on the middle step and the men would quickly group around her.Especially Mr. Skidder, who had cast her in his mind for the star part in a private, romantic (unspoken) drama in real life. And especially Mr. Hoover, who was forty-five, fat, flush and foolish. And especially very young Mr. Evans, who set up a hollow cough to induce her to ask him to leave off cigarettes.

The men voted her "the funniest and jolliest ever," but the sniffs on the top step and the lower step were implacable.* * * * * *

I pray you let the drama halt while Chorus stalks to the footlights and drops an epicedian tear upon the fatness of Mr. Hoover. Tune the pipes to the tragedy of tallow, the bane of bulk, the calamity of corpulence. Tried out, Falstaff might have rendered more romance to the ton than would have Romeo's rickety ribs to the ounce. A lover may sigh, but he must not puff. To the train of Momus are the fat men remanded. In vain beats the faithfullest heart above a 52-inch belt. Avaunt, Hoover! Hoover, forty-five, flush and foolish, might carry off Helen herself; Hoover, forty-five, flush, foolish and fat is meat for perdition. There was never a chance for you, Hoover.

As Mrs. Parker's roomers sat thus one summer's evening, Miss Leeson looked up into the firmament and cried with her little gay laugh:"Why, there's Billy Jackson! I can see him from down here, too."All looked up--some at the windows of skyscrapers, some casting about for an airship, Jackson-guided."It's that star," explained Miss Leeson, pointing with a tiny finger.

"Not the big one that twinkles--the steady blue one near it. I can see it every night through my skylight. I named it Billy Jackson."

"Well, really!" said Miss Longnecker. "I didn't know you were an astronomer, Miss Leeson.""Oh, yes," said the small star gazer, "I know as much as any of them about the style of sleeves they're going to wear next fall in Mars."

"Well, really!" said Miss Longnecker. "The star you refer to is Gamma, of the constellation Cassiopeia. It is nearly of the second magnitude, and its meridian passage is--""Oh," said the very young Mr. Evans, "I think Billy Jackson is a much better name for it.""Same here," said Mr. Hoover, loudly breathing defiance to Miss Longnecker. "I think Miss Leeson has just as much right to name stars as any of those old astrologers had.""Well, really!" said Miss Longnecker.

"I wonder whether it's a shooting star," remarked Miss Dorn. "I hit nine ducks and a rabbit out of ten in the gallery at Coney Sunday."

"He doesn't show up very well from down here," said Miss Leeson. "You ought to see him from my room. You know you can see stars even in the daytime from the bottom of a well. At night my room is like the shaft of a coal mine, and it makes Billy Jackson look like the big diamond pin that Night fastens her kimono with."There came a time after that when Miss Leeson brought no formidable papers home to copy. And when she went out in the morning, instead of working, she went from office to office and let her heart melt away in the drip of cold refusals transmitted through insolent office boys. This went on.There came an evening when she wearily climbed Mrs. Parker's stoop at the hour when she always returned from her dinner at the restaurant. But she had had no dinner.

As she stepped into the hall Mr. Hoover met her and seized his chance. He asked her to marry him, and his fatness hovered above her like an avalanche. She dodged, and caught the balustrade. He tried for her hand, and she raised it and smote him weakly in the face. Step by step she went up, dragging herself by the railing. She passed Mr. Skidder's door as he was red-inking a stage direction for Myrtle Delorme (Miss Leeson) in his (unaccepted) comedy, to "pirouette across stage from L to the side of the Count." Up the carpeted ladder she crawled at last and opened the door of the skylight room.She was too weak to light the lamp or to undress. She fell upon the iron cot, her fragile body scarcely hollowing the worn springs. And in that Erebus of the skylight room, she slowly raised her heavy eyelids, and smiled.For Billy Jackson was shining down on her, calm and bright and constant through the skylight. There was no world about her. She was sunk in a pit of blackness, with but that small square of pallid light framing the star that she had so whimsically and oh, so ineffectually named.

Miss Longnecker must be right; it was Gamma, of the constellation Cassiopeia, and not Billy Jackson. And yet she could not let it be Gamma.As she lay on her back she tried twice to raise her arm. The third time she got two thin fingers to her lips and blew a kiss out of the black pit to Billy Jackson. Her arm fell back limply."Good-bye, Billy," she murmured faintly. "You're millions of miles away and you won't even twinkle once. But you kept where I could see you most of the time up there when there wasn't anything else but darkness to look at, didn't you? . . . Millions of miles. . . . Good-bye, Billy Jackson."

Clara, the coloured maid, found the door locked at 10 the next day, and they forced it open. Vinegar, and the slapping of wrists and burnt feathers proving of no avail, some one ran to 'phone for an ambulance.In due time it backed up to the door with much gong-clanging, and the capable young medico, in his white linen coat, ready, active, confident, with his smooth face half debonair, half grim, danced up the steps.

"Ambulance call to 49," he said briefly. "What's the trouble?""Oh, yes, doctor," sniffed Mrs. Parker, as though her trouble that there should be trouble in the house was the greater. "I can't think what can be the matter with her. Nothing we could do would bring her to. It's a young woman, a Miss Elsie--yes, a Miss Elsie Leeson. Never before in my house--"

"What room?" cried the doctor in a terrible voice, to which Mrs. Parker was a stranger."The skylight room. It--

Evidently the ambulance doctor was familiar with the location of skylight rooms. He was gone up the stairs, four at a time. Mrs. Parker followed slowly, as her dignity demanded.On the first landing she met him coming back bearing the astronomer in his arms. He stopped and let loose the practised scalpel of his tongue, not loudly. Gradually Mrs. Parker crumpled as a stiff garment that slips down from a nail. Ever afterward there remained crumples in her mind and body. Sometimes her curious roomers would ask her what the doctor said to her."Let that be," she would answer. "If I can get forgiveness for having heard it I will be satisfied."

The ambulance physician strode with his burden through the pack of hounds that follow the curiosity chase, and even they fell back along the sidewalk abashed, for his face was that of one who bears his own dead.They noticed that he did not lay down upon the bed prepared for it in the ambulance the form that he carried, and all that he said was: "Drive like h**l, Wilson," to the driver.

That is all.

Is it a story?

In the next morning's paper I saw a little news item, and the last sentence of it may help you (as it helped me) to weld the incidents together.

It recounted the reception into Bellevue Hospital of a young woman who had been removed from No. 49 East -- street, suffering from debility induced by starvation. It concluded with these words:

"Dr. William Jackson, the ambulance physician who attended the case, says the patient will recover."

10 Great Photography Quotes

Tomorrow will be bright and sunny

When I opened my eyes, an ink-blue night sky was spread over me and a soft rug of grass, under. Tufts of clouds floated in stealth across the moon. I could see stars twinkling between them. At a distance and all around, were silhouettes of trees. At that hour of the night they wore a somber look, as if bearing down from all sides. There was a drizzle softly descending like dew in the early hours of the morning. I realized that I was still lying in the golf course.

My throat was dry, so were the lips. But there was no way I could get any water here. So I just opened my mouth and let the rain drops find their way in. It was excruciatingly slow, nevertheless, a relief. I tried moving, but could not. Gradually, a sense of calmness came over me, as if my entire being was an integral part of the surreal setting.

The moon loomed large in the sky, like a bright silver coin fresh out of the mint. I could even see the dark spots on it. It was amazing that men had been there just two years ago, or was it three? I was not sure. My head felt a bit unclear. I think we were in class eight then. There were pictures of the Earth taken from above the moon, a blue beacon in the midst of unending blackness. Who could imagine that there were so much pain and conflict on that cosmic speck?

Kolkata was divided into vicious conflict zones in the South, North and in pockets elsewhere. Controlled by political parties of varying colours, each of the zones was a safe haven for people with compatible ideology or for those who had their heads down and lips shut tight. There were the ruling party, the lefts and the enigmatic ultra-lefts. Was there any other hue? I am not sure. All of them apparently wanted the best for the people but were in a diabolic dance of death amongst themselves. Body count went up by the day, especially of the young. Surprisingly, the rest of Kolkata seemed either oblivious of the conflict zones or preferred to look the other way.

The rain had picked up by then. Still I remained motionless. There was no point in trying to seek a shelter in the vast stretch of green. Instead, I drank some more drops of the clouds. They were in plentiful. I felt satiated, but weak. There was a growing numbness in my head and the body.

I was in class ten. Given the charged atmosphere in Kolkata, it was impossible not to have a political leaning. But my interest in politics was overrun by the urgency to study and make something out of my life. My childhood friend, Swapan, on the other hand, was deeply swayed by the dream to change the system and change it overnight. In fact, some evenings, we had arguments over the difference in our outlook and priorities. Sometimes these even turned out to be heated ones. However, eventually, we would leave our emotions aside and head home before my mother sent the younger brother in search of me.

The rain finally stopped and the sky cleared up, uncovering countless stars. “Tomorrow should be bright and sunny”, I thought. I realized that it was getting late and I needed to go home. Still, the thought of my friend crept back into my mind, once again.

Over time, Swapan became more and more impatient and intolerant. Our arguments were frequent and the intensity, stronger. It took a day or two to reconcile and not just the time to walk back to home. One day, at the peak of our debate, Swapan fiercely said that I have turned out to be a class enemy, an enemy of the working people. I was confused and even taken aback. The only class I was aware of was mine, class ten. I could not fathom how I can be an enemy of the people. Anyway, I decided to let it go. But, I was not sure if I knew my friend anymore. Eventually, Swapan decided to drop out of school. “It is a symbol of archaic, bourgeois system,” he said. “Also, I do not feel safe in the school area,” So Swapan decided to remain within his locality. It was a different zone, controlled by a different political party.

A meteorite flashed across the sky, bringing me back to the present. Shouldn’t I go home now? I thought. Mother would be getting anxious. But the moon, the grass, the eerie silence and the numbness nailed me to the ground. I felt calm yet sleepy and my strength seemed to be draining away. I slipped back into my thoughts.

Swapan and I rarely met after he had dropped out of the school. In six months, we totally lost touch. So when I was passing through his neighborhood this evening, I thought it would be great to drop by his home. Luckily, I did not have to go that far. Swapan was in a huddle in a nearby tea stall with a few other people who seemed to be college goers. I greeted him. Swapan did not share my joy. Instead, he seemed tensed and turned to the others and said, “He is the person I had told you about”. I was relieved. At least Swapan still thought of me and was not as far removed as I had assumed. He invited me to join. We talked till the street lights came on. They seemed like a fun bunch of people to be with. It was almost seven when I stood up and said, “I need to go home, now”. “We will also come along with you”, said Swapan. One of them, Arun, stayed back. He had a chore to do and said he would catch-up with us near the old temple.

On our way, we crossed the pond, half filled with water hyacinth, and the evening market. Arun joined us, as planned. I noticed that the people on the streets gave way to the group as they saw us approaching. It appeared that Swapan and his friends were well known around here. Some of them kept staring at me for quite some time. I guess they were wondering who the new member was. Anyway, at almost the fag-end of the journey, we took a short cut through the golf course, sneaking through the large hole dug under the boundary wall. It was the same one that Swapan and I had used since our childhood.

As the pack walked silently across the course, a sudden lightning sliced through the sky, lighting up everything and everyone nearby. I noticed something shining in Arun’s hand. The pack had stopped by then, as if lighting was the signal they were waiting for. I realized that I was surrounded. All around me were shadows of people, beyond them were those of the trees. Only Swapan stood at a distance, looking the other way. Before I could grasp the situation, one of them gripped me from behind and Arun stepped forward. He sunk the dagger into me; once, twice, thrice, and then I lost count. I slumped to the ground. All of them, except Swapan, came and stood over me. “End of another class enemy,” Arun said. “The path to revolution is a difficult one. There are no friends, mother, brother or father in this journey.” Then the shadows faded into the night. After a vain attempt to move or cry for help, I lost my consciousness.

Clouds had floated in again, so had the rain. It was a downpour this time. Nature seemed to be trying to ease my pain and cleanse my wounds. But they were too many and too deep. Tonight mother would wait till dawn. Brother would go from one house to another in search of me. Father would run from pillar to post to trace his son who had gone for the tuition. But all would return empty handed.

I struggled to keep my eyes open. Consciousness was slipping away yet again. Still I could feel the rain hammering down on my face. I could feel the blood flowing out of my body and seeping into the grass. “Down the veins and up the roots,” I smiled to myself and finally shut my eyes.

Tomorrow should be bright and sunny.