Sher:
Khule asmaa me main kabhi udta nahi,
Shazar wo purana agar tootata nhi.
Translation (Lantern):
When
a sheltering
tree falls, you
finally see the limitless
sky.
Author’s note:
Author’s note: Thank you Theo for the first line to help me break out of my writer’s block.
The clock said it was bath time, but I was not up to the struggle this evening.
Whoever made this rule about regular bathing must be tested by a doctor. It takes days to build up the cover of mud and dirt to keep those ticks away. And once it is achieved, you wash it all off for a splash in water? Sheer madness, I say.
And who would want to sit in water and wash their face ever? I shiver at the thought.
I uncurl from my bed and sneak a peak at Becky. She is still busy on her computer. Engrossed.
May be I still have a chance…
I quietly move toward the cat flap hoping Becky wouldn’t notice. When she doesn’t move or make an attempt to stop me, I quicken my pace, covering the last few feet in a mad dash, hoping to get out through the cat flap in a single jump.
But my head in stuck in the flap and I can’t move it in or out. I mew for help. Becky replies in an exasperated tone, “Not again!”
As she pulls me out of the cat flap and off the floor, I try to scratch and bite her. Resigned, she tries to bribe me, “Come on, Mama! Be a good girl and I will give you a can of Tuna.”
What can I say? Tuna has that effect on me. I calmly follow her to the bath. As Becky settles me on my bath chair, I hear her sob.
Here I am,
waiting for you,
but your arms are full with another
who speaks as and when you want,
what you want and
however much you want–
a slave to your wishes,
forever your companion,
sleek, stylish–
your smartphone…
Author’s note: The first line of this story was offered as a prompt by Darlene when I had hit a writer’s block. I hope I did it justice.
She whispered, “Home at last.”
Last year, he had hit his wife in a fit of rage, as he had so many times before that. But this one became one time too many. She had succumbed to the injuries. He had his job cut out for him as he disposed off the body and dodged the authorities, trying to prove that she had, in fact, run away with her new lover. The case was finally closed and he was celebrating his new-found freedom with a new date when ‘she’ had walked out of the closet where he had once hid her body.
She had never been a pretty one and death hadn’t done her any favours–unmade hair, shrivelled skin, bloodshot eyes, the eerie air she carried around her and the rancid smell that accompanied her had made him shit in his pants. Weirdly enough, his date couldn’t see anything and she only smelled a faint flowery perfume! So, when he went berserk, she assumed he was a crackpot and had run for it, leaving him alone with a murderous ghost who wouldn’t kill him, just brought him close enough every time. She had promised she would make him feel every single scar he had given her in her lifetime; that she would make sure he regretted the day he had married her. She had made good of her promise ever since.
When she wasn’t hitting him with things or strangling him in sleep, she would pleasantly discuss how she would torture him once she was stronger. She would often show up suddenly behind him in the mirror, in the car, in the grocery store and at work; and scare the daylights out of him. She would touch his back in the bath, leaving a trail of goosebumps, promising an eternity of pain once she was ready. He couldn’t tell anyone she was haunting him because saying that would mean confessing she wasn’t eloping and actually dead.
He tried praying, but his prayers only kept her mildly amused. Apparently, when you kill someone and they come back to haunt you, God declines to interfere and all bets are off. Eye-for-an-eye and all that. He had tried holy water, witchcraft…
When in a moment of insanity, he had begged her to kill him, she had smiled sweetly, “Killing you atones your sins. It frees you to go to heaven while I rot here in nothingness. I certainly can’t lose my only source of entertainment, can I? I want to finish what you started, very slowly, in the dragged out painful manner that you always loved…”
After too many sleepless nights with an overactive ghost trying to strangle him, always falling a little short of killing him, he had fallen sick. Hospitalised, he would wake up to find her sitting on his bed near his feet, smiling cruelly, waiting for him to wake up, so she could start over again…
He hated her now even more than he had hated her in life. He knew he had been right to kill her in the first place. But after too many sessions like this, he broke down. Assuming that gradually she would gather more power and hurt him worse, he had split his veins open, hoping to be finally rid of her. She had smiled at him sweetly then and whispered, “Running away, are we?”
When he left his body behind, he waited for the white lights to arrive, how it happens in the movies. But none came. Suicide was a sin. He realised he wasn’t going to heaven or anywhere at all. He finally understood what she had meant by once she was “ready” and “stronger”–that he had entered the same domain where she had been gathering power–when she had given him a twisted smile that promised an eternity of endless pain and whispered, “Home at last!”
Tere ishq ki deewanagi
tari ho kuchh is tarah,
Wo deewaro me chunwa dein
aur hum kahein, “Shukran Allah!”
English Translation:
Lost in your love so,
When the world immures me
in the walls to kill me,
I wouldn’t know…
The food is never so enticing
as when you are denied.
Water never has such a hold
until your lips are dried.
But you wait for the signal
and a not a moment before
do you let it touch your lips
as you surround it
and yet ignore it,
praying,
waiting until you are free
to devour it.
Ah! Bliss!
Authors Note: Our dear old delivery guy is grumpier than usual.
I hate these foreigners.
They swoop in, sully our lands, eat our food, and stutter around with their red heads held high as if they own the place. Sometimes I wish I could take them all aside and show them what we do with encroachers. But we have hosted them all our lives. I can’t get on a killing spree…
Not that I am afraid of them! I mean, I know they are bigger and stronger, and their group is too huge, and the raw power they radiate when they descend together on their huge black wings and too long crooked beaks held high is awe-inspiring. And our women “Ooh” and “Aah” as they pass.
Agh! I wish I could take a swing at that massive black one my sweety is pining for. Every time he is around, something comes over her. She has never been clumsy before but when he looks in her direction, she drops whatever fish she is holding and has to brace herself with both legs. You would think we never taught her how to fish.
Sometimes, she stands taller, ruffles her feathers, plumps them up and cleans herself too often, as if vying for his attention; as if this foreigner is going to fall in love with her and stay here forever or take her along with him. He won’t. He is here only for the winters. Come summers and he will fly away leaving her high and dry. Just the thought makes me want to peck him to death.
Not that he is interested in her. For all the attention he gives her back, she could be a mouse in the field. He just flies around showing off, his eyes only for the woman he brought along–never even sparing a second look for my pretty girl. Every time he passes without looking at my sweety, I can see her heart break in the way her face drops, and that too makes me want to break some wings.
I want to peck him to death or, at least, want him to leave the place before my sweety loses it. I wish she would choose a stork who would love her or, better still, stay away from all the storks forever so I don’t have to kill them all…
Sigh! I am not sure anymore what I want anymore. I just wish being a father was easier.
I open mail and I see
my bank trying to reach me
offering a loan I didn’t ask for.
Then there are recruiters
mailing me
on a 10 year-old resume
offering me a job
that I needed when
I was still growing teeth.
People are begging me
to take half of their bank account
to get them out of their country.
I have won competitions
I didn’t enter,
and I have won enough lotteries
to make jealous the Arab emporer.
And then, there are
WordPress notices,
and subscription mails from world over…
What I sought and didn’t find
was a single mail
seeking me as a person
(not as a user or a bank account).
No one misses me…
We have just faced the worst fear of parents–children stepping out of their control zone! Our daughter has finally joined school. For 5 hours, she is out of our sight and very much on our minds. I can only wonder how parents send their children to hostels or marry them off. We can’t breath properly if until we see her again. It is like a part of us leaves with her. The house is too quiet and weird without her chatter.
And then, there is the fear for her well being–we know she is in safe hands. (My husband visited the school multiple times to ensure that.) But still the days and nights before the first day at school were filled with instructions.
Note that there are no doors in the classes of this school to ensure children don’t shut them, but still our daughter indulged us.
And then there was more serious stuff about good touch-bad touch and self-defense heirarchy with increasing severity. If someone corners you or you don’t like their touch:
And so we go again…
In the end I was afraid that I had converted my daughter into a walking landmine, ready to explode at the touch, and I had to calm her down, reminding her that most people are nice and generous. They don’t hurt people and usually take care of children. I am wondering whether I have done a good job.
Even after all these preparations, on the first day, after walking her to school, my husband went back there to check on her after an hour and would have gone again if it wasn’t against the rules. He reached the school half an hour early to bring her back home.
All these years, we had waited for the day to come when our daughter would go to school and we would have some quiet time. Now, all we can do is look at the clock slowly ticking away the time until she returns home and fills our day again with her constant chatter.
I wanted to write about this for past one month but either I didn’t have time or the will or energy… So, our area is in temperate zone, around one kilometre from the river–half a kilometre by flight… of course planes don’t fly for such short distance, but birds do and that’s why we often see a lot of water birds here. Also, there is a small farm–I mean, really tiny farm–across the road inside what once used to be a government park. Which means that we get lot of birds around harvest and tilling. And there are trees, quite a lot of them where bird’s nest.
In short, it is a bird watcher’s paradise.
Every year, during winters I and my daughter spend an incredible amount of time on the rooftop, taking in the sun, watching birds and feeding birds. Several birds visit the rooftop on a daily basis and others we see in the overly large trees closer to water and larger fields close by.
We have gray and black Crows, Eagles, Hawks, Owls, Peacocks, Rock Pigeons, Wood Doves, Orange-black Mynah, Yellow-brown Mynah, Pied Mynah, , RufousTreepie, Babblers, Barbets, Cuckoo, Parrots, Magpies, Sunbirds, Sparrows, Tailor Birds, Kingfishers, Egrets and Lapwigs as a usual fare.
We also get guest birds during winters: green pigeon, Indian gray hornbill, black Ibis, brahmini starlet, speckled finch, black and white finch and others unnamed but awaited birds that grace us with their presence every year.
Out of all these birds, Gray Hornbill and Green Pigeon are the most difficult to take pictures of because of their colour and reclusive behaviour. They choose the densest tree and the shortest flight route. They move from trees to tree, hardly ever crossing more than a few feet at a time. A bunch of them is nesting in a tree that is just far enough that my phone never captures their picture. The only way is to either befriend the neighbours who live close by (not my cup of tea) or climb to the highest branches of the 60-feet tree (What are you even suggesting?!). So I had send out a prayer to God to let me take a pic and they started coming to a tree closeby so I and my daughter can look at them properly.
I took a few pictures. See if you can spot them.
first pic: At least 5 hornbills in the tree along with starlets
second pic: what horn bill looks like
third pic: Black Ibis
Fourth pic: at least 8 green pigeon.
Let me know if you see anything in the first and last pic. 😄
Short Stories | Fish-eye Perspective 