To drown yourself in this stinking water is a bad thought. When you take the last breath before everything ends this foul smell would suffuse into your brain. don’t you think that moment must be sacred. You feel the world for the last time.
Nonsense! I will rot like a vegetable after I die. I will add my part to its stink. Then what is the point in worrying about a foul smell? Stop thinking.
If the wind could stop for a moment, he thought. Let there be no smell. If the earth could suck the air? Make a vacuum. Let there be nothing.
For the last time he wept within his arms and jumped .
Suku had a dream wherein Devi kissed him on his lips. Before their lips were unlocked he woke up.
“Devi.. get me those onions” he heard her mother in law shouting from downstairs.
“Never before” , he thought as he felt the pain of love.
What makes a woman beautiful? The hair .. the violently moving black threads around her face.
The way she look straight into your eyes would make you sink in your desire for sometime. Before you rise up she would be gone. What has she told you? You will never know.
Who cares if she is a widow? She is the woman I love. But her father in law, that dying old man, will he accept? No he will never, because he knows my past. My illness. I shouldn’t have told him.
Would she accept at the first place? is she still devoted to her dead husband?
No you are not worthy of her.
“Suku..” someone called him from downstairs
“have lunch from here, we have prepared for you also.. come.”
After a shock treatment patient fainted on the bed. All he wants was to sleep. But each time he closed his eyes thousand faces peeped out from darkness. They laughed in his ears like the sound of flowing water.
“Your head is full of noises, stop it” one face screamed
“You are tired beyond words”
“Let us play cards, if you don’t know I will teach you”
Doctor slammed the door before he went.
A train just passed before he reached the station. When Suku sat on the bench disappointedly, Sunshine fell on his face like a slap. He moved the bench.
It was crammed up with people going to work. The exhausted train spat out smoke and panted forward.
Suku stood near the bathroom door and began to snore. The disturbed crowd muttered curses.
The sweating bodies glued together and one could feel the dampness of others chest. They unfolded the packets of burdens and threw at each other.
Suku felt a jerk that made his knees bend.
“Do you believe in God?” Devi’s father in law asked him
“Only when I suffer, to hate him.”
“What is the point in that?”
“Nothing”
“What else do you hate?”
“I hate myself”
One night suku thought he wants to dance naked under the moon. He climbed steps leaving his cloths on the floor.
From a distant house a radio played an old melody. Suku took steps as the singer reached her peek of voice and fell in to silence. Then danced to a song that lingered in his mind.
Moon looked down in amusement and showered light on him. Suku found inside the rhythm grows intense, his body moved rapidly to meet the beat.
Then he sensed he doesn’t follow the rhythm. His mind and body were drawn apart.
He fell on the ground like a wet cloth.
“Devi” suku called as she was washing her cloths. She turned in a shock. She never anticipated such a call.
Suku thought for the last time, should he tell her what he has in mind. He couldn’t think.
“Devi, I love you”
As he sighed he felt he has lost the burden that haunted him. Now if Devi reject him how will he take it? He knew what he would do?
He will hate her. For not loving him back.
Devi rushed into the kitchen. And he heard a silent cry.
He felt hurt. His mind has cheated him. Man and woman cannot love each other.
Before the ambulance could arrive, the old man , Devi’s father in law, his house owner, died. Last thing he did was to call out his dead son’s name.
Devi closed herself in a room to cry alone. Her mother in law was telling the dead man something she forgot to tell him when he was alive.
bloom..
Suku fell into the pit that water made for him and he swam towards darkness.
