Chapter 1

Stanza One

Time means nothing if it is all you have and this is exactly Lana’s case since Bagheera had been skyjacked into the Great Beyond. She is staring blindly into the Botanic Garden not minding the sun shooting its gritty rays into her eyes. Who’d be hurt by a sting if a part of you, the one nearest to your heart, had been slashed off?

-My arms are waiting to caress you

And to my heart to press you-

A soundtrack of a black and white film plays in whisper at a crumbling film theatre inhabited by the ghosts of past gone by

Lana knows that to mourn is wrong.

Ruminating over a loss, instead of trying to fill up its void, is deadly

Get up and walk, Lana!

Rewrite the Lazarus parable!

Back off from your flawed past towards a self-made present

You know how to start anew

This is not the first time that a disaster hit you!

Rewriting what happened is the only way how to rise Bagheera from the dead

A sheet of paper, a pen, a time-yellowed photo and courage not to mind your hurt

That’s the true love story

A kind of calligraphy of a soul obliterating ghostly markings

When your story refuses to remain untold

Bagheera’s story sets off with the photo of a little girl weeping in front of a forbiddingly high wire mesh fence with a black kitten perched on its top. The kitten stares unfeelingly at the girl’s chagrin gaping at the tears running down the girl’s cheeks

The kitten is not cruel

The kitten just doesn’t know what pain is

The pain of loosing

The realm of those who love to excess

The girl is blonde

The kitten is black

White and black

The colours of the straightforward morality of fairy tales

This is a chilling story

To be told in a halting voice

As if you were groping in the dark

Where love goes disappearing

Like a switched off light

Stanza Two

Time goes by printing another story

The little girl is not that story

Its order has been reversed

The kitten is the needy one

Look at this tiny creature with its “I should care!” mask slipping from its scrawny little face

Its miaow is such a sad, weak moan nobody will hear

Ignore Brothers Grimm cruel tales!

I am telling a fairy talefor well-behaved children taught tobelieve that the world is a cosy place to live and all is well and ends well and the scrawny stray and the adorable little girl will set off for an eternal life of never ending bliss

This is how a story should be

Not how it is

There is pain where there is love

Whipping a heart to beat so fast that it is about to break

Are seventeen years of togetherness when the stray and Lana fused into one soul paid for too dearlyif one of them is gone?

Stanza Three

Bagheera’s paw is scratching my hand demanding attention; the same one she is bestowing on me

There is a rule in life. The only decent way to take is to give back, the bylaw of Bag’s relationship and mine

It was broken when Bagheera left me alone with my wrenching need for her scrawny, insistent paw forcing itself into my life- our life!

Bagheera’s death is where my fairy taleturns into drama

Was Bagheera’s and Lana’s need for one another a foretaste for Hell’s flames?

Weren’t black cats crossing your way fathomed for causing misery?

Is Bagheera my blessing or my curse?

If I’d some chance of writing her off me

Shall my life with that part missing be still a life?

Stanza Four

I breathe in the sick stench of death at the veterinary ward, my eyes on the needle nearing Bagheera’s heart while her paw clawing into my flesh, demands all of me

For one last time

Her forever time

Stanza Five

Was killing Bagheera a fair justification not to let her suffer?

Was it my incapacity

To see her suffer?

May killing mean loving?

Loving to death…

A heart stops beating

One heart?

Just one heart?

Death