A Destined Eureka
The apprehension of 360° , this time, only led to the civilized show of the hunt and the hunted. Its hoot didn’t revert. Probably, couldn’t find its way back among the hocus-pocus of the humane freedom.
Did the most awaited dawn chirp the dusk of an end or did it mourn the beginning of the end?
Somewhere in the clouds of Kolkata, presently.
Hello? Anyone there?... still? … Anyways, I have waited for 78 years, and it has never mattered. Because I know he has always heard me, felt the stroke of my hand through his hair. That’s it, only he ever mattered to me. I am happy though, that Ustad didn’t return. He would have been disheartened as his ‘forever young’ granny’s hair, which he once loved to braid, aren’t long anymore. They got chopped.
A languorous petrichor of September 1938 had welcomed the day I found him, or rather I should say, he found me. After weeks of the clouds’ tantrums, I had expected Shakespeare’s head, cloudless at dawn. I took an umbrella with me, not ignoring nature’s fraudulency. Checking on one of my neighbours, Laxmi, who was diagnosed with some incurable disease, as they liked to call it, had become my daily morning chore. With an inflammable belief in my sharbat’s healing power, I waited patiently for her to open the door. I was seven minutes early that day, could feel it. The light in the balcony had not been turned off. My attention shifted to a naked little boy, all wet and muddy clinging to the letter box. I descended the stairs and he flinched as I approached him. Didn’t say a word, but emptied my glass of sharbat through his eyes. I picked him in my arms as the beads of my necklace replaced his fear with curiosity. It was before I could ask the little one his name, a Babu screamed with a dry throat, “FIRE! IT’S BURNING IT ALL!” I turned around to find Laxmi’s apartment in flames. A gobbledygook of all-of-a-sudden concerned eyebrows gathered in seconds. Breaking in through the windows, they found a matchbox right on her table. Laxmi, just like me, had paired with her own self to run the race. On these tracks of already drawn lines, we at least had owned the azadi of sharing the same air. Laxmi was the only family that Murtuza had and Murtuza was the mother that Laxmi never had known.
The boy coughed and was choking, the glass of sharbat was already halfway through the corridors of his ribcages.
