The Moment

I looked into his moist sparkling eyes. There were wrinkles around them. He appeared to smile, but I couldn’t be sure. Sleepily he looked around, not recognizing anyone…anyone but me. After all, we went a long way back. He felt familiarity in my touch and began drifting off to sleep again. I put a blanket around him, it wasn’t as warm as he was used to. I noticed he slept with his mouth open- in a toothless, almost comical smile. I realized there were so many things I didn’t know about him even after all this time.

He looked very peaceful in that sanitized environment. Complex gadgets beeped all around and nurses and doctors walked scuttled about. I don’t know how long I stood there just looking at him, waiting hoping he would talk to me like all those hidden conversations we had. For nine months, in those stolen moments, I spoke to him and he knew my every heartbeat.

He suddenly woke up, yawned and looked at me again with big sleepy eyes and I realized that the journey had only just begun, for me and my baby…

The Retribution

The rain was beating down hard on the parapet, loud enough to drown out muffled screams. He hurriedly rummaged through the cupboards and upturned every drawer. There had to be money hidden away somewhere! Old ladies like her didn’t go to the bank so often. His experience told him there would be a wad of cash stashed away somewhere.

He searched frantically for what seemed like forever and all he found was three hundred rupees and an expensive looking watch. He finally gave up and walked to the door. On the way he glanced once more at her curled up body on the kitchen floor, lying motionless in a pool of blood. Her eyes were still open, a strange bewildered look on her face. She seemed almost alive, the trusting old woman.

She held his attention a moment too long and he didn’t see the broken vase lying on the floor. He tripped over and hit his forehead hard on the shoe rack. He was conscious long enough to hear a sharp crack and the warm trickle on blood running down his cheek…and then he sank into the blackness.

 

Love Story

‘Next Station: Bandra’ said the recorded notification system of the local train.

She climbed into the crowded compartment with her father. The compartment was too crowded to afford either of them a place to sit and in the jostling of the crowd that followed, she was pushed further and further away from her father and landed up right in front of him. She looked up at him, slightly uncomfortable at the proximity and in a moment their world changed. In that one unexplainable moment, it was like a star was born in a faraway galaxy and world stopped moving. The heat, the dust, the crowd all blurred into the city that sped by outside and they both just stood there looking at each other. There was something in the way she leaned into him when the train curved sharply on the tracks and the way he stood firmly before her. And all of a sudden, the next station came and her father pulled her away from him and she was lost in the crowd. He remained there, stunned, as the train began to move again.

‘Next Station: Santacruz’

The Wait

That evening he came home knowing he would paint his masterpiece. Relics of his past hung in every reputed gallery in the world, and yet he knew he hadn’t found the one. A lifetime had been spent waiting of the masterpiece. Now it was time.

As the sun sank behind the cluster of busy homes and hardwood trees, he lit a candle by the table. The blank white canvas stared at him, waiting to be painted upon. The whiteness was meaningless, mute and unthinking. The drying paint on the palette having long resigned to its fate, waited to be touched by the brush. And the brush rested listlessly in his hand, waiting to be lifted again. And he looked out of the window, waiting for his inspiration.

By morning not a drop of paint had touched the canvas and the brush lay on the floor. Once more he looked at the blank white canvas, but now it spoke volumes. It spoke of the endless wait of the night, the unused canvas, the untouched paint, the paintbrush on the floor, the inspiration that never came…and yes it was a masterpiece.