A DIFFERENT BEAT

“Either you were late or I was” he heaved into the phone. The voice pierced the last cell in my heart and I bled in tears. “Bye.” He was accelerating his journey away from me, never to return. I bit my lips, cried in soft monotones audible for just two of us. “Don’t hang up, please,” I mumbled. It was beating wild in my heart, the undying flutter of wings. Wings of love, craving to be together. Realization that we would never be husband and wife, would never be one, chained my wings. It hurt me more with each passing microsecond. “I love you,” he said. Every time he had said this in the past, I danced like a child in my heart. The sun would shine right there in the centre of my heart. But this time that very sun was burning my heart. “What use?” I cried. “I know. But, I will love you for ever.” He sounded less guilty than he should have been. Here, he was offering water to my thirsty being for ever, with the condition that I cannot have even a single drop of it. I was waiting...

The smile on her face was still the same, as I had seen her on my 7 th birthday.   But the red lipstick had lost its glow and the fair skin looked a bit tanned. It was not the red glowing sun that had baked her brown as she had been indoors for more than a dozen years. It was the dust and years of negligence. I had once shared my childhood with her. The red saree with its golden spots carefully spun had given bright colours to my dreams I had woven on yarns of childhood games. She looked like a bride in her bright red saree celebrating life with golden bangles, tingling the bell of festivity. She smelt of jasmine.           Now, her beauty is a blurred reflection of the past. The bangles are broken and red saree has faded. She now smells of kerosene that I had once accidentally spilled on her. Her smile did not elicit a smile from me. But I was tempted to pick her up from my closet. There she lay for seventeen years, uncared and...

I switched on the O Watt bulb in our room and sat up from a distant dream snapped abruptly by the whining I heard. She was sitting there on her bed with her legs neatly folded under her pillow. She had her elbows on the pillow and her face was cusped in her tender fingers that had played with mine many a time in the past. Her hair fell loose on either side of her cheeks and she was staring at the light blue pillow cover. I got up from my bed and went and sat next to her. Her pillow had a wet drop of her tear. The drop got larger as I looked at it. But my daughter never looked back at me. “Munna” I waited for her to look at me. She was lost in her realm of I don’t know what. “Munna,” I tried once again. She did not respond. That moment I realized my daughter, sitting near me was far away from me. Far far away where my helplessness was measured in her indifference to the world around. When your dear ones do not respond to your call or sound, you are like a man caught in a whirlpo...

    I stared into the distant fields of patchy green and dusty brown. The weather was hot and I was sweating. I pulled out my handkerchief from my pocket and wiped my face. It was stinking as I had not washed it for the last three days. I stuffed it back into the pocket and rested my head on the bars of the window. The hot sun spat on my face and I moved back in reflex. Warm air blew in and made me more uncomfortable. I looked around and counted seven others in the transport bus. It was half an hour past eleven and I was heading home after a week of competitive exams.     The driver stopped the bus at the next bus stop where an old woman and her grandchild boarded the bus. The child eagerly jumped into the side seat in front of me. His grandmother swaying with the bus’s movement held on to the rods as she struggled to sit along with her grandchild. I closed my eyes for some time and slept in between. When I woke up, the bus had occupants in all the seats...