It was in the evening. Sun’s fluorescent rays to my right, as I glanced that way, filled my eyes as grains of sand would an hourglass. Between the rows of apartments, watching from the eightieth floor, I saw, doused with yellow, the street was sprinkled with men and women. I lifted my gaze over the slanted roof tops of brick red tiles and square patches of cement floors; the scene before me was witnessing a strange transformation.
Someone drove an SUV into our compound wall. The dhoti clad old man from first floor and a particularly bickering young woman were presently on the street below us. With a pair of long range binoculars, I observed the drama beneath me. The row of palm trees outside the apartment stood bare; hitherto they were planked by the compound wall, which now lay in rubble at their many feet. The youth had missed the transformer seated on a raised platform by a narrow margin, my word; the whole apartment would have been doused in flames. The SUV’s torrent had dented, by the spate of the boulder outside, many a car in the parking area. Mother and father, who were returning from the supermarket, overlooked the ‘first aid’ necessities of the bleeding youth.
It can hardly be argued that the blame rested on any one in particular. Now, sitting before the colony’s park and watching kids playing cricket, I let my mind hover over the unprecedented turn events took yesterday. Soon after the youth was deported, out of nowhere, a truck with brick load (bought for the repair of the compound wall) reverse geared, lost its balance and fell with a thud to its left. In a cloud of red smoke, the occupants coughed the whole evening.
Now, it’s time I introduce the readers to my wife; don’t let her attractiveness cloud your judgment. Almond shaped eyes with blue irises carpeting the dark pupils, she has, in the past, dangerously affected many a men, young and old. If memory serves me right, she wore a green sleeveless negligee on that day. A lace that ran in a crisscross pattern through the front of her dress was tied on her back, over the bump of her hips; another lace that ran over the sumptuous bosom was tied into a knot beneath the nape of her neck. The second knot, sewn into a frill, sauntered flirtatiously over her bare back that furrowed beguilingly on the spine. Mother was on her way to the temple with our neighbors; my wife expressed a wish to follow mother into the temple. I could not bear the thought of watching her back to me, with its vivacious charms, walking into the distance. But I relented.
Ominous dark clouds fogged the crack of the bow shape horizon to the left; an amorphous being settled its thick melting paws of pitch black darkness on a bereft electric pole here and a housing colony there. The dark being crawled atop the sinuous rocky backs of the succession of sea elephants that lazily held hands together from end to end of the horizon. To the right, sun crouched low to escape the impending doom as the dark being’s yawn enveloped, everything from left to right, leaving in its wake, a sullen cry of light.
I remember, from where I stood in the dark by the shade of a giant sized Buddha, I could see angels melting out of their rock sculptures, and dropping one by one into the lake. Buoyantly, in white garb, they stayed afloat as moonshine does on water. There they singed, bathed and danced in merry. As I recall, when my wife found me in a loving embrace with one of the angels, a thought of compunction hit me. In a profound mood of judgment, I must confess, I was to blame. Not for the fact that I was caught in a compromising position, but that from the vantage point of Budha’s shade, only a while ago, I happened to notice my wife, mother and rest of the ladies inside the temple. Instead of assuming a posture of precaution or measures to that effect, I dived into the pond. The last thing I remember of the incident is the fact that wife and mother were getting along unusually well, following their finding me in the lake. My word; I was in jolly good spirits.
Grandmother and two other ladies were seated on the ground. The evening was as pleasant as any other. Yesterday’s event, I must say, ended in an amicable resolution. I promised my wife, only this morning, in the august presence of mother, that I would seek refuge in the wife for future moon light sonata. Presently, the old ladies were finding it rather difficult to penetrate my thoughts. One of them eventually spoke “what happened this morning?” With a monocle stitched into the eye, grandmother expressed that I oversee the arrangements for their visiting the haunted mansion.
In the mansion, following a dramatic escapade, grandmother undid the bandages of her legs replete with scars of fatigue. To tell you more about the incident, when the four of us stepped into the mansion, one of the old ladies sprang up in emotion. Although it appeared innocuous for a while, soon the boulders came tumbling down and I had to carry the only survivor, grandmother, on my back for a while. Our struggle ended with my hoisting her up on my shoulders so she crawled up the ancient stair case and finally reached up to the roof to dislodge with her blind serrated eyes, an opening that let the sun pouring in plenitude.
In the end, it has come to this – that night when I dragged an angel into my arms, she declined and I persevered. A certain roguishness escaped my person, as I dragged her out of the lake into the temple. Here, I proceeded to plant a kiss on her lips, at which point she tore herself away and lodged firmly in the sculpture. Today, she is frozen. Her corset with brocaded girdle is all that remains with me.
To the left, the dark being was now undergoing an embryonic development; white pollen produced (with the turn of a switch) by tiny ant like creatures housed in their square shaped anthills, germinated on the dark being’s plume. Now, as its underbelly couched before me, the many spotted (white and pale yellow) plume saw the spots multiplying as though a disease spread through its tail. On the right, the dark being’s sharp yellow beak (crack of the dawn) gradually metamorphosed with the being finally dropping the glowing mango into the sea of darkness.
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