Twelve hours of Forever: Part-2 When the Sky Turned Crimson.

-

A sense of renewed vigor laced her steps as she trotted back home, absorbing the curious little affairs of people around her. For once, she felt that she wasn’t chasing time but rather walking with it.

Walking under the shower of autumn­-­burned leaves, under an overcast sky, helped in calming her nerves, a gentle gush of wind caressing her out of any remaining misery. It was only a matter of a few moments before she found herself at the doorstep of her home again.

With jerky steps filled with impatient glee, she fetched her car keys and took, quite surprisingly, her baba’s car for a spin. It was kept untouched in her garage since her baba’s demise, perhaps as a token of his memory.

She slid into the seat. The engine roared to life, and with it, so did her memories—her baba's laughter, the winding roads, gelato in the afternoons.

For hours, she drove around the city, taking roads that led to old, forgotten bonds of friendship—delicate threads, woven and broken apart by the interplay of fate. It took the entirety of the day, and by the time she left the warm embrace of her last acquaintance, crimson hue had already enveloped the autumn sky, marking the beginning of the end.

Fathima could just smile, a single tear making its way down her cheek as she drove to the graveyard one last time, a fresh bouquet in hand and notebook.

Hushed silence enveloped the place, yet it remained far from eerie; rather, it was a consoling embrace of nothingness that helped calm Fathima as she began pouring her emotions into words. It took the form of a letter—a letter to her baba, moulded by her flood of emotions. Under sniffling mumbles, she weaved a web of emotions and then tucked it within the rose bouquet.

“I lived today, Baba,” she whispered. “Just like you would have wanted me to.”

With tearful eyes she somehow managed to reach her apartment, pondering over her life choices… just one chance was all that she needed to make it right again. Was she really gonna die? or was this all a figment of her superstition? For once she started to question her sanity but a splash of cold water helped to wash away this mental tussle.

She slumped against the couch, massaging her heels which ached from the entire day’s excursion. A peculiar sense of satisfaction arose within her- the smiling faces of her friends and acquaintances told her that her life wasn’t pointless after-all. She prided herself that she had never wronged them, betrayed them… in the end, that’s all that really matters.

She smiled, hoping she could have done this more often; yet, her share of life had been, in a peculiar sense, well-lived too, and that was all the contentment she could have at this moment.

She yawned, her eyelids getting heavier with exhaustion. She fought against it for as long as possible, until she finally gave in to the bliss of sleep.

***

The next morning, sunlight filtered softly through the curtains, and Fathima stirred awake on the same couch—alive, untouched by fate’s darker whims. For a long moment, she simply lay there, her breath steady, her heart light. And then the tears came—not of sorrow, but of profound, liberating relief.

Maybe the man in her dreams had never meant death in its literal sense, maybe his words were a nudge—a whisper to shed the husk of the life she had been living, one that would herald a new chapter in life.

It had not been the end of her life… but the end of a version of herself that had forgotten how to live.

And in its place? A quiet beginning. One that smelled of old roses, tasted of sweet gelato, and pulsed with memories, warmth, and a legacy worth leaving—just as her baba would have wished for his little girl.

-The End

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Forgotten Battalion

-
Mud swallowed every step that private Thompson took. The November rain had turned the mooring lands of Hürtgen Forest into a sucking mire, its damp air reeking of decay and rot. He trudged forward, armed with his mud covered rifle, in this eerily silent forest with its trees casting a suffocating gloom over him. Last night, his regiment had been ambushed by the Germans, forcing them to disperse in the dead of night to avoid being gun down. He remembered losing the company of his comrades, and then his balance as he tripped midflight in this usurping mud land. The next thing he knew; he was in the middle of nowhere in this hellish battle land. Alone and forgotten. But then he saw them, in a distance, a heart-wrenching march of death. He hid, he crawled through the muddy swampy land till he reached a point where these wavering figurines took the shape of soldiers- slow but fluid and unwavering in their movements. They stood in the mist-shrouded trench ahead. Their uniforms were old—b...
Read more

The Forgotten Village

-
Young Evelyn hadn’t set out to be a war reporter. In early 1940s, women seldom did so, but young Evelyn was different. She was a budding journalist, eager and ambitious yet confined to writing human interest stories for the morning daily. She had grown up in a household where current events and world affairs were freely discussed over dinner. Often she would hear the stories of the Great War and chafe at the limitations placed on her by the virtue of her gender. She yearned to cover the stories that mattered, stories that shaped the world. In pursuit of this cause, she repeatedly applied for overseas assignments but was only met with rejection. “The front line is a cruel place, one not for a woman” she’d often hear the editor say but her tenacity knew no bounds. She was driven by a belief to tell the war-bound tales from where the bombs fell and lives were torn apart. Her breakthrough, however, came unexpectedly. An older correspondent, tom Anderson, was critically injured in a bombard...
Read more

The Veiled Woman of Kolkata

-
Kolkata, rightly acknowledged as the city of joy, is a major metropolitan of India which prides itself as a hotspot of various cultures and inspirations, as it rose from a strong colonial influence to establish itself as a mixture of both hemispheres and a cosmopolitan which has created a distinct identity as an amalgamation of a multitude of people. Famed for its culinary mastery and remarkable architecture, it manages to hides some dark mysteries within its folds, exhibiting its misfortune to some ill-fated. *** Year- 1996 Mr. Bhattacharya was a man of science, a firm believer in the evidentiary sciences behind the myth of paranormal, he was closely associated with many science clubs and awareness groups during his college days itself. A bank employee and a family man, his profile was amenable to any other common man you would see walking down the streets of Kolkata. A man of prolific caliber and a perfectionist to the core, he would usually stay in his small cabin after his usual of...
Read more