A Jolly Good Life

I sat down at the piano, burning pages of painful memories into a soothing melody. My fingertips traced the piano keys softly. Music calmed my mind so easily. The world could be burning around me, but I wouldn’t even notice if I had a piano in front of me. But today, that wasn’t the case. The world was burning around me - figuratively, of course- and music wasn’t calming me down. Sighing, I got up from the stool and got ready for another gloomy day. Sure, the sun was shining, and quite brightly in fact, but that didn’t change the fact that my world seemed to be collapsing. I readjusted my bow tie and tried to look as sophisticated as possible. I picked up my suitcase, glanced at the mirror one last time and walked out of the small, dilapidated room that I call home. It’s December 1940, and I’ve lost the longest job I’ve ever had. I taught music at a central school in Madras for eleven years until they decided that to cut the budget to give more to the war. And of course, the firs...

  Irony :  (Noun) Meaning : a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often wryly amusing as a result.          (Note : Nothing about what happens in this story is amusing or even slightly comedic.) Example : “The same delicate hands with which she crafted her abode would now dig her grave.”   Random memories. The rustling of paper. The intoxicating smell of perfume that she never thought she would miss. Totally random thoughts. Infact, if she closed her eyes and focused hard enough, she could almost feel fingertips slipping away from her. It all boiled down to one thing : Time. Time had been her ultimate downfall. She kept consoling herself, kept telling herself that her time would come. Why take a risk when destiny had her course charted out already? So she never took a risk. Never travelled, never got on an airplane, never stayed up all night just for the sake of it....

  Fear crept into her and tightened its noose around her heart. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t move. ‘Post-traumatic stress disorder’ the doctors had called it. Her parents and even her younger sister had nodded wisely. As if they understood anything. AS IF. ‘Post-traumatic stress disorder’- Four meaningless words. All that she knew was that she would never be like the other children. She would never get to run. She would never get to dance at parties. The other kids would stare, they would not include her. She would never get to have a friend to pass a note to during class. She would never get to pretend to take unnecessary trips to the washroom so that she could talk to a friend. Simple things in life. She would never experience them. Post-traumatic stress disorder – the bane of her life. She would never be able to get in a car again. She had tried, really, but something stopped her each time. A cold voice inside her head telling her to stop, whispering threats, remindi...

     He glanced up at the poster on the opposite wall of his room. On it, were the golden words he’d lived his whole life by - ‘Life is a journey; heaven is the destination’. He still remembered the day they put that up. When he was six, his father had lifted him high in the air so he could pin up that poster.   And his mother had looked him in the eye and told him to remember these words all his life. Back then, he was just a typical bubbly 6year old whose life was confined to the safety of his parents’ arms. So much had changed in those 11 years. Here he was, 17 years old, staring at the same poster and wondering if his whole life had been a lie. Everything that he had done, was to please someone else. To make others happy. He had joined the football team at school to please his football crazy father. He hated football. He had joined the cricket team to be included by his cricket crazy friends. He hated cricket. He loved art. He wanted to draw and paint. To...

She traced the scars up her hands and down her back. Those scars, that covered every inch of her body were a constant reminder of the tragedy from her childhood. She still remembered that day, crystal clear. That was the day she lost everything she had. She remembered the screams. The screams that haunted her at night. She could hear them echoing off the walls of her room on most nights. She remembered those few days in the hospital. The doctors and the kind nurses. Telling her that she was so lucky to have survived. Looking away from her when she asked about her parents. She remembered hands reaching for her, patting her, trying to comfort her. But nothing could comfort her. Her parents were dead and there was no bringing them back. She remembered the day in the court room. She dimly remembered voices arguing. Some said the men should be hanged, others disagreed. And in the end, they weren’t hanged. She remembered sitting wide eyed as they pronounced the verdict. How could t...

  After the crash, he vanished. Some say he disappeared into the wild unknowns of the Amazon Rainforest. Crazier theories suggest that he moved to some place in Africa. Others, the more optimistic ones, say that he’s probably dead. But the one thing everyone knows - they never found his body after the crash. The Chief Inspector sat down at his table at work and told himself the same thing again and again, ‘They never found his body.’ The others had given up, assuming that he was dead. But the Chief Inspector knew better. He had spent the last two years tracking this man down. He was dangerous. He could kill. He would kill. A few kilometers away from the Chief Inspector’s office, the very fugitive he was musing about, had started making preparations for tonight. He had been planning for ages, nothing could go wrong. Meanwhile, the Chief Inspector had reached home. It was just a kilometers walk from the office and most of it was very scenic. Despite the beautiful view, there wa...