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....