Under the shadows

It happened on a night when I just turned upside down on my bed in the middle of the sleep and I woke up. Something pricked on my back?

It was the tail of a question mark. I had a question mark stamped on my back!
Strange; one would think so.

I did not have a crane's neck to turn and see. But it was there.

Later I forgot about it, but whenever I was alone it just pricked me from behind.
I used to sweat and the human stench pulled me into a whirl where I could see the trail of the question mark clearly.

When I told this to my friend he just shrunk his eyes and looked at me without changing his face. He talked about his acidity problem and the traffic jam on the high way.

It used to crawl on my back and I got annoyed. I took whiskey and slept in the nights.

I looked at my shadows to see if it reflects. It never. The shadow which everyone could see was normal.

Like a clock's pendulum it swang on my back to the left and right.

In a city train I saw my friend one day after many years. When young, life gets changed soon and we had strolled into our own cornors of life.

He looked different and the hair on his chin looked grey.

"Is the acidity problem still troubling you?" I asked it all of a sudden and felt ashamed of myself.

He just gave a sigh and smiled. I wouldn't have understood that reply years ago.

"Do you remember, once you told me about something disturbing you in the nights and when you are alone..." While talking he never looked at me.

It had become my shadow or I lost it somewhere during the years.

When he stepped out and walked away I saw his shadow elongated by the lights. The edge of the question mark was slowly swinging on the many shadows I saw there.

Red Hibiscus and Yellow Dragon

When I came here I was just trying to hate everything.
After my evening walks when I drag myself back and see my own untouched footprints walking towards me, I just smile at them. Like in the crowd, I am unwatched here too.

We end our walk at the end of the pathway where we can see the forest.
We look at the dry trees like watching a movie on a wide screen.

"The jungle begins here?" I mused.
"It ends here". Everything ended there.

I drew a watermelon with the twig I had.

I looked deeply into the jungle imagining the girl who walked into the jungle at the end of a movie I watched long time back, will come out through this end of the forest.

Each day we spent sometime there in our evenings, like wild horses.
The freedome was raw and nude. Still untouched forest infront pulled my feelings inside.

The thought of the girl coming out of the forest always disturbed me. Initially I used to look into the trees once in a while. Now I stare continually, barefacedly.

My watermelon was still lying on the mud and one day it looked red. The yellow dragon who I sent into the forest in search of the girl just stepped onto it. The red flesh splashed and it looked like a hibiscus!

"Let's go back?"

I did not want to. But the rule is to leave the loved. I obey!

Wrong pathways

One of these days they have erected a new lamp in the cemetery. My friend told me that someone started stealing tombstones from the cemetery and hence they thought of keeping a lamp there. He also mentioned that the lamp was not shedding enough light and the place still looked very dark.

In the evening when I opened my room it was fully yellow and the light from the new lamp was falling completely in my room! Next day I paid a visit to see the new lamp, my far away companion and new sleeping partner. But when I reached there, I was rather curious about the stolen tombstones. The place was much familiar to me and only army men died in second world war were buried there, that too very few. I was surprised to see that all tombstones were still there and not a single one was moved.


My friend was waiting for me in my room when I was back home. We went to the backyard and sat back to back looking at the far horizon.

"That music is nice, but from where is it coming?" He was sitting idle.

"From where is it coming?" I paused "Ah, but what music? I can't hear anything..."

"It's a piano music, can't you hear?" The horizon he was seeing was the opposite of what I was seeing.

When he left, I tried hard to check if I could hear a music and slept under the yellow light.

I joined a piano class that week as I was disturbed by the unheard songs, which my friend could always hear around me. The class room was on the other side of the cemetery and I got a piano facing the new lamp. I did not notice any of these things until then. However hard I tried, no sound came out the piano keys when I played!

Things were just making me pale day by day. My friend used to come to my room very often, just to listen to the piano.

He took me to his dentist one day, who was interested in my situation. We talked for sometime but the conversation was not leading anywhere. I had a crippled tooth which I decided to show her as we spent sometime there with her.

She switched on the lamp and it shed light on me. It was pure yellow! I turned pale again.

"Yes, I can see, you have a missing tooth." She saw the missing tooth?

She smiled and her teeth looked like tombstones to me. She pulled the crippled tooth.

My friend was playing piano in the cemetery for us which I could hear clearly.

Thousand flowers fell from the cemetery into the layer between me and the world.