Transmigration

After pacing up and down for a few seconds she sat on the parapet of her terrace. There are a bunch of school boys who were improving their reflexes, reacting to the ball thrown on an unevenly surfaced wall. A few others on the same balcony were, apparently, discussing cricket. There is a guy on a distant terrace showing signs of interest towards this lady sitting on a parapet wall.

The sun was just about beginning its slumber. She stared at the falling sun. It looked as if the tower behind which the sun was hiding was its final resting place. Her soggy red eyes made her blink in a consistent but slower frequency than the inconsistent normalcy. The sun’s brightness seemed to fade with every blink.

She looks at the boys who were ceremoniously engrossed in improvising their fielding skills as if it was the last minute of their exam preparation time. But all she saw was a hazy black patch. She would have wondered myriad times about the ephemeral existence of the black patch every time she looks at anything, immediately after she reaches the core of the sun, battling her way with the sun rays to reach it.

Her stomach was grumbling. But she despises eating food with a lump in her throat.

She thoughtlessly gazes back to her earlier area of focus. By then there is just the tower – the tall, svelte tower; like those long skirted American blond beauties whom she started admiring a few weeks ago. The sky was painted with a faint tinge of pink on a light blue canvas with the intermittently scattered, persistent, ever existent white patches.

She reverts to those boys. Now, she could see their faces clearly. They had retired from their play and were chatting. She thought they should have quit due to the fading natural light. She turns her head further away from the west and traces back to the terrace where she saw the guy, whom she thought was conscious of her existence. He had gone by now.

The music from the walkman had stopped long ago. But she realized it much later – after she reasoned out as to why the boys had quit their practice.

All along her life she worshipped music and had immense faith in it. So much so, even when she had a headache and her friend asks her to anoint, she would amusingly say, ‘I shall listen to the walkman.’

She took the walkman from her trouser pocket, gazed at it for a while, with the same affection a mother would, when she sees her child after two long days. The walkman was revivified. By now, she seemed composed and was in a much better frame of mind. Her eyes had the enough thinness of the watery film to look at things in the right perspective.

She now turned her head towards the western skies and it was crimson red.

Dated: April 02, 2005