| Maanasa U | January 2026 | Short Story |
The black compass looked wrong in the thin, malnourished hands in front of her. It should be with her Tej instead. It should be sitting on his shelf, where he had proudly deposited it himself back when he was still a hyperactive kid of ten, where it had sat proudly for almost a decade now. It should be with her son, and not with this stranger in front of her. The man probably didn’t even want it. He’d probably sell it for a bottle of liquor the first chance he got. He was probably calculating how much he could bargain for it right now.
Sarla forced herself to pull her eyes away from him, away from those wretched hands around her Tej’s compass. She stood letting a piece of herself get swept away into the sea of despair around her with each item she pulled out of her car. Tej’s old sweaters, the soft ones that he scarcely wore for fear of ruining them, his fuzzy, well-loved ones, his worn, low-maintenance ones – perhaps it was her imagination, but they still smelled like him- she gave all of it away. She gave away all his trinkets – his collection of Rubik’s cubes, his iPad with the cracked screen, his old comic books with his scribbles on the edges, his laptop – she gave and gave and gave until the sea became an ocean, with wrinkled hands and haggard faces all around her. They came in waves, these hands, pulling her under and under with each wave until she could hardly breathe. She didn’t care. She had felt like she could hardly breathe since the phone call about the accident anyway. She was almost used to it now.
Perhaps she would get used to the wrinkly hands too. They were inside her car now, sifting carelessly through her Tej’s treasures. Some kids had managed to scramble inside the trunk. Perhaps she could’ve brought some chocolate for the kids. She would’ve bought KitKats. Tej had loved those. Harsh and Tej would often sneak out late at night when they thought she was asleep to go have KitKat milkshakes at that sandwich place they loved around the corner. A runny-nosed teen had found the bicycle at the back. Scrambling out of the car in a heap of sprawling limbs and dusty tyres, he rode off without a second look, a bunch of younger boys running behind him. A younger girl had found the yellow rocking horse tucked behind the Stepney wheel.
The yellow rocking horse, in Sarla’s eyes, summed up Tej’s entire childhood. Harsh had bought it for Tej’s second birthday. Tej’s second birthday was special to Sarla in a way she couldn’t quite explain, not even to Harsh. While his first birthday had swept her over in an overwhelming avalanche of well-wishes and gifts from their family and friends, the second one had been a much more memorable and intimate event of whispered wishes and hushed giggles, with only the three of them huddled together. They had both taken turns rocking Tej on the horse for hours. Tej had loved it so much that he had been inseparable from the toy since. He insisted on taking it everywhere he went, be it short trips to the park or week long vacations halfway across the world – the horse went where Tej went, no questions asked. With all the trips it was forced to go on, Harsh had had to get it repainted twice, and each time, Tej’s smile had glowed brighter than the shiny new coat of paint.
The bright yellow had now faded to a dull grey-green, with indistinguishable stains marring its sides. Paint was chipped off in several spots and the rubber cover on the grooves of the handles jutting out on either side of its face was missing, leaving them bare. Tiny hands now clutched those handles, rocking the horse with groans and creaks. The little girl clutched at the barely moving horse in giggling delight, leaving dusty black prints all over, at the sight of which Sarla seethed. A boiling flood of anger overtook her all of a sudden. It was her Tej’s horse. He had loved it for years. How dare this girl taint it with all the grime she was streaking on it and then have the audacity to giggle about it? It should belong to Tej. It was so unfair! He should be the one who’s alive. He should be with her right now. He should be with her, whining about how she’s giving away his beloved horsey and that it was not useless and that he would still use it even though he was an eighteen year old teenager at least five feet taller than the said thing. He should be alive; it was not fair-not fair-not fair-not-
“Get off of it!” Sarla’s voice rippled, her face contorted in ugly rage. “Don’t you dare touch the horse!” Everything she said came out in a scream. It was like she was incapable of not screaming. Her screams were the only thing inside her and her screams were the only thing that would come out. She felt that even her heaving breaths came out in screams lately. Perhaps that’s why even Harsh avoided her these days. He hadn’t looked her in the eye in a week. She understood. On most days, she wanted to avoid herself too.
The girl sitting on the horse began crying, thick tears flowing freely from her wide eyes fixed on Sarla. A woman nearby summoned enough life into her sunken eyes to shoot an annoyed look at her before rushing forward to pull the terrified kid out of her car. Tired eyes all around her were now alert, the hunger in them transformed into something else. They didn’t care about all the things she was distributing anymore. They wanted to see the cracks in her life. They wanted to see her scream. They wanted to see her lose it so they could go home and tell themselves lotta good her money did her, or she was crazy, or money wouldn’t buy happiness, or something along those lines and feel better about their own miserable existences. The hands weren’t wriggling over each other now. No waves pulling her under. Perhaps she was already beyond that. Everything seemed to have come to a standstill. Everything except Sarla and Sarla alone.
She doesn’t know how long she stood in the shell shocked silence. She doesn’t remember driving back home. She was at the intersection near her house, getting honked at by everyone whizzing past one moment and in her bathroom the next, scrubbing and scrubbing at the horse until she couldn’t tell if the bleeding dark steaks were the dusty prints or just the wood underneath peeking through. She scrubbed at it anyway. All she knew was that her Tej’s horsey was dirty. He wouldn’t like that. She had to take care of it. She had to clean it.
That’s how her husband found her hours later, on her knees and scrubbing away at the dripping wooden horse on their bathroom floor.
***
Harsh didn’t cry on that first frantic phone call from his devastated wife that their only son had met with an accident on his way to college. He didn’t cry at the scene of the accident, at the sheer amount of blood, his Tej’s blood, splattered on the same road he had driven on mere hours ago without a second thought. He didn’t cry under the harsh fluorescent lights of the hospital corridor where the doctor refused to meet his eyes when she said his son hadn’t made it. He didn’t cry in the freezing silence of the morgue that he’s ashamed to admit he couldn’t wait to walk out of. He didn’t cry when he lit his son’s funeral pyre with trembling hands. He didn’t cry through all the stifling well-meaning condolences and ‘I’m sorry’s. He didn’t cry that night as his wife cried herself to sleep in Tej’s room. He walked out when Sarla set out three plates for breakfast the next morning and immediately broke down when realisation set in.
That was when the questions started popping in. It had been easier at first, when the answers were still clear. Why should I keep going? I must. For Sarla. Why do I have to get out of bed today? Sarla needs me. Why can’t I hide down here forever? I need to take care of Sarla. Sarla. Sarla Sarla Sarla. But then the questions began questioning his answers too. Why does Sarla need you? I’m her husband. I take care of her. We take care of each other. Why? We need to overcome this together. We need to survive. Why? Why should we survive? What for?
He couldn’t answer that one. And then, he found he couldn’t face his wife anymore either.
He found himself frequently cooking bitter gourd, the one vegetable he had despised in his entire 46-year existence. He refused to wear anything warm on the coldest of winter nights that month. He stayed up into the absurdly late hours of the night for no apparent reason despite having been a habitual early bird for decades. He buried himself in work day and night, like drowning himself in piles of emails and status reports was the answer to everything. He had to survive for this. He needed to survive to present status updates on weekly deployments to his manager on Friday mornings.
Harsh knew. He had known for a while that he was beyond due for a one-on-one about his unreasonable work hours, so it wasn’t any real surprise when it finally came knocking on his desk on a Thursday evening. He walked into it with his now-familiar whirlwind of whys trailing behind him. Why should they care about how many hours or how long he worked? Why did they feel the need to intervene in his matters? Why were they even tracking all this in the first place? Why couldn’t everybody just leave him alone? He didn’t question anything in the meeting though. Yes, he would tap out right now. Yes, he would take Friday off. No, he wouldn’t come in three hours early on Monday morning.
***
Harsh knew. He had known for a while that he was failing his Sarla, and yet, the truth of it ran him over the moment he saw her that night. He didn’t know how long she had been scrubbing the waterlogged rocking horse. She was surrounded by chips of old paint, drenched from head to toe at the sight of which a fusion of something uglier and more painful than everything he had felt in the past few months twisted inside Harsh into one painful shard. He fell onto his knees next to her, water instantly soaking into his dark khakis, and gently pried the flimsy brush off his wife’s freezing hands. “I’m sorry.” His voice was nothing more than a choked whisper as he embraced her trembling frame, the cold, hard piece of wood nestling into the crook of his elbow in a cruel imitation of someone else who should’ve filled that space.
“I’m sorry, sorry sorry sorry” he said over and over and over again till he lost all sense of the word. Was it an apology? Was it his punishment or was it his salvation? What did it even mean anymore? What difference would it make? He didn’t know, and yet, he bled out his ‘sorry’s until the ugly spike inside him churned and surged until his eyes were bleeding tears too. “I’m here” he whispered into her hair. “I’m here now,” he repeated as he rocked her back and forth. He wept and wept and wept until his sobs became indistinguishable from Sarla’s, until she was the one holding him up, until he cried himself to sleep on his wife’s lap.
***
The late summer sun had almost dipped completely below the horizon when the couple pulled over at the entrance of the abandoned underpass. Kids were first to run out of the dark tunnel, followed by some of their mothers with hopeful eyes. At the back of the group, Sarla spotted the little girl she had yelled at the last time she was here and beckoned her with a tentative smile and a wave while Harsh pulled out Mr.Horsey from the backseat, freshly painted in cool blues this time. “Here you go,” said Sarla, pushing through the sudden closing up of her throat. “He’s all yours now.”
_________________________
Maanasa U is a new writer from Bangalore, India. When she’s not writing, she can usually be found sketching with her local urban sketching group on weekends.
_________________________
Photo by Rustem Baltiyev on Unsplash
Find MeanPepperVine on Instagram @MeanPepperVine
