| Sharika Nair | July 2024 | Short Story |

The first night 

Maya (Illusion)

The luminescent pink and green from the neon signage of the bar across the lane casts a mini spotlight on his feet. Kabir wriggles his toes and watches the colours dance. He turns on to his side and looks at the alarm clock on the side table.  1.42 AM in red blinks back at him. He watches the clock till the numbers change to 1.54. He gets up then, and pulls on a hoodie. Slipping his feet into his worn out sneakers without untying the laces, he steps out of his terrace flat, jogs down the stairs and starts walking towards the ring road. 

Next to the bus stop, a truck driver sits on one of the wonky wooden stools strewn in front of the tea stall, drinking tea out of a kullad. Kabir orders a tea from Ayush, the teenager who makes milky adrak chai from late in the evening till dawn – till the owner, Shahid bhai, takes over. 

Ayush smiles his earnest, crooked smile at him, “Studying late? You have an exam tomorrow?” 

Kabir shakes his head. He can barely muster the energy to reply, but he doesn’t want to be rude to the one friendly face he sees on most nights.  

“Exams are done. It’s just the interview now.” 

Ayush’s smile broadens, “You will crack it this time. Your mother’s prayers will not be in vain.”

“Yes,” Kabir replies politely, though he cannot stop his face from twisting into a slight grimace. He drains the tea, throws the kullad into the cardboard carton filled to the brim with a pile of used terracotta cups, and walks the few feet towards the bus stop, stopping and leaning on a metal pole inside the shelter. 

He is surprised to see a woman in a black churidar walk in and sit down on the bench inside the bus stop. A lurid orange saree peeks curiously out of her bag. A bar dancer. She is attractive, though there is a roughness to her features, and very young. Early twenties, at most. 

Three years ago, when he was new to the city, Kabir would have ogled her, maybe muttered a lewd comment. He would have been aroused by mere proximity to a beautiful woman, especially one whose work was, as described by a friend, a PG-rated version of prostitution. Shame seeps through him. He is not sure what changed in three years. But now he sees a woman who works hard; she could possibly be the sole breadwinner of her family. Strangely, she reminds him of his mother and the katak katak katak of her sewing machine, which he had deeply loathed while trying to study or sleep when he lived at home; but which he now misses in the silent despair of his tiny apartment.

He clears his throat. “Is there a bus at this time?” he asks. It comes out sounding less like a question, more like a hesitant statement. She looks at him, warily for a moment; then whatever she reads on his face relaxes the stiffness in her shoulders. 

“It’s a private van, not a government bus,” she answers. “You must be a student,” she observes. 

“Yes, I am preparing for the civil services,” he says, not sure if she would understand. “Yes, IAS,” she nods, “there are many around here preparing for it.”

He had always found the English phrase ‘breaking the ice’ rather odd. The way he and the woman start conversing is cautious and unhurried, like ice melting gently in the sunlight. Twenty minutes later when her van arrives, he feels as if they know each other better than anyone else in the world at that moment. They have not traded many personal details. He doesn’t know much about her family. He does not even know her name. They had spoken about her work; she told him she had gotten used to sleeping during the day. How the first time he wrote his prelims, he had prayed desperately that he would qualify and stopped answering calls from his mother when he failed. He had even divulged how clearing the mains this time had left him cold; like it was something nice that had happened to someone else. 

The second night 

Bandhan (Connection)

It is just over an hour since he switched off the light. The sound of his own breathing feels loud and infuriating against the uneasy stillness of the barely slumbering city outside his window. 

He starts walking the other way, away from the bus stop. The road turns narrower, soon twisting and turning into labyrinth-like gullies. He walks briskly, leaping over sleeping stray dogs and puddles of rainwater till he reaches the large tract of open land that extends till the boundary wall of the Army quarters. A group of Rajasthani nomads who roam the city selling blankets, terracotta pots and wooden toys have set up their tents on the weed ridden ground. They huddle around a blazing fire, the men and the women together, the smoky aroma of freshly toasted roti permeating the air; the sing-song tone of their dialect, as they chat over dinner, pleasingly musical. A toddler criss-crosses between the adults in the group, moving from person to person but retreating to his mother’s arms after each mini-exploration.

Kabir sits down on a block of roughly hewn stone, the debris from a nearby construction site all around him. An elderly man squats just outside a grimy canvas tent nearer to him, as compared to the group of migrants, but still a little away, across the road. He had assumed the old man was a part of the group, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. 

The old man has dark glasses on, dark as the night sky above him. A walking stick lies on the ground besides him, his unseeing eyes looking directly at Kabir. 

He crosses the road and taps the man gently on his shoulder, “Want a cigarette?” he asks. The old man doesn’t startle; just nods yes. 

Kabir sits down on a gnarled tree stump near the old man, once they finish smoking their cigarettes. The old man is silent, scarcely moving, and the only sounds are the chatter of the large group near them and the chorus of a pack of stray dogs howling at a distance, that usually sets his teeth on edge, but does not bother him as much tonight. The older man has wrapped a thick blanket around himself, his chin resting on his knees, seeming content to stay immobile and silent. It’s bizarre that he reminds Kabir of his father, though he had been exactly the opposite – twitchy and loud, or that’s how he had been during the short spells he spent at home; when he was not driving cross-country in his battered old truck or sleeping off his alcohol-induced haze on a footpath somewhere. He had collapsed outside a bar and promptly died two days before Kabir’s fifteenth birthday, and he had seen the shameful relief he felt in his heart reflected on his mother’s face. She had cried dutifully at the funeral. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to.

Maybe it’s the emptiness in the old man’s gaze that’s so familiar.

A while later, the nearby camp quietens down, most of them retreating to their tents and their fire hunkers down into sluggish embers. Kabir stands up, rubbing his cold palms together to increase circulation, before patting the old man lightly on his shoulder to bid him goodbye.  He walks back to his room, following the same path he had trodden awhile earlier, but at a much slower pace.

The third night 

Jeevan (Life)

He walks through the main shopping area – shops that sell readymade garments, spices and imitation jewellery, now with darkened storefronts. He buys a paper pouch full of roasted peanuts from a seller at the street corner, and strolls by lowered shutters and dozing security guards.  At the end of the road is a movie theatre. It is the old school kind, with a single giant screen where deep burgundy velvet curtains would rise at the beginning of each show, to present the screen with a dramatic flourish. The last show had been two months ago. The building would be pulled down soon to make way for a mall. A security guard sits on a beige plastic chair in front of the locked gate, talking softly into his cell phone.

He walks into the alley adjacent to the theatre and jumps over the back wall of the property. He walks up the stairs and through the shadowy corridor into the main hall. Surprisingly a couple of lights have been left on. 

He climbs onto the stage area, near the screen, runs his fingers on the plush curtains that look faded at close quarters. Hundreds of empty seats stare unblinkingly at him, and he jumps down and sits on a lumpy-cushioned red chair in the middle row, putting his feet up on the seat in front of him. He watches the shards of light – a twinkling kaleidoscope – on the cavernous ceiling.

He wanders to the basement. He hears subdued meowing from behind a few sacks of cement piled in a corner. He locates a pregnant cat that’s lying on a jute bag. He runs a finger through her fur, and the little forms inside her seem to convulse at his touch. A sense of fascinated revulsion engulfs him. He loses sense of time as he sits there, the cat ignoring him after her initial appraising glance, his fingers lightly running over her soft fur, over and over again. 

He shakes himself out from the blank stupor he has sunk into. 

He buys a cheap plastic bowl and a small Tetra Pak of milk from the 24-hour supermarket next door, and watches the cat hungrily lapping up the milk before jumping back over the wall.

The fourth night 

Bhay (Dread)

He floats on the water, tracking the constellations in a cloudless sky. The water tank is at the edge of a posh residential colony, beside a Ganesh temple that seems really old, pre-Independence for sure, when the city had been for the most part a drowsy village. He has left his clothes in a pile on the topmost of the rock-hewn steps leading down to the pond. A layer of pebbles covers the bottom of the lake, and so the water is mostly clear despite it having fallen into disuse. Even the temple rarely sees worshippers during evening puja, except for a few elderly women from the neighbourhood. 

The water is warm and soothing, despite the January chill, and he suddenly laughs, the sound echoing strangely in the hush of the night. He tries to recall the names of the constellations he had studied in Social Studies during middle school. The Great bear and the Little bear are the only ones he remembers, possibly due to their quirky names. He cannot make them out in the sky though. Wasn’t there one called Orion? He wonders if they would ask him about constellations in the interview. He had got widely varying responses from his batch mates at the coaching institute who had made it to the interview the previous year. Only one of them, a doctor from Bihar, had cleared the personality test and was currently going through training at the Civil Services Academy in Mussoorie. 

He starts reciting the periodic table to stop himself from thinking about the interview. He knows he is worried he would fail. Again. But what he absolutely hates thinking about is that he knows he is worried he would pass this time.

The fifth night 

Umeed (Hope)

The under-construction commercial high rise building is almost complete. 25 floors. The same as his age. He tries to recollect his corresponding memories from each year of his life, as he walks up the stairs. Fifth floor. At five, he had cried and screamed outside the doctor’s clinic before his Typhoid vaccination. His mother had had to drag him inside. Eighth floor. He had got into a cricket craze at eight. But the older boys he played with wouldn’t let him bat and he was made to field most of the time. Thirteenth floor. He had written a love note and left it on his classmate Shreya’s desk in 8th grade. His friends made fun of her because she wore braces, but he thought she was pretty. She had torn up the note and thrown the pieces away. She had smiled at him the next day.

Painting work has started on most floors. The construction workers have left all the materials neatly in a corner on each floor. Electrical appliances are not yet fixed and neither are the lifts. So he climbs each floor in darkness till he reaches the terrace. 

He knows for sure he is not going to jump down. At least, he knew for sure by the time he had reached the eleventh floor. 

The terrace is clean, and surprisingly clear of construction material. He straddles the terrace wall, his breathing evening out after a while. His right foot touches the concrete floor while his left dangles over a twenty-five storey precipice. 

He has to reach the UPSC office by 10 am for his interview. He will go back to his room, wear his neatly ironed light-coloured shirt, with dark-coloured trousers and a sober tie as suggested in ‘Competition Success Review’. He will take the metro and reach Dholpur House, sit alongside the other candidates and await his turn. But for now, he waits for sunrise. The sky is a screen of furtive darkness. As he watches, a richly sensual ochre starts painting the eastern horizon.

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Sharika Nair wrote extensively for digital media platform YourStory, where she covered women’s issues and wrote feature stories on entrepreneurs and successful women from various fields. Her story ‘The Silver Anklet’ won a prize in Deccan Herald’s short story competition in 2018. She has authored a children’s book titled ‘Tara and the Quest for the Cursed Prince’. Her short fiction has appeared in Borderless Journal and Kitaab and have also found their home in several anthologies, including ‘The Best Asian Short Stories 2023’. Sharika is the winner of the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2023 in fiction. She lives in Bangalore.

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Homepage image by Rajeev Chandra via Unsplash 

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