E-Paper
Steal a thought
It?s been two long and enduring years in the city since I left the comforts of sleepy Ajmer. Two years to realise that I am still recovering from the fears of my childhood, which I wistfully had thought I?d left behind to perish when I packed my trunk. I couldn?t put 2005 behind me fast enough.
It’s been two long and enduring years in the city since I left the comforts of sleepy Ajmer. Two years to realise that I am still recovering from the fears of my childhood, which I wistfully had thought I’d left behind to perish when I packed my trunk. I couldn’t put 2005 behind me fast enough.
Even as I struggle to break loose from adolescent tugs, life untangles miraculously every day for me to face and survive. What may be in store for me is perturbing. With the first morning cuppa to settle the nerves, I pour my thoughts over the news. There are some of us who don’t mind being ridiculed by the velocity of destruction the opposition self-inflicts. There are some who head straight to the sports section, believing that Ganguly is a victim who suffers society. And while the morning news has become as much about glossies and features, for me, the turn is always to the the most daunting and incorrigible part — the crime stories — unapologetic, gruesome and always enough to fill the pages.
It was not too long back when a senior colleague and his wife dropped me home, late at night, from work. The day had been perfectly mundane and the fact that I can’t remember a single incident might prove that it was extraordinary; a day in one’s life that fails to evoke any emotion of any sort.
The ride back home was as delightful and uneventful as any other. It couldn’t have possibly changed anybody’s life or comfort. I was wrong.
It may have been early morning when I gasped for breath, waking up from a thought-defying nightmare. It was at the same moment that my phone —left to charge besides my bed — beeped a message. I failed to muster the courage to drag my sleepy mind to read: the subconscious expecting humourless prose.
The morning, like any other, poured through my window and it was only after breakfast that I remembered the unattended message. It had been sent by the senior colleague who had dropped me home. It read: “Last night at 12.30 when we reached home we found that our house was burgled and our maid murdered.”
The message, and I tried hard, couldn’t lose itself.
Three months from then, the matter — the police case — lies unsettled. The culprit is untraced, like so many others.
For me just the thought of it — that a culprit walks loose on the streets mocking every policeman in his mind; makes me sleep uneasy, interpreting each sound the house makes at night. And every morning, I inevitably turn to the crime reports, playing to the same fears that I wanted left behind.
