End of August

There's a guy, not too old, lives in the opposite villa. Not much of him is known to me. Tall guy, bearded and sparse greying hair. Behaves queer.

Portions of his living room is visible from the window of my room. Vast empty space with just a table , a small refrigerator, an old fashioned television set and a recliner. A minimalist it seems.

On quiet nights, through the worn out curtains blown by the cool breeze, he is seen lying on the recliner. the TV (volume muted) streaming a medley of images cast strange shadowy shapes of flickering light that leaped all over the otherwise dark hall. There were electric lights in the house though, I suppose, there must be !

 He did not seem to watch the programs being aired. The mute live TV just seemed to fill in for a companion.

People sometimes say he is/was married. Some even claim to have seen his wife in yesteryears. There's a little photo frame with a lady's picture in it, he sometimes carries to the balcony and stares silently at it for hours leaning over the parapet. Maybe that's his wife. Not many visitors come by apart from a sweet little girl who comes along occasionally for a few hours in a chauffeured car. The silent old guy sports a rare bright smile on those days. Even the little one seems to enjoy his company.

The man becomes oddly strange when it rains. Sometimes he just stands and stares at the falling drops, imagining things or maybe remembering things in the past. At lengths, his distant gaze turns into a faint smile or a little tear in the corner of his eye.

Last night, when it rained, the guy emerged from the dark hall, a drink in his hand.He stood in the balcony staring at the falling drops. The street light in the lane faintly illuminated his face which revealed his swollen eyes. He held out the drink in his hand into the rain until few drops splashed into his glass. He then sipped from it slowly. Then, weak and heavy, he collapsed to the balcony floor, falling down on his knees. His bowed head clutched in his hands. I could hear him sob for quite sometime after which he just got up and disappeared into the insides.

The glass from which the left over drink spilled on the tiled balcony floor kept rolling there.

    

2:05 AM

Her : I am just a part of your life...just like any other part...I am not your life...

Him : (silence) (jarring disturbance over the phone line)

Her : What is it ?

Him : Nothing

Her : Hmm...You consider me your life (?)....

Him : (silence)

Butterscotch

It was July...or maybe August. The skies looked so through the windows during these months. The years had been excruciatingly slow. The helplessness of each month, week...moment kept making profound incisions into his restless heart and his paralyzed body showed the effects. His body lay motionless on the bed by the window. He had learned to accept his immobility. The turbulence within him manifested itself with glorious fury when he stayed like this...and strangely he found peace in this turmoil.

He quit medications now. Just as he had quit the hope to revive both on the insides and outside. The irony, however was, his body's condition did not worsen as he had hoped. It stayed the same. He never had his way with hope.

Monsoons cast their banal curse on the skies as they evoked dark profanity instead of the pristine blue for which they are  known. Drops from a past shower followed each other down the glass pane and finally trickled down to somewhere below where he could not see them anymore. Drops that seemed like the tears he made her shed, which lost into silence. Silence - that crept between them after the events that had transpired.

Sun rays streamed through wisps of clearing clouds grazing the stretches of green grass fields at a distance. The wilted blades revived to greet the sun before the next spell of shower would wash them down again. In spite of whatever had come to pass, he had regained his lost faith in Divinity. Her well being had restored the faith. This calmed a part of him down Lately, he had been remarkably calm when amidst all the seeming misery and apparent agony, things had started making sense to him. A realization of the delivery of divine justice reinforced his belief in the Almighty. This sinner had met his nemesis. It all made sense.