A Ghastly Tale

A Ghastly Tale

A moonless night… A deserted street. A lone dim lamppost kept fluctuating… Dogs howled and a lone owl hooted. Bats whisked by every few minutes. Crickets chirped…darn those crickets with their monotonous chirping. The barks of the trees on the sides of the road formed strange and horrifying shapes. “Eerie” I thought…A few light rays, having escaped the dim lamppost fell on those strange shaped trees…Turned out they weren’t trees but giant cut-outs of pot-bellied actors and politicians with their hands clasped, begging majestically for votes. “Eerier” I grumbled!

The street, deserted for the night, still carried the scars of the day. Crushed plastic cups, worn out garlands, dried flower petals and filth of all sorts adorned the street that already carried the curves, crevices, and humps most women would envy. A meek siren went off in the distance. The noise came from a source, probably several kilometres away, carried by the wind along with the hot air coming from the rear of the air conditioners in the twelve-storied IT park in the horizon. Bright lights emerged from the building in the horizon adding more to the eeriness of the environment. Like a giant fire breathing monster marking the skies his!

I stood there all alone wondering why I was there and what I was meaning to do. I tried so hard to remember but I could remember nothing. Was I sleep walking as I used to do in my younger days? I had no clue. My mind was empty. My bosom felt heavy…or was it light? There was a strange sadness, but I felt peaceful at the same time. As if my true love had found his own true love. Sadness that I wasn’t his… Peace that he had found his. Strange feeling…Or was it a memory? I can’t tell the difference. I can’t tell a lot of things. I decided to stop thinking so much and just move. Better move than stay still was an advice I seemed to recollect having heard from my college professor. “If you do not know where you are going, just move! If it is the right direction, you will enjoy it, if it is the wrong direction, you will learn from it.” Woah! Where did that memory come from? Didn’t matter, I will just move…I moved…moved…I was still directionless. I enjoyed the movement nonetheless…Light, seamless and gliding. The wind picked up strength. The leaves and the dust on the ground, all around me, blew away as I moved.

I felt like the princess in my favourite Disney movie, that I used to watch as a child. Another strange memory! I hoped for colourful birds to fly all around me and land on my hands, as I sang a melody. But only bats and dust flew away from my path. No melody came from my lips. Just a low howling. What happened to my voice, I wondered. The building in the horizon once again came to my focus. What’s with that place? It’s bringing me a melancholic feeling…A whole lot of feelings actually…A feeling of anxiety of going to an interview in that lobby…a feeling of jubilation of having received the offer letter in the manager’s room…A feeling of joy in making new friends in the induction hall…a feeling of excitement of seeing ‘him’ for the first time in the elevator…a feeling of shyness when trying to speak to him for the first time in the office pantry…a feeling of contentment when sharing an ice cream with him in the food court of the building…a feeling of comfort when crying on his shoulders for a goof-up in my work in the park…a feeling of excitement when I was trying to ask him out that night in the office balcony…a feeling of grief when I saw him holding ‘her’ hands when boarding the office cab…a feeling of anger when I saw them laughing and playing with each other as the cab left the building…a feeling of depression when I came to know they were engaged…

These were too many feelings to endure in such a short span. I stood there in the corner of the street, covering by face with my hands, unable to bear the gush of thoughts and memories. I noticed a scar on my wrist. I noticed blood oozing out of it. But I didn’t feel any pain. Strange!

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a dark figure emerged in front of me from the ground. The hooded figure was quick to spring up from the ground, only for it to fall back behind, as if startled. The hood fell back and revealed a bearded old man, with his toothless mouth wide open, and his blood-shot eyes staring directly at me with a tinge of horror. His one thin, skeletal looking hand raised above him as if trying to defend himself, while his other hand pointed back toward a wall.

On the wall was a poster and on it was a face. Some more light from the dim fluctuating lamp post fell on it. On the poster were the words, “Gone too soon! We miss you deeps!” Above the words was a face…My face…

The homeless man on the ground screamed in horror, and lights began to appear in the buildings nearby one after the other. I let out a moan, so low, that only the homeless man was to hear and then I disappeared from there. Just like a mist into the fast disappearing shadows… Nights were getting just as dangerous as days…

-A. Prashanth Narasimhan (Sri Vishnudasan)

Core concept: S. Ashokan