LIFE: A SANTA CLAUSE

All my childhood I had known Santa Claus to be the one in a red fury coat at the crossroad, a few blocks from my house, lending gifts to kids and wishing people Merry Christmas. Someone who will readily give things to people to make them happy. I remember how much I loved hopping on my toes to ring the bell at the tail of his cap.

STOLEN KISS - Part 2

To the lanes of College Street, Calcutta…

It was another sticky August night in the city of Calcutta and a half radiating moon loosely hung in the sky. For some reasons, she was having a bad headache that day and was lying in the bed as every other second a throbbing pain, like an electric wave, originated from her temples and sped down her neck to hurt her shoulders. Each of those torturing waves made her writhe on the bed with slices of the sullen moonlight slanting through the window, glistening upon her skin.

Against all odds she tried to shut her eyes to the pain and digging deep into the pillow, wished sleep to steal her away. But some days are just as bad. She had only turned to the other side that she is held by the waist.

“I am unwell. Please.” A genuine plea evoked through the voice.

Her husband replies with a groan, perhaps an ignoring groan, and with an even firmer grip pulls her towards himself. Her aching body, sliding along the bed like a sack, comes to a halt against the man’s broad torso.

He grips her bosom, slowly tightening his fingers around them and rubs his stubbly face on her shoulders. She is agitated and wants to be freed. On one hand the pain continues to torment her from within, knocking her head and neck with an invisible hammer and on the other was her husband trying to satiate his arousal. She is squeezed, pinched and slapped before the husband rolls over and gets on top of her. She is sobbing; her voice drowned by his fist shoved into her mouth and just when he has taken off his trouser and leaned on her, a momentary relief shot through her. High on alcohol he just fell asleep between her legs and having laid there for quite some time, she finally withdrew and descended the bed. Though the pain still buzzed inside her head, she was glad to have been spared of the pounding down below.

She emerged into the darkness of the drawing room and humidity in that encapsulated place, looming high between the close knit walls, held down on her, making her sweat instantly. She sighed and having washed her face decide to stand out at the porch for some time.

She unbolted the door, the ringing sound of metal yet to subside in the night’s silence; and with the first step out, her limbs froze and she nearly passed away. There’s someone already standing at the door and now, the broad, shadowy structure seem to walk her way. She attempts to hurry back inside the house but she couldn't move. Her legs are pinned down; someone is standing on her feet. And in the nearest possible distance as she raises her face, she feels the blood in her brain freeze. In the scatter of the dilute moonlight across the veranda, she knew it is the same hoodie jacket she had seen worn, descending the stairs of that sagging building in College Street from the bookstore window the other day and dissolve away into the city’s humdrum.

He dips his head and taking her lips in his mouth, sucked with immense passion. She wanted to push him back with all his might but he soon buckled her hands on her back, squeezing her buttocks seductively. It was when he unbuttoned her loose night shirt and kissed her chest, she felt something ease in her. The disgust that used to sprang up her skin with every touch of her husband is not even making a whisper of protest to this sexual assault by someone unnamed at the death of a night, at the porch of her own house. She was sensing a Deja-vu. 

“Who are you?” She asked.

“I am your dream and you are sleeping.”

“But I can feel you. In real. In skin and bones. In every touch, kiss and squeeze.”

“That’s the thing with love, dear; you feel what it is not.”

And then a ghastly wind swept across, spraying into her face the scent of the night as drops of rain started rhythmically beating upon the branches of the sleeping trees. She ran ahead and out into the rain to find him but he was not there.

The arrow sharp realization that failed to reach her that evening in the dimness of the claustrophobic bookstore had finally reached her in the middle of a sticky night with her aching body coming to meet the cool, lively rain.  She knew it was him. The poor guy she madly fell in love with six years back. But never got married. Because…because he was poor.

Back in the washroom as she was changing, she discovered from the rear pocket of her shorts; a folded piece of paper. It was a note. She opened it. The rain wetted paper had the ink running in all directions; it was all flowy and blurry yet not completely unreadable.  She leaned by the wall and tried to read the spilling scribble. 

"You can be rich, very rich and can afford to, for all the extreme seasons of life, cover your body with the finest of clothes. But it is during the season of love, the moment you intend to share your everything with someone else’s everything; you have to shed the clothes of wealth and lie down naked. As naked as those poor children on the streets, carefree and unworried about almost everything in life. Love, after all, is two souls seduced by the mutual desire to seek each other and for it to happen to you with all its colors; you need to be naked, poor and childlike, all at the same time."

***THE END***

Author - Sobhan Pramanik
Email - subho.pramanik@gmail.com

STOLEN KISS - Part 1

To the lanes of College Street, Calcutta…

A clicking sound from behind tenses him up. He quickly turns around to see her walk through the door; a line of shadow diagonally splits his face. She drops her handbag at the counter and collecting the token, walks into the dim, narrow aisle guarded by high, iron shelves with books spilling from the edges.

STARTLED

On nights following a long day of work, tired and exhausted, as you stretch out on the cot and close your eyes to the darkness around, welcoming a refreshing sleep –

DESTINATION

"Maybe I will never be able to reach my destination..." She sighed, unpinning from her lobes a pair of lapis ear stud - the blue stone of which shining rather distinctively against the round silver petals surrounding it.

THE DRAGONFLY

Like always I was sunk into my old cane chair; the varnish from its handle faded to pale brown and the jute windings on its backrest, thinned; with its floral pattern now appearing to be a mesh of tangled sewing threads. With my head dropped back on the shoulder and a small red cushion crushed to the canes under my weight at my waist, I gaze at the wall ahead of me. Every time I shift to sit up straight with the cushion sliding further down on my back, the timber of the chair creak like a person cracking knuckles. Timid yet distinct.

APPLE TREES

To see you wander in the orchard, swift through the trunks of apple, filling your trug with the ripened fruit; I walk all the way down the hill. Staggering along the twists of the clear stream, hearing its clear waves roll over the pebbles. Right at the neck of the valley, where the sun kisses the mist goodbye, I stand and watch you pick the apples.

A FATEFUL MEMOIR - Part 5

(Based on incidents post Indira Gandhi’s assassination)

Daylight, a faint shade of yellow streamed through the crack of the window to scatter on the floor. The buttermilk sky faintly visible behind the draping of the curtain, gently flutters along the frames. Outside, singing in chorus in the trees were herds of sparrows, their scales camouflaged against the bark. At the far end of the courtyard, on blades of high grass growing wild at the foot of the walls, glistened the morning dew. Along the roads that ran parallel to Mehran’s house, were heard the hoofs of buffaloes and the heavy wheels of the carts pulled by them, tumbling over pieces of stones.

A FATEFUL MEMOIR - Part 4

(Based on incidents post Indira Gandhi’s assassination)

Wiping his face with the back of his palm, he jumped from the branches. It was late noon and the sun, a brighter orange shone low in the western sky where tailed colorful kites made merry to the tune of the breeze. Glints of the orange light caught in the ripples of the lake ahead.

A FATEFUL MEMOIR - Part 3

(Based on incidents post Indira Gandhi’s assassination)

That morning, the first of the winter breeze had started to blow across the village drifting through the canopy of our Jamun in a sullen puff. In its shade lies freshly shed leaves of the tree amid a pattern of light and shadow, as the soft glowing sun peers through the leaves.

A FATEFUL MEMOIR - Part 2

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A FATEFUL MEMOIR - Part 1

(Based on incidents post Indira Gandhi’s assassination)

2^nd November 1984

Little Mehran sat frightened behind the thick Sal trunk, the flat top of which still wet with the morning trade. Pieces of flesh lying in puddles of blood and long, flat knives, the edges of which yellow with the fat tissues occupy the surface. The woody brown texture of the trunk slightly dark with the soaking of the goat blood through the crevasses made by the steel chopper, every time it came down on it through the meat.