by Debasish Mishra 

We count stars at night, chase fireflies in the backyard, and pass our days watching the flutter of birds in the sky. Some of our elders, the intelligent ones, read Shakespeare and Marx, beside the smoldering candle or the half-shut window. Thankfully, books don’t dwindle like our foodstock, even with overuse.

Something is rotting badly. Perhaps the carcass of a dog. The smell invades our nostrils like Occidental influence. But we are helpless. There was an innocuous streetdog with dark speckles whom we fed everyday. We haven’t heard it bark for some time now. I’m afraid it might have swallowed a bullet. That’s the price for irking the officers.

A girl, en route to the hospital with her ailing mother, was inappropriately frisked. Her mother died in the ambulance. But for the police, it was a friendly banter. And the death, an accident. Don’t believe the stories you hear, the radio warns us. Most of them are rumors.

Two young men were shot at the crossroads. Their collective yell as vigorous as the noise of a hundred cars honking at once. But then, it could also be an untruth. A rumor manufactured in idle imagination on the basis of assumptions.

A neighbor’s son threw a tennis ball out of the window. A swarm of uniformed creatures burst through their door. The poor father was hit hard.

You’re rehearsing with a ball now, you’ll repeat with a bomb tomorrow.

We don’t have any bombs.

But you’ve balls, they argued.

The stink is getting worse. The radio defers dates of withdrawal. Of restoration. Of peace. While we are hopeful for a change, the older folks can smell a deep-seated collapse. And then, perhaps, a new beginning from the hot cauldron of nothingness. Like a dream.

Image by Sven van Bellen via Pexels