This short story made to the 'honorable mention' list in the "Writing Nepal 2023: A short story contest."
My room is not very spacious, but is abundant with natural light
during the day. It has a very big window with glass facing east. Adjacent to
the window is a big table cluttered with an array of books, mostly novels. I am
seated on the chair beside the very table. It is the month of October, the time
when autumn imparts the surround with pleasant weather and the clock reads just
half past six in the morning. Perched in the chair, settled in one of eight
rooms on the third floor of a modest four-story
building, I can see the long sprawl of a ripe paddy field. The sky and weather,
along with the general ambience offer a perfect prelude to Dashain, a major
Hindu festival. A gentle brook meanders behind our building, and then starts
the lush expanse of the staple crop waiting to be gleaned sometime soon. Far
across acres of that field is a narrow gravel road separating an old boarding
school from a newly constructed residence. The red-colored school hosts four
different posts hinged to flags of four different colors; most presumably they
represent the four houses of the students. Those flags, often, keep fluttering.
As the clock strikes 9AM, the school comes alive with the hustle and bustle of
students. The window of my room is, thus, a lens in a metal frame that enables
me to peek into the world in real time.
The house neighboring
the school is not yet completed, because its exterior remains unpainted.
Construction has been underway for several months. Today, there are more people
than usual. Last night, there were thuds and thumps, shouts and laughs vaguely
and distantly audible through the low rumble of brook flowing just beneath our
fenced yard. For the
first time, the rooms of the house were illuminated
at night. A family has moved into this new house and it seems their occupancy
harbingers a new dimension to my daily routine because it is only now something
new is happening in the landscape.
As I am
immersed in Jon Fosse’s ‘I is another’ my attention shifts abruptly for I spot someone, a youthful woman, standing on the balcony
of the newly inhabited house. Intrigued, I attempt to discern more about her
from a distance. The girl, tall and lean, presumably, in her early twenties is
looking towards our abode. My new curiosity overrides my commitment to reading
and I decide to take a break. At this moment, I'm more interested in
deciphering whether she's truly looking at me, rather than what fate awaits
Asle’s doppelganger in 'I is another.'
For half an hour, we
engage in a silent visual exchange. I remain uncertain if she has indeed
noticed me, as I am concealed behind the closed window of my room. She
momentarily retreats into her home and returns, holding a cup of tea. Her gaze
remains fixed on my room, as she sips her tea with elegance. My book lies
neglected; for I'm entranced by this beautiful young woman, dressed in loose
black t-shirt and checkered shorts. Her hair dances freely in the cool morning
breeze, and shortly she vanishes into the haze of her balcony door. A mature
gentleman, likely a sexagenarian, joins my eyeshot on the balcony and lights a
fag. Oh, who is the pensioner now, her father? Maybe, if she is the daughter of
his younger wife!
The house remains
tranquil throughout the day, with no sign of life. I am in my own room the
whole day occasionally expecting some accidental glimpses of the girl across my
barred window panes. Yes, finally she reappears at the balcony just like that
in the evening. As evening goes by, I wait for the night to pass away quickly
and as the morning goes by, I wait for the day to pass away soon. Another
evening, another transaction of visual receptions. Next morning: repeat and the
modus operandi of gander continue for days. I am so enthused to know what time
unravels in the eastward vicinity of our building, maybe, because,
physically bound here, I don’t have much to do these days except sitting,
sleeping, reading, imagining and only the suchlike.
One morning, she does
not make her customary appearance. The day looks so gloomy even though it is sunny.
I cannot flip a single page of the novel I am into. Oh god, her sight has
become so addictive. One single instance of her not showing up has jeopardized
my life to, like, hell. Where might she be? In retrospect, she must be a
college girl, perhaps a sophomore, but sadly, I cannot tell which college she
goes to. If ever I get a chance to see her in a college dress, I could have
found cues about her college. I can see only the back of her house. The family
would go out from the front façade to the road which is off my view and is
largely blocked by a series of tin sheets along the side for makeshift
furniture workshops. So, I cannot really tell when she goes out and comes home.
Despite these limitations, I continue to keep a watchful eye on her balcony. Oh,
girl! There she is, again on the balcony right
at quarter past six as my heart pounds in dismay. I keep looking at her until
dark when there is just a feminine silhouette standing at the backdrop of a dim
room-light. I can very well descry the curves that outline her existence.
One day, quite
surprisingly, I
would behold more footfalls on the balcony than usual
in the early evening. Ah, it is Saturday, and she might have invited her
friends from college for, perhaps, a soiree. They were laughing and cheering.
They all have similar physiques, so it is really difficult to recognize who is
who. Oh, there is one bloke as well with whom girls seem to hug. Nah! That boy
with a ponytail? He can’t be her friend. He must be her cousin or a sibling
from relatives. That way hugging makes perfect sense. Her Saturday’s social
appearance has belied my belief that she is a loner, an introvert and a
full-time contemplator. She cannot, nonetheless, be a happy-go-lucky party
animal. I would like to place her in a no-man’s-land between these two personifications.
For over a fortnight,
the iterative task of looking continues, but still, I am befuddled if she was
looking at me or just towards me at the house, to other rooms. Therefore, I feel
like checking on her. In the
morning as she comes to the balcony, we savor the moments of transcendental
sight exchange and I raise my both hands and wave at her. I notice her body
reacting to the wave. Ah! She was also looking at me all the while past these
weeks. Just as I am enlightened from the new knowledge she careens into the
room. In the meantime, my friend, Zupal, enters my room, “There is blood, man.
These guys had a brawl again,” apprises he. I hear him pronouncing blabbers
because my consciousness is detached from the surroundings to become poised at the
window of a stranger girl just about a kilometer away. Her buttery face gleams
in the room so majestically to reflect the incandescence of light hung in the
ceiling. My tongue jostles in a circle in the wet void of my mouth cavity to
articulate, “She notices.” My friends are here, in other rooms,
but lately, I am not with them. It is because I am ready to thaw in piecemeal,
in each morning and evening, in the naivety and in the purity of her splendor,
just like wax in a blazing candlestick.
Next morning, she
presents herself at six. Now we face each other, person to person. We both are
now sure that we know each other’s existence, and this feeling crawls and
spills into me to become emotional. This humanly sensation has foregrounded the
materialization of our friendship of sight. There is no talk, no expectation,
nothing. We just share a few hours of a feel-good moment remaining at a
distance. What more pristine relationship can there be than this friendship of
sight? When she makes her existential statement standing at the edge of her
balcony, it peels off layers of happiness in me. The world feels just so complete
with her being on that balcony.
My time is divided not
according to the appearance of the sun in the sky, but by the appearance of her
on the balcony. It is a day in the morning and in the evening, and it is a
night in between. At the time when we spot each other I feel a thrill from
inside, my mind empty. When she is gone, I embark on a series of quixotic
adventures. What I know is
that she is slim and nimble; what I speculate is that
she is cherubic and fair-complexioned. I grapple to make a complete picture of
her in my mind.
One morning, a
middle-aged woman—probably her mother—comes to the balcony and talks
officiously to the girl, and soon the girl emerges onto the upper terrace,
where she begins the task of hanging freshly laundered garments on a taut
clothesline. It takes her about half an hour to dangle all those clothes. I
remain beguiled by
her hypnotizing mannerism. Oh Almighty, let this
moment last forever. She would, at times, vanish into
the grooves of curtains and bed-sheets hung minutes back. I cannot disremember Dashain when everybody is washing
clothes and cleaning the house. Yes, Dashain is at threshold.
Meals are communal affairs
in our shared mess. During lunch time, my friends, hailed from various
districts from across the country, propose to play cards to celebrate the great
festival. Rather than playing with them, which most often culminates into a
kerfuffle, I rejoice in brushing up the unfinished nuances of a persona made up
of the balcony girl in the canvas of my own figment. It is so satisfying when I
realize that I am fully empowered to cast a girl in my own wish. I can add
tincture and tone to that distantly positioned figurine. I can beautify her
countenance with a soft whisk of a filbert brush. However, I cannot modify her
in a way that contradicts the reality perceived from a distance of one
kilometer. She is five feet five inches tall, with a slender build. That’s it:
flat and final. No modification on that. The imagery of her is increasingly
becoming so crisp and vivid that the details and distances between her bodily
projections could be nothing less than real. That is a helluva fanciful
sculpture of a girl. I know her thusly in my own way, in my own world of
imagination.
In the days that follow
many of her friends frequent her house. Today is Mahanawami and her balcony is
teeming with
people. Is she the one who is clad in a green dress? I struggle to figure out
but if she is, then how gorgeous she would now be looking when glanced from a yard
or two? As we live in the same zone, time has been
our friend but this distance is enemy to our friendship. When heard carefully,
I can only perceive a muffled, washed out sound of giggles and hollers coming
from afar. Our building also is not quiet because guys are in a festive mood.
Murmurs turn into shouts as my housemates warm
up themselves for gambling. Wrangling
is not unusual for these guys as they bet money on fate.
We just have a small
celebration of Vijaya Dashami with Tika and exchange of blessings, all except a
few aggressive-looking new occupants. Some fellas re-engage in playing cards
but I, seated in a chair by the side of a bed just sufficient to accommodate my
body in, resume my routine business of looking at an unpainted plastered house
that boards a girl who I remotely befriended just a month back. Today the house
is thronged by even more people from the backyard to balcony to the top
terrace. Even the largest extended family cannot have this many family members.
Nah! They might be hosting some gatherings. But what might that be? The girl
completed her undergraduate degree? Someone is going abroad or has just
returned? Nothing of the sort can justify the extent of the multitude.
As I hear the shuffling
sounds of feet in my abode, maybe from the next room or another, there he
appears, in the balcony, in his best tucker and bib. The boy whom I have seen a
couple of times in there. The same ponytail boy, who I had conceived more as
her sibling from close relatives or a cousin brother, has
become the groom. Here, more people seem to shamble off down the floor
simultaneously. The cacophony of thudding, dragging and yawping ensue. Now I know these sounds of rabble walloping aimlessly
are coming from the mess hall. There, she, the enchanting little girl, saunters
to the sunshine in unison with her boy. The photographer prepares his
paraphernalia to frame them still. Here, sounds of thrashing and shrieking
continue. My friend Zupal rushes into my room, his face contorted with
distress, “There is bloodshed, man. Those new bastards pummel Anand to near-death.”
In no less than an hour,
people rarefied on the balcony and all around the house. Now she is all gone.
Zupal always has some news, “They are coming.”
I ask,
“Who?”
“The warden and police,”
he says. “They are shifting many of the inmates to another prison.”
Three people come into my room. They have already manacled Zupal and other
friends. The warden says, “Today onwards, no more fighting.” By their gestures,
it is not difficult to conjecture that the new prison will be heavily secured,
fortified and circumscribed unlike this temporarily rented facility.
When the police handcuff
me, I realize my vacant chair is gazing at the empty balcony. Both the
occupants will not
be here, from tomorrow, to look at each other.
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