THE SUICIDE
(A work of fiction...)
Chapter 1: The Invitation
if anyone would have asked Aryan how he felt about the day at that moment when he stood against the wall of the balcony across his room, with the wind ruffling his hair and his eyelids surrendering to the serene power of the breeze, he would have not bothered to answer.
He stood there in some kind of stance, with an eccentric smile on his face. It seemed as if he was transmigrating to an imaginary world he had always wished for. So mesmerizing was the splendor of the earth around to him. It was already summer and the sun got crueler with time as life got stagnant under the shade. It was that afternoon, however, when it seemed as if an invisible cloud passed by the lonely part of the planet he called his hostel. It seemed as if the earth got blanketed under its humongous canopy.
A cool breeze paved its way to the west and a few drops of rain met the thirsty earth leaving an intoxicating fragrance into the air. As he stood against the wall a droplet of rain landed on his lips. It was like an assemblage with his love, lost long ago; a kiss of his darling. In the next instant with a feeling as innate as his love for the moment, he pumped his legs with all the energy he could gather, dressed himself with a smile on his face and whispered to an invisible audience.
‘Let’s celebrate’
Chapter 2: The Decision
He ran up to the adjacent block in the hostel and started knocking vigorously on a door, catching up his breath. Inside the room, hunched over his bed sat Ved, stooping over the screen of his laptop, watching “The Big Bang Theory”. The transformed climate didn’t enchant him much, save for coolness of the air which made him cozy on his bed.
‘What’s it?’, asked his glaring eyes as he opened the door, questioning Aryan what on earth has become so important to attend to, that he was disturbing him at this moment.
‘Let’s go to the market. We will have fun’, quipped Aryan before Ved could get mad at him.
‘Mmm…nnhh…’ ’Why?’
‘Common, We will have fun’
Still standing at the door, Ved looked in turns, towards the laptop laid over his comfy bed and the scene outside: cloudy, serene and cool and his laptop again. It took a while for him to choose between the assured fun he could have with Penny, Howard, Raj and Leonard in his favorite TV series and the unpredictable, unsure merry moments he might find going out with his friend.
In fact, he couldn’t choose.
He turned towards his friend, as if to confess the grief of his inability to decide but when his eyes met Aryan’s, he felt as if it wasn’t a request to come with him but instead an order to follow; there was something in the eyes of Aryan that made his guilt vanish instantly.
‘Let’s go.’ ‘But I won’t walk long’ ‘Don’t make me walk long’.
‘Okay’ ‘Be ready by 4:00’ ‘I will come see you again’, Aryan said in a tone that had a flavor of ephemeral jubilation.
They never knew what awaited them in the near future.
Chapter 3: The Lake that wasn't
They passed by a great number of streets that converged together to the same road. People were seen rushing all around. It was the last Sunday of the month when the street hawkers had their field day. Everyone around was busy either selling or buying something.
‘Let’s have a cup of tea’ "Let’s have a cup of tea. I know a place where they serve great tea", Aryan proposed, trying to divert Ved from his thoughts, which as it seemed to Aryan, were cursing himself for his terrible decision to come into the grueling mob sacrificing his comfy bed. He knew Ved shunned big, noisy crowds more than anything else.
"Okay"
As they moved with their cups to take a seat in front of the Lake view hotel, they found hundreds of people gathered around the swamp, stretched ahead of them.
The green swamp used to be a lake some years ago. A beautiful one. Aryan had once heard that such was the beauty of the lake that children, couples and families would walk from far off localities to spend the evening in front of the serene view of the sun setting down to the west that left a panorama of colors on the water and feel the cozy cold breeze that passed by. But as people got modern, the lake lost its beauty to the traditional garbage they left.
Over the years, the lake was reduced into a tiny pool of mud colored water with green ferns and weeds covering everything but the top of the small temple built in the middle.
The temple was a piece of structure that had withstood all the years of torture and dared all extremities. From an image of a spiritual haven to an idol of neglect, it had earned a symbol of horror and mystery with a thousand versions of stories explaining the inexplicable power that the ghosts of the nearby graveyard had imbibed on the pillar of stone that stood upright in the mid of the green marsh.
Even as people, most of whom were either rookie drunkards or goons of the locality, still sat in front of the concrete chairs that faced the beleaguered lake, no one ever dared to step down the boundary made up of bricks that surrounded the lake.
The swampy earth was believed to be too dangerous. There was a strange omnipresent respect to the magical power and the haunting contemplation of the pillar of rock that guarded the bog, in the minds of people who lived there or who were aware of it.
Aryan had heard a story about a kid, who some months ago, went the other side of the boundary in an attempt to show his heroics to his friends and how he died within the next 24 hours in an attack of a mysterious disease that the doctor could not diagnose.
Walking by this place had always given Aryan goose bumps. However, that day was different. They saw an abnormal number of people standing by the boundary, staring at something with great interest. Neither he nor Ved was able to get a hint of what the hell was happening amidst the boundaries that made the people leave their jobs and gape at the bog so eagerly.
"Everything will be fine", he kept thinking within himself with a contradicting optimism.
'Or will it not... ?'
Chapter 4: The Awakening
‘What is happening in there?’ ‘Why the rush?’ Ved kept inquiring as he tried to find a way to peek through the huge mob that made a human wall in front of the boundary.
Aryan tried asking a person who popped out of the mob, only to find the person so awestruck that he stood facing Aryan for a couple of minutes without uttering a word before he moved away from the place.
In the swamp, was a man jumping, kicking the water off with the haste of a voyager who is just to reach the summit. He leapt through the weeds and ferns taking their support to cross the water underneath. He kept spinning his hands like a drunkard, like a priest sacrificing a life as a reverence to the deity. He jumped over the plants, sometimes succeeding, while sometimes he would fell into the water and move his arms vigorously as if, trying to swim.
Of everything eccentric and mysterious that was happening in front of hundreds of eyes that were witnessing the moment, one thing was apparent, which every soul present had an unanimous agreement - the man was going to die.
‘He is drunk!’ ‘Isn’t he?’ ‘Why else would someone do this?’, Ved whispered as if asking himself why would anyone drag himself to such a heinous death.
‘That’s suicide’ ‘he’s committing suicide’ ’we should save him before he gets too far to the middle’ ’But who else would go into that bog?’, Aryan murmured looking around as if searching for an answer .
‘Look Aryan, there’s someone who is jumping in to save him’
In the next few minutes three people, one after the other, jumped into the bog from different directions, trying to leap and swim their ways to the man before he got into any more danger.
Within this time, the area around the lake had transformed into an amphitheater with hundreds of audience, some purely awestruck, who looked like the people who stand in the background of anime cartoons when a hero fights the goons.
The man kept moving his hands in circles and jumped, as he neared the stone column, which apparently made him a subject a mockery among a group of people as it became apparent to one and all that either he is a drunk or mad. By the time the man reached the stronghold of stone in the mid of the swamp, the three rescuers had already covered him from all sides. The strange man stood, with his head only in vision, beside the stone pillar, and the three rescuers stood a little way further making sure they catch him. The rescuers tried to keep away, hesitating to go near the stone mast in the middle, and hoping that the man would come towards them.
It was then that the man finally stopped his gawky movements and it seemed as if the rescuers would bring him out. But instead of moving out, the man started trying to climb the stone pillar, pushing his weight up the pillar.
A new wave of feeling mixed with excitement and fear ran through the audience. It was like waiting for the inevitable end of the man, only a matter of time for the audience around to cherish a scene of doom, they can talk about.
The man was doing the unthinkable.
Chapter 6: The END of a beginning
The rescuers couldn’t dare moving any closer to the mast and kept shouting at him instead, to stop the man from doing so.
The stone pillar was quite tall for the slender body of the man and it seemed impossible to climb. Nevertheless, the man every now and then tried climbing the pillar but could only manage to slip off from it and it seemed he would die at that very moment but then he would come out of the swamp and never give up climbing it.
A rescuer after waiting for quite a while, watching the man trying to climb the mast and fail, decided to take the dare to go near him; near the haunted stone pillar. A wide round of applause thundered in the air as people lauded the bravery of the rescuer- they found a hero to sing praises for.
As the rescuer neared by, the man took a desperate attempt pulled his whole fragile body. He stranded his hands and legs in a loop around the stone, grasping one step at a time, kicking the air below him to reach the final step.
He gave a final push and the man found himself on the top of the pillar; he was standing on the haunted pillar.
As the crowd was left gaping with wild apprehensions of what would happen next, the man raised his hands towards the skies punching the air with his fist in jubilation. His face showed no pain of the scars he got on his body, but an expression of completeness and eternal happiness.
The rescuer took a final effort to pull the man down the mast and sprang his hands to catch hold of his legs. He reached for the man’s limbs, pushing himself up with a desperate jump.
But, all he could catch was a fistful of air.
It seemed, for a while, as if time had come to a standstill, as if the wind had stopped, as if life had got stagnant. Not a single soul moved for a moment, trying to conceive what had just happened in front of their eyes; to believe they are not dreaming.
Like a firefly getting incinerated into smoke, like the water vaporizing from the surface of a boiler, the man vanished into thin air, leaving hundreds gawking at the event that happened in front of their eyes, leaving a thousand questions behind and making the stone pillar an even bigger mystery.
It still stands, waiting.
A Short Story By,
Birupakhya Dash
