At 2.51 am, she had the sack tied to her back, the sim card shattered, and the bus ticket ready. She didn’t stand at the door. She didn’t take a last look at her bed, or her mirror, or the ancient details of her childhood that defined her.
This home had to die, for another to flourish.
She took a long breath. Smiled. She was happy.
She walked to the main door.
Unlatched. Walked out. Closed the door behind her.
Silently. And successfully.
She giggled and thought of all the mess movies made of out it. ‘Bedsheets and ladders’. So simple, it was in real life. So becoming.
On her lips, was her prayer of leaving, of letting go everything that one is afraid to hurt or lose. The second commandment.
You are used to thinking
that you should have painted her mirror black
Or hidden away
that jingling pair of her earrings.
You accuse the scent of her nape,
"It must have been her scent that led him to take her away."
What you don't see
is the possibility
of her eloping
with her reckless rage.
Tonight,
with no man and in no man's hope
she flees,
this Runaway Girl!
She has left them behind,
along with a bag full of snakes
-your tantrums and your chains-.
The jingling piece earring that you so worry about
(one that makes the lovers meet on the screens)
never left its place.
…
An ardent reader that she was, Annie always operated upon stories. Like a keen worker, she’d uncoil the metaphors, judge a writer’s circumstances, and fish out a lesson. Even the most fairy-est of the tales had a life lessons in them for her. One of such stories had taught her that if she never made mistakes (and that is, unprecedented mistakes), she’d never be the best version of herself. That ‘doing her best’ and ‘doing the best that can be done’ are two different ways of performing in life. At 16, she’d known that the birds that are born in a cage think flying is an illness. That’s when she had decided that one day she’d run away. She would run away before she labels flying an illness. She’d make her own mistakes even if she may scatter in disarray. Tonight, she had fled from her cage.
Unsurprisingly, there were no lampposts around her house, no one to notice the disquiet of her eyes. No one with a camera. No fake rain. Her life was her own movie. The one that won’t be written or screened or frowned upon. The destruction of which won’t spread in the private lives of the viewers.
She walked to the bus stand. Took a window seat in the bus and nestled against the window.
“Ticket?”
“Here.”
“Pauri?”
“Yes! Pauri.”
“Take the receipt. Keep it safe. It will take us take 9 hours.”
“8 hours 35 minutes.”
“What?”
“Nothing! 9 hours, yes!”
The bus conductor slid back to the old creaky door and started counting the coins in his little black bag.
Annie watched him with a newly born curiosity.
Old greasy clothes, clumsy fingernails with crescent shaped dirt lodged in them, muscles tough as leather, a bag full of stories from a thousand Indian roads.
More passengers. More coins.
Onwards the bus wheels, with the conductor and his black bag and his treasure of coins.
8 hours 35 minutes away from her was the kingdom of deodars, a child of Himalayas, a place with few people, fewer cars and myriads of mystical mountain stories, the whimsical little town of Pauri.
This wasn’t the first time she was visiting the place. The decision to flee to Pauri was well thought and very well planned. A year ago, Annie and her best friend Bhavya had taken a week off from the university for a short getaway to Pauri. Pauri was Bhavya’s native town but she had never lived there. Her great granddad’s old lonesome house stood halfway up a merciless and a steep hill. The closest neighbour was an old single woman living on the other side of the hill, who nobody from the family had ever talked to. Bhavya and Annie spent the week angling, eating, and taking walks in the mountains.
Nice story