Be silent in two situations. When someone can\u2019t understand your feelings through words. And when someone understands everything without any words. Archana waiting for her train to arrive, read on her mobile, forwarded to her by a friend from her hometown Sirsi.<\/p>\n
A lengthy hefty tan-brown cobra slithering forward, halt. Turn stiff. Remain still. Its greenish yellow eyes alert, wide open, stare hither and thither before it, gaze ahead, then dart off towards its hole, its destination. The doors of the train that Archana took to reach Kanakapura, where she now lived with Rajan, closed. And in that instance, Archana sighted through the train windows, in front of her, like snake scales. A young woman in the opposite parallel railway line, with her head held straight, looking ahead, as if at something approaching. Attired in the exact same ankle-length, dark-grey salwar kameez adorned with embroidered white flowers and leaves, that Archana was wearing. Hit by a train coming in. And the woman flung off the railway line like a drab grey sack of charcoal.<\/p>\n
Archana gasped, \u201cShe looked just like me.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHer hair, like mine\u2026 curly\u2026 shoulder length.\u201d Archana felt the edges of her hair brush her shoulders, as she shook her head. \u201cNo. No. That is not possible. It\u2019s not.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat wasn\u2019t me. That was not me.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo,\u201d Archana cried.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat?\u201d Sheetal her colleague seated beside her checking X, Instagram, and other app notifications on her phone, looked up and asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cNothing,\u201d Archana said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re \u00a0sure?\u201d Sheetal put her phone in her bag.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am good.\u201d Archana blinked, looked away.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow is your relationship with Rajan?\u201d Sheetal creased her forehead and asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cDon\u2019t ask.\u201d Archana shut her eyes tight. \u201cI have to stop taking this train.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYes,\u201d Sheetal said, \u201cand take a train or a plane that goes elsewhere. Not Kanakapura.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAgree,\u201d Archana replied, her eyes misty.<\/p>\n
Rajan, whom she had known and cherished as a man attentive, gentle. And she had left her parents to live with him. Turns out impatient, violent, indifferent. Court other women.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur life need not be\u2026 it isn\u2019t\u2026 I guess, one beautiful\u2026 round\u2026 complete\u2026 circle, in which beginning and end disappear,\u201d Archana mumbled \u201cBut one line added to a bunch of lines. A cluster of beginnings and ends. In that expansive space, Brahmanda, universe of universes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sheetal nodded. \u201cYou stay with me, if you can\u2019t go back to your parents.\u201d She said, and collected Archana\u2019s quivering hands in hers.<\/p>\n
Archana bowed her head, looked sideways at Sheetal. A forced half-smile on her lips.<\/p>\n
\u201cFree. Freed at last.\u201d Sheetal reciprocated.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes,\u201d Archana replied, her voice shaky \u201cfrom my illusion\u2014<\/strong>delusions.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cRajan.\u201d Sheetal gently rubbed Archana\u2019s thin limp hands in hers plump and soft. \u201cRajan.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIncorrigible brute,\u201d Archana sobbed.<\/p>\n \u201cYes.\u201d Sheetal nodded. Closed her eyes brimming with pricking tears.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Unabated violation, violence, rooted in vile sadism watered, fertilised, with general indifference. A minuscule size violence shoots out of desperation to end it. I suppose. How else to explain what I witnessed that evening in that village where I had been staying taking a long leave from my work as bank coordinator in a private bank.<\/p>\n The sun, sunk low behind a dense pink-grey horizon, nearly invisible.<\/p>\n Trees, shrubs, that lined the village red-dirt streets and lanes. Cows, goats, canines that loitered, roamed, with sheer entitlement. Beside\u00a0weary villagers, labourers, traversing on foot and by run-down bicycles, bullock carts, public buses running on bone shattering unpaved roads, towards their house or streetside bars to grab a glass or bottle of country liquor and pour down their throat and into their stomach hungering for it, or to some secluded place to meet their lover, craving for sex. Look like silhouettes of wandering ghosts waiting for the moon and its gang of stars to arrive and rule the sky.<\/p>\n My mind tired, my body fragile, me akin to a piece of thin glass held up with a piece of coarse cotton thread wound around it. Since, my disintegration began four years back.<\/p>\n I hesitate to say.<\/p>\n All sorts of things have appeared before me out of nowhere. An elephant in my room, late at night. A lion beside me in a bus. Women in clothes worn in ancient times, mythological stories, scowl and slap me. But not this, Shri. Maa Kali herself, sickle in one hand and a decapitated head in her other.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat horrible deeds did I commit in my past lives.\u201d I cried. Dropped the pills prescribed to me by my psychiatrist. \u201cO Maa. I didn\u2019t rape\u2026 torture\u2026 any woman in this life. I didn\u2019t.\u201d I prayed, and prostrated before her.<\/p>\n \u201cGet up, you fool. That is our Vidhya.\u201d The pharmacist behind me shouted.<\/p>\n I, as if nudged in my sleep, turned my head, and saw him cry \u201cVidhya. Vidhya. What have you done?\u201d<\/p>\n Bewildered, I moved and sat pressed against the wall of the shop. Watched what I thought was Shri. Maa Kali herself, tell him, \u201cWhat else? Killed him with my sickle.\u201d<\/p>\n She raised the decapitated head in her right hand and the blood-covered sickle in her other, like a butcher in a meat shop.<\/p>\n The pharmacist sobbed, \u201cNo, Vidhya. No. You didn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYes,\u201d she told him. \u201cHe wouldn\u2019t listen when I tell him, I can\u2019t fuck you anymore. He comes every day, forces me.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOkay. Okay. What are you going to do now? That head in your hand,\u201d the pharmacist asked, pressing his eyes shut.<\/p>\n \u201cGo to the police station,\u201d she said. Her voice loud, fierce, like that of a lioness enraged.<\/p>\n \u201cWith his severed head?\u201d the pharmacist asked.<\/p>\n \u201cYes,\u201d she told him. \u201cHand it to them, the police, who wouldn\u2019t arrest him. To the judges who would release him even if they did arrest him.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Our life need not be\u2026 it isn\u2019t\u2026 I guess, one beautiful\u2026 round\u2026 complete\u2026 circle, in which beginning and end disappear. But one line added to a bunch of lines. A cluster of beginnings and ends. In that expansive space, Brahmanda, universe of universes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":22651,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3530],"tags":[4173],"class_list":["post-22036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-flash-fiction","tag-friends-friendship","writer-devayani-anvekar"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22036"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22036\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22653,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22036\/revisions\/22653"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}YOU DIDN’T<\/h5>\n