IceAndBlood

 One day, I caught her off-guard. “What the heck do you think you’re doing? Plunging the nib of your pen into your wrists like that!” I cried. She looked at me as if I had popped out of the earth just yesterday, and continued to scratch her almond skin with the pen till blood spouted. I looked on with horror, too stupefied to do anything. For a long time, I waited. I waited for her to open to me. I waited to win her trust. Then she told me the story behind her scars. A story of a dark childhood, a reign of terror and neglect, abusive love affairs and chronic depression. “Sometimes, you know, my eyes itch for blood.” She said, “Rich red of blood. I feel as if the incandescent beauty of this warm liquid flowing out of myself outshines my drab life. It renews my hope to live. The pain, the pangs of the cuts,” she panted as adrenaline rushed all through her, “they revive in me the will to live, when I don’t wish to live anymore.” That was my first encounter with them. The S...

Let me begin with a story from my childhood. This was years ago, back when I was in class 4 or 5. I had been a quiet, shy and reserved child from my early years. I made few friends. It was the time when my parents finally decided to admit me into a pool car for travelling to and from school. The children tried to make me talk for the first few days but when that failed they started to laugh at me. “Don’t stare, idiot! Look out of the window!” or sometimes “Look at your feet. Yes. Stay like that.” They would command. Being meek and scared, I used to do as they told me, with teary eyes. One day, one of the elder children passed by me in the playground and as she did, she clapped me on my back and commented, “Abnormal child!” I stared at her as she disappeared in the distance. Years have passed, I have come to see and perceive life differently, I have taken hold of my life, I have made bunch of friends and that memory has reduced to nothing but a residue of ash. Yet, the sting of those wo...

  Cockroaches peeping over the water-pipes. Cobwebs at the ceiling corners. Red stains of tobacco spits all over the walls. I continue to gaze at the walls below the staircase as her head slowly disappears beneath the flight of stairs. The cobwebs have grown, the red stains have been replenished over the year, the cockroaches in our bathroom have given birth to tiny babies who scamper all over when the rooms get dark. They say cockroaches can survive anything, even an apocalypse. I wonder, are we cockroaches? Over the year, the world has turned upside down. Economy has crumbled. Peasants, who had been rotting in the hell of their lives, have risen in revolt. The relentless online classes have cost my 7-year old brother a pair of big heavy spectacles. Market is on fire. Maybe my eyes are burning too but I can’t feel it. Yes, for us, the cockroaches, who struggle through make it through a day, who fight endlessly to get up in the morning, to carry ourselves to the basin and force...