Sunday, 1 March 2015

Prose 500 2015 Featured Anirban Nanda

Broken

I just have been announced as dead. Me, my body is very hot now. In fact, I am famous for being hot. People like to stare at me and hold me in their hands lasciviously. Yes, I am that hot. But it is not true that I am always hot like this. Sometimes I wash myself in cool water. To be true, I wash myself in every 30 minutes, for I am manhandled in every 20 minutes interval. They order me and my owner listens accordingly. He washes me, then makes me hot ─because people like me preheated. Then I am prepared for serving, with a little heat here, a little sugar there and then some quivering and shivering and shaking. 

The customers then light up a cigarette and kiss me on my fragile and moist body, with their smoky lips. They devour me in open daylight, for they are too bold to do anything in secrecy. They have complained about me a few times ─I repeat, only a few times─ for my height, for I am quite tall for them. But different people have different tastes. Many customers like short ones, because they can hold them entirely, they feel like they can en-capture and absorb the whole body in a dominant position. I think they want to feel superior. But who doesn’t? 

Today, when I've been declared as dead, my owner is not sad at all, rather, very angry because it has caused him loss in his investment. He's started blurting abusive words to the killer. Oh, forgive me. I’ve forgotten to mention that it's not any natural death; it's a murder. An unintentional and accidental murder. I’ll tell you later why it's accidental. You know, I am feeling delirious during my last minutes and can’t remember everything chronologically. Everything I remember is a combination of different memories, entangled together with other blurred events in an obscure way. I would be cremated soon and I don’t have much time to talk more with you. But I so want to talk with someone like you, who listens my unworthy talks with such attentiveness. But what can I do other than bade you goodbye and vanish from this world? Because every soul needs to rest in peace. 

Before going, let me tell you why the murder is an accident. The customer has held me and talking with someone about some political issue. As the conversation has progressed, it has got heated up and he's absentmindedly left hold of me. And then I've fallen and I found myself broken into pieces, for I am simply made of glass, a glass in a roadside teashop in which hundreds of people drinks tea every day. My owner, I mean the owner of the shop is very poor and it costs him 10 rupees for a glass. It's normal for him to be angry. It's normal for me to be thrown in garbage and recycled.

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