The Sprauchled Breath

"I could not explain my worth,” she sighed, "I could not present the truth." "Why did the evil win?" as answer-less as an ancient rock. 

Her truth, though a whimsy for all, had started devouring her soul from her beating corpse. Being nourished in the hands of delicacy, she had begun to feel herself as a loathsome, putrescent soul. For her, the mirrors of reality had sprinkled the chaos of virtuality.

She had begun to look for her peace by plunging in abysmal depths of thoughts. And the beauties of life seemed a chimera for her. 

But, what was the truth she could not present to the world? What was the bad event that was absorbing her peace? What was the flood that turned her morose?
At such a young age, what was the cumber that was growing with her?
She just used to hum some lines all the time as she roamed lonely in her aisle of sorrow....

 "Weather was in rage and the clouds turned black...
Oh! The sun chose to spread the sorrow in the sane...
 That sudden serious gaze thrilled the norm in my soul;
 and the rays of hope riddled the threads of my peace."

A writer since a long, but now, she felt helpless to quote a single word; tremors straying her from holding the pen in her hand. She could not accept the fact that her strength was being challenged but helplessly, she could not rise to the level above it and got sinking deep into the bitterness of the aura. She was helpless!

A girl, who tried  to love even the odds of society, had now a stained heart with the developing hatred for everyone around. 

The love from everyone seemed to be a mere begunk to her.

"Why these episodic nightmares?” she used to ask herself. “Why do my scary dreams come true!" Now, even the fairy dreams were nothing more than nightmares. She was scared of sleep and she used to wake up whole night, staring at the sky, at the moon and the stars and used to wish if there was some path that went to moon where she could spend her rest of breaths.

In the foggy winter mornings, she used to cry under the voices of muezzin, heavily, as if never cried before and then with swollen eyes, she used to speak in her heart:

 "There is a need, O lord! I need it. I love you, I promise. Your blessings to me got captured by evil. Now, it is more than a decade and I am tired. Present it to me, not as a blossom but as a way to you." 

And then she used to lie down, close her eyes and croon with herself…

“I feel death soothing my lips;
From the distant narrow edge;
In my distant breath,
And then censoring the good out of me.”


Her hopes, though less; her patience, now trampled and soon, she decided to end her trial. And, with the heavy heart, on a piece of paper, she attempted to quote her last words:

To the charlatan scenes of world, 

I write to you, not as your votary but as your nemesis. Your abstractions are perfect to intoxicate a pure soul but your gladdened heart will soon burn in the gross!
Good bye!

And, with her closed eyes, she placed the sharp scalpel on her wrist and the blood washed all!

"This is what I got to know about her," he smiled and had a sip of cold coffee. 
I was numb, I could not ask more. As an interviewer, I felt weak for the first time since my first interview. 
He understood it and after placing the cup of coffee back on table, he took a pencil out of the pen holder with an eraser.

 Then, on a sheet of paper, he sprauchled some lines with pencil in his hand. 

Then, he asked me, "Can you erase this slumber in some minutes?"

"Yes, it is a pencil mark," I replied eagerly.

Then, he sprauchled in the same way with a ballpoint pen and asked me, “What about this one?”

With confused mind, I responded, “It is not possible to erase it like that.”

With a sigh of vindication, he said, “This is what troubled her internally. She felt her soul as stained with the drops of evil which could never be erased. She had begun to ponder on the thought of being a ruined lot!”

“What was the guilt that turned cataclysmic in her life?” I asked desperately.

"She was abused. She was molested by a person of her day to day dealings; a person who put her into dilemma of respect and honour when the dolls used to be in her toy house and she used to cry for her missing dolls; a person who made her entangled in the wires of dark and a person who made her hate herself when she could cherish her floral frocks." 

"As she grew up, it never escaped her mind and  she used to paint her feelings out on a sheet of paper and used to assume her life in it." he exhaled and looked out of the window.

“Did she ever speak about it to anyone?” I asked.

“To her fiancé.” 

“And, how did he react? Did he break the bond?” I asked.

“No, but he turned out to be the worst form of that animal whom she had already faced in her childhood,” he sighed  and continued, “And this made her reach to the conclusion that her impetus was lost forever . . . and this is what laid her to rest."

He continued with his anguish, "Everyone is busy in this world, like a busy bee buzzing in her nest but working with heft. Some stories bloom from the memory packs for centuries like the moral story of a lion and a rat but some stories, which should even be more moralising are dug into the gross of whim."

 "Though being molested before her adolescence, somewhere, she had started to grab that strength to live the world; to adapt herself to its atrocities until another person; an another person, her beloved fiancé, who was the first person whom her conscience trusted to speak to, grappled this right from her and blazoned her dignity into pieces," he sighed.

"I remember when I talked to her on her death bed, she spoke to me as if speaking for the last time, as if she knew that this is the end decided by the world for her."

 "And, I still remember those tears rolling from her cheeks as she said, ' His efforts of love towards me, his promising hopes to deal with crests and troughs of the life, together and along, turned into the subsequent events of humiliation, soon after I tried to present my bitter hidden roots to him.'" 

 "And, I still remember when I saw her breathing her last, her face showed a smile of relief as if she was murdered the whole of her life and now, was entering the phase of forever relief," he exhaled.

“As you said earlier, this could have been moralising. So, what are the morals with which you want it to be presented to the society?” I asked.

"Morals! 
I will just say that I wish if in this society, people chose to be the real educated ones and not only literate. There is no fun of such big blooming degrees when you can't differentiate the right from wrong and the innocent from accountable. " and with this, he concluded.



Nowsheen Jan 
(class of 2020)