Point of View

You know what they say about dark alleys and little girls? They should never be friends. Never ever.

The clouds rumbled loudly as she stepped into the alley, either going someplace or coming from somewhere. A bright colored raincoat adorned her little frame as she walked on the pavement. There was little light, since the moon was cosied up comfortably behind charcoal clouds. The streetlights did little to improve the situation. Trees swung back and forth a little and occasionally nodded hard in agreement. She did not care. It wasn’t raining cats and dogs yet. More like kittens and puppies. The thought made her giggle.

As she walked on the pavement, she did not notice a pair of eyes sizing her up, like a wild animal. She walked along, uncaring, occasionally doing a step here and a step there. The pair of eyes now appeared out of hiding and stood under the pale, jaundiced streetlight. Supported on a ragged frame, it stood complete with a ragged shirt and a pair of ragged pants. The thumb of his right foot stuck out of a torn pair of canvas and secretly licked a small puddle on the street before being complete drowned. He let out a string of curses as his right foot came out soggy. There was no moon to be seen yet. The streetlight continued to light up the scenery.

Water made him irritated. Water damaged his temper. Water dissipated his inner peace. Since the time it started raining in the afternoon, all he had done was get soaked in the rain. He hated it. And now his canvas had managed to find a puddle and get soaked in it. As one of his shoes squelched, he had seen the little girl, walking quietly, occasionally skipping. She even seemed to be humming a song now. He had the answer! It was all her fault! He did not know how, but he knew one thing for sure; she was the one who would pay for it.

There was an alley lying in wait for her. A few rotten banana peels and an occasional stray cat made up for its everyday livelihood. It encountered an occasional druggie or someone who had lost his way. Sometimes a drunkard would come and crash, and wait for dawn to arrive, when he would finally get up with a splitting headache and mend his way home. Today, a little girl in a bright raincoat decided to grace the alley. The alley stood there, surprised, and decided to let her walk through. As it stood there, admiring the cute thing, the ragged man stumbled in. The alley frowned and let a discarded can in his way. The man kicked it and realized he was about five steps away from her.

The little girl heard the clanking can and turned around to see a ragged man with a ragged expression. His face was streaked with rain water and grime and he looked really mad. The light in the alley was dim. Just then, lightning tore across the skies and revealed his shabby attire. “Don’t come near me!” she bleated. While her voice was soft and sheep like, it strangely did not carry any tones of fear. The shabby man was too drunk to care and he realized that this was the moment which would turn his day a little better. Just a little better. Maybe, a lot better.

He lumbered towards her. She stood still, her eyes like black buttons fixed on his face. “Don’t come near me!” she said once more, almost making it sound like a warning now. There seemed to be a shift in her tone as well. The man was either too drunk to notice, or too naïve to take a little girl like her seriously. As a result, he now stood right over her, breathing down her face.

“Come to daddy!” he said and broke into shabby laughter. The joke seemed extremely funny to him for some reason. She still stood there, her face set like stone. He finally looked at her eyes. Black and stony, they seemed to be staring right at his soul. He ignored the fact and placed his hands on her waist to pick her up. She did not struggle. A rat quickly ran past his foot and hid behind a trash can by the corner. She looked at him one final time and did something totally unexpected.

She placed her right palm right on his nose.

The man took it as a sign of defence and it tickled his funny bone even more. He broke into a fresh peal of laughter and tried to shrug his head sideways to shake off the hand from his face. Strangely enough, the hand remained. Suddenly he felt something hard closing around his nose.

Teeth.

He screamed in agony and let her go. The hand stayed, not moving, as she continued looking at his face with the same stone expression. He stood there, bent, unable to take his face off her hand. Blood flowed freely now, dripping down, mixing with the rainwater. The cats and dogs were finally coming down. His scream kept reverberating through the alley, but no one heard him. The hand soon let go off his nose and worked its way across the rest of his face. He finally managed to push her away and fell backwards. His face, by now, was a bloody mess. “Fuck off bitch!” he managed to utter through a mouth full of blood and a few broken teeth.  Then he ran.

She looked at him till he disappeared down the far side of the alley. He was gone. The rainwater washed off all the blood and gore from her hand. She looked at her palm. A pair of thin lips looked back at her.

“Thank you hand.”

“Hey no problem. Can we get another meal before we retire for the night? I am still kinda hungry.”

“Sure thing. Lets go check up a few more alleys!”

The rain kept falling in sheets as she trotted along the alley and stepped out of it. A frog croaked somewhere nearby. A few crickets chirped. No one had noticed the encounter; none of any consequence at least. No one would believe a babbling roadside idiot anyways.  The night, it seemed, had just started to get better…

[First published here, one of my favorite stories till date, for a couple of reasons. Its one of my 'experiments' that I did with the premise of putting the little girl in control instead of the demons which might have been haunting her. Secondly, it was a story which I had narrated at  

a Serenewoods (my publishers) convention at IIT Delhi, with writer Samit Basu (of Gameworld Trilogy fame, and more recently Turbulence) in the audience. He LOVED it. Hope you guys like it too! :) ]

Shocketry a.k.a Shocking Poetry!

It’s really heartning to see that the first post by me received such great response; thank you guys! You always manage to make me feel extra special! :D

I would like to begin with a leetil sorry to Stephen. It actually skipped me that you can only post older posts on weekends. So that won’t happen again. However, this is good news for YOU guys, the readers, if you like reading my writing. You would now see one NEW post here every week especially for this place. And on the weekend, you would also be able to witness one of my older, more popular stories. That makes it atleast TWO posts from me every week! :D

Since this is a new place, I thought of doing something NEW for it. At this moment, I hereby coin a new form of poetry: SHOCKETRY! I define Shocketry as nothing but Shocking Poetry. It can always be a good shock or a bad shock. The only condition is it MUST have shock value! Your boyfriend growing horns. The school teacher turning into an octopus. Anything. Wild!

The Pumpkin’s Revenge

It was late at night

And Jack sat down

On the night before Halloween.

With knife and pumpkin on his lap

All ‘ready’, if you know what I mean!

For years together,

 Jack always made

Lanterns Big and Small

And during Halloween, Jack o’ Lanterns shone

In the houses, one and all...

So on this night

Without a fright

Jack poised his knife on top

Before the blade could make the cut

He heard a grave voice say “STOP!”

“No more lanterns!”

The pumpkin said,

“We have taken this all too long!”

And before Jack knew, the pumpkin broke

Into a pumpkin song!

The song now over,

And Jack quite frozen

The result was very strange

Jack spoke not a word, nor did any gesture

For both seemed out of range

Next morning when

the villagers came

to take their lanterns home

It seemed just like any other Halloween

The way the years had known.

“This one looks like Uncle Jack!”

A child squealed looking at his piece

The villagers giggled

and praised crafty Jack, saying

“I think we should pay his fees!”

Jack now hangs

Outside a door

With a candle in his head

And if the poem scared you bad,

Make sure you don’t wet your bed!

P.S.- The facebook page just crossed 200 LIKES!! Fresh music uploaded today! Make sure you check it out here. My De-scribe blog also crossed 200 followers! Do check it out for fresh stories and great music! And in-case you want to write your own Shocketry on this blog or your own, make sure you put a link to my blog! Have a great day...see you soon! :)

Room for Rent

The chirping of the birds on the lone tree near the door rose to a shrill cry as he turned the key into the lock. A thousand things played on his mind as his gaze caught a rather dreary looking cat jumping over the wall and disappearing on the other side. A few ruddy looking chicken played hopscotch nearby. Not the kind of neighborhood that he would want to stay in, but real estate was pricey. This was the only setup he could get. Afford.

***
I hate empty rooms. I have always hated them. They don’t scare me; they only make me uncomfortable. I remember the first time they had asked me to stay in one; I had probably been around seven years old. Young enough to be not taken seriously, old enough to remember every detail. It was in my mother’s village and we had gone there to attend a funeral. My parents decided to stay in one room and asked me to sleep in the other one which was vacant. I had decided not to complain and sleep in it. I slept pretty well and woke up to a bright and fresh morning. Everything was perfect; until the moment I overheard some elders saying that it was the same room that Shashi chacha committed suicide three days ago.

***

The room opened up and drowned him in a sea of dampness. He stood for a while surveying the place. The landlord, it seemed, had tricked him. Nothing complicated though. He had told him that the room would be his. Only his. And here he was, standing, looking at someone else’s luggage. He was sure that the house had been sold to the other guy with the same assurance. There was no use fighting about it; he just might lose the only abode that he had finally managed to get. He would have to figure it out with his new found roommate. He was a little disappointed. But more than that, he was happy. It wasn’t an empty room.

***

While growing up I always avoided empty rooms. They always reminded me of the room that I had spent the night in at the village. Once, during recess, as we played hide and seek, I went and hid in one of the empty unused classes. Some kid noticed it and latched the door from the outside. I screamed for about half an hour before fainting. The next memory I had was of four hours later, sitting with my parents’ worried expressions boring down on me. Obviously, I did not tell them anything.

***

“Hello! Will you be sharing my room?” a voice called out behind him as he stood there with his bag still slung over his shoulder. He turned around to see a decently built guy, sparse hair and smooth expression in place, standing at the door looking straight at him. “The other guy”, he thought. Half his problem seemed to have been solved. The other guy had taken him to be his roommate without even being asked. The landlord had probably given him a different story. No problems.

“Yes, looks like it”, he said finally, after doing a quick run through in his head. He would stick in now, and ask the landlord later. Not that he was complaining about the room not being empty. But the matter had to be sorted, sooner or later.

***

After we came back from the village, I could never sleep alone again. My mother never figured out the reason but she made it a point to sleep with me everyday. One night, she promised she would come in a bit. She was crying for some strange reason. She never did.

Did I tell you I hate lies?

***

I went and confronted the landlord, just as the sun decided to splash out of sight in the distance and drowned the whole place in darkness.

“What are you saying? There is no one in that house! The last guy who was living there passed away some two years back. Nice chap he was, well fed, looked from a good family! What a loss!”

I did not say anything. Strange, you might add. But I will tell you what bothered me now. If he was not staying there, it only meant that I was the only one. It also meant there was no one staying with me, which was kind of obvious. I tried my level best to take the supernatural angle out of it.

It meant the room was empty.

***

He slapped his knee, throwing back his head in a jerk and laughed. “ He told you I was a ghost?” he asked, eyes shining.

“Yes” I said defiantly. I was not used to having spirits laughing at me.

“And this guy, you said, rented you this house. His name was…let me remember, Manohar?”

“Ofcouse!” I replied, starting to feel a little irritated with his behavior now.

“The wit of that guy! Why don’t we go along and have a quick chat with him yes? Let him say that on my face! I hate people calling me a ghost behind my back!”

We walked to the door of the house where I had the conversation with my landlord the previous evening. He went boldly and knocked the door. A lady, in her mid fifties came out. He folded his hands and greeted her. She returned the greeting.

“Doesn’t look like she thinks I am a ghost unless she is one herself!” he whispered in my ear and asked her loudly, “Manohar ji hain?”

She nodded her head and seemed to look through me. Then she looked straight at me and questioned at length “ Did he ask you to go and stay with this boy?”

“Yes” I replied, a little bewildered. “ I met him about three days ago at the very spot where we are standing!”

“He prabhu!” She said and looked up, paying her respects to someone in the skies. “ It’s high time he stops renting out the house to people when its already occupied!”she sighed.

“After all, it’s been five years since he passed away!”

[My first post at The Writer's Lounge, so go a little easy on me! :) Originally published here, it remains one of the rare stories that I did with an Indian setup. Also one of my favourites! Do tell me how you like it. Big hello to new bloggers!  ]