The door silently opened. The room was pitching dark. Groping for the switch, her fingers grazed along the wall until they met the switchboard. She turned on a switch, at which the fan creaked starting to turn slowly and she put it off. She turned the next switch on and the tube flickered as it lit the room. News-lines paced along the TV screen mutely, as she walked in towards the sofa. There lied her father; one hand clutching the foam beneath, the other hanging freely towards the table. A glass of water stood still there and his eyes were closed as his face directed to the TV She was horrified, closed her ears as if to scream, but sooner realized that voice was too low to shrill, and she panicked until she had fallen herself to the wall and glided down thrusting her head into her knees. She cried.
The white cotton veil was held tight as the priest sighed to the other side. "Nikhil" his mother called him, and he sounded stunned, as if woken from sleep, startled as he stretched his legs. He peeped over the veil, and their eyes met again. Much like the first time in the training class, they still blushed in their marriage even after a score of months.A fortnight later, they moved into this old flat in the thirteenth floor of the apartment. High above the busy secretariat road, with a view of half the skyline of the city ahead, and leaking taps and clinging lime frames, her home was just one among a million of such nests.
After both of them left to the office on a boring weekday, all her father would do is sit on the couch, and crouch towards the newspaper reading it through the magnifier. Seldom did he talk. He used to eat his food and sit in the corner of the sofa watching the television or newspaper, or sleeping half seated, or listening to the office stories of his daughter. Everything was normal till today. And today, he is dead. She sobbed endlessly as her husband tried to pat her back and make her comforted.
Blood still dripped in large collecting drops slowly onto the floor mat which was no more being cared. The ambulance, funeral van, and the luxurious cars of a few relation-caring friends and relatives came over as the funeral went on.
"You are not letting me be romantic. He is seeing us forever. That can't stop us." "We spend on him more than his entire pension" "all that land near the airport shall belong to your younger brother"; she heard the voice in her quite ears as she sobbed.
"Nikhil" she called him in a tone over tuned by emotions. He turned back to see his wife hardly controlling herself. He ran back to her and she led him into a room. As the door closed, she asserted "you killed my father." "Yes. You see it. I've asked you a thousand times to keep him away. Our privacy, our money, our time, everything he snatched off from us. Yet no, I didn't kill him. I scolded him. I taunted him. As soon as in the morning you left, we had a fight over words. He panicked and tensed as he called your brother home. I left in fury then. Yet I knew, deep inside my heart, deep inside his eyes, he will die today."
(To be continued...)