Dev sat on his knees as if in a confession, staring at the
bright red shirt spread on the bed in front of him, his eyelids dropping with a
sadness that sits so heavy on the soul that it makes one’s shoulders droop. Tears
welled up in his eyes, fogging his spectacled vision, as he ran his palms over
the soft fabric lying in front of him. He felt as if he was trying to touch the
person for whom it was meant. His eyes narrowed as if trying to find something in
a distance. He looked from one side of the wall to another, as if trying to
ease out the lump in his throat, as if trying to loosen the sudden stiffening
of the neck. He threw his head back and stared at the blank ceiling for a while
as if looking for some sign from above. He could feel his desperate silent
prayers rising up and eventually falling on his face unanswered. Sadness does
not come at once, it comes in waves, one after another, each more cruel than
the one that went before. He felt as if the space and heaven was shrinking fast
and he was going to be crushed between to unfeeling sphere colliding around
him.
Questions were floating around
him in the sad, solitary and stale air of the fourteenth story room of the
Hotel.
“Will this, this perpetual pain,
end with death?”
“When will death come?”
“Could this all be a bad dream
that has gone on for so long that it seems like a reality of his life?”
Questions floated around like
serpents floating about, eventually tying themselves around his neck,
threatening to stifle his soul. He longed for someone to shake him by his
shoulders to wake him up from this nightmare which hounded him. Tears rolled
over helplessly over his angular, near-impoverished faced.
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