But...(Fiction)

It was a blasé start for Hari that day. There was no coffee to greet him good morning. He spent most of the morning waiting for the paperboy, ignorant of the fact that the paper was stuck in the handle of the entrance. He scanned the fridge for some food, found an egg, and decided to have a go at making an omelet for himself. Just as he was done with the omelet, the phone rang, its tone piercing the awkward silence in the house. Hari was caught unaware and rushed to attend it. When he returned to the kitchen, he was not at all surprised to find a thick black mass of carbon on the frying pan. The over fried stench that pervaded the house disallowed him from eating anything else. He finally sat down to meditate, just as he did everyday, realizing he could not concentrate anymore, had an express bath and left for the office a good one hour before time. He glanced at the sky as he got out of the house. There was not a single patch of blue to meet his eyes. All he saw was a consitent dull gray hemisphere. He couldn't but help compare the dull climate with his equally dull morning.

"What's gone wrong with me?" he said to himself on his way to the office. "Am I missing my wife…or...have I got used to a whole year of being lazy?" After a little more thinking, he decided that it was the latter that sounded better, his chauvinistic attitude not allowing to admit to the former.

When he reached the office, he saw that the work for the day was stereotypical. All he had to do was clear some pending files from the day before, and look at a fresh set of files which had just been brought in. The work took him more time than he expected, before he realized it was time for lunch.

As he sat down to eat the canteen food, he remembered the words of his chairman on the day he was inducted. “The canteen serves very good food, extremely rich in nutrients. Its doors are always open for our employees.” He observed during his first three years that the ‘nutrients’ came at the expense of taste. The food lacked in the minimum required amount of salt and spice that was expected in any kind of meal. But being a bachelor at that time, Hari had very alternative few options.

But, ever since his marriage, an year before, he couldn’t remember a single time he’d eaten at the dull canteen. He recalled the first dinner Tina prepared for him.
“Did my mom teach you how to cook?” he asked her after devouring the meal.
According to Hari, it was supposed to be a compliment. Tina took it the other way and triggered their first post-marital argument. He remembered the sordid words exchanged between them. The animosity lasted for one whole day, before both the parties realized how foolish they had been and conciliated, promising each other never to quarrel again.

The arguments and quarrels, however found their way into their topsy-turvy marriage life. But the final blow took place the previous night, when Hari, drunk, mentioned something, which he could not recollect now, about her only boyfriend during college days. However, he remembered Tina going back to her bedroom, in tears, impertinently closing the door on his face. She came out of her bedroom, directed herself towards the front door saying, “I won’t come back unless you come to my parents’ home and say sorry for what you’ve said.”
“In your dreams!” Hari had retorted.

Unconsciously, Hari felt a drop of tear at the tip of his left eye, waiting to run down his cheeks. The emotions stopped pouring out and Hari somehow managed to let it dry at that very spot. The hunger had left him. He had some fruit at the counter and left the canteen. After he’d reached his office, he looked out of the French window. He was shocked to see the intensity of the rain that was coming down. He got lost looking into the dense drops nature’s cast down on the earth, and suddenly realized the gravity of the statement he’d passed last night.
“It is my fault.” He said to himself. “But I was drunk. She should have understood.” He wanted to console himself.

He had just decided to apologise and get her back when he heard a knock on his door. It was his secretary, with a bunch of new files in her hand. He wanted to send them away, but his eyes fell on the bright yellow post-it stuck on the files. It cried “URGENT”. He had no option but to look through them.

By the time he finished with the paper work, it was dawn. He observed that his office was almost empty, barring a few, who had just arrived there to attend to their duty. He quickly packed his bag, and left his office hurriedly. On reaching the ground floor, he saw the lobby swarming with people drenched from head to toe. All of them were seeking refuge from the rain. The surroundings of the office were blurred by the dense downpour. The water outside was up to the knee level and Hari had to, by all means, go to meet Tina. He wanted to sort out all the things that went wrong between them. He wanted to feel the soft touch of her lips on his.

With the basement locked, the access to his car was cut-off. The only way Hari could reach her parents’ house seemed to be a fifteen-kilometer long walk. The calculation that went through his mind told him it would take around three hours to reach there. That would mean a night’s stay at her parent’s house. He made up his mind to walk through, even if it meant an attack of pneumonia.

It was a downpour, a terrible one, like that he had never seen before. His umbrella was rendered helpless. The wind was howling and there was no escape from getting drenched. He abandoned his umbrella mid-way. It was more of a burden than help. The walk, which started off though knee-deep water, was now, an hour later, a wade through waist-deep water. To keep his spirits up, Hari started off with his favorite ‘Chale chalo…’ tune. The people walking beside him took the cue and joined in. In fact all through Hari’s walk, the ‘rain-walkers’ were singing with zest and zeal, singing any song that could lift their spirits and make them forget the precarious situation they were in. This was probably the famous ‘spirit of Mumbai’, that he’d heard a lot about and was experiencing for the first time.

Hari finally reached Tina’s colony, and her house was very near. The water was still waist deep. He was already thinking of how happy Tina would be on seeing him at her doorstep. He couldn’t wait to see her. He would get freedom from these truculent floods, and have Tina back, this time renewed in a much stronger bond.

While Hari was pondering over what her reaction would be, he committed the biggest blunder of his life. He ignored a rumbling noise, he thought he heard a few seconds before, taking it for some engine’s noise. He suddenly felt a huge impulse on his head and then darkness.

It is strange how, in a jiffy, one can grab defeat from the jaws of success. How one can fall deep in love with a person. How, in a momentary lapse, one can lose one’s life.

The next moment, I saw Hari, lying crushed under a huge stone that came rolling from a near-by hill.

I still see her every moment, still want to be with her, still want to be morphed. But…