Free To Express

Mani lay emancipated and spent on his hospital bed with a death like somberness. He was the single occupant of that particular ward, it seemed that he was on his own, all alone! It was hard to believe that this was the same outgoing and handsome Mani with chiseled features, piercing golden-brown eyes and straight brownish black hair with a prominent widow’s peak on his forehead! Mani who once was the toast of the town, the very life of almost all the parties that he happened to find himself in was ill, really ill.   All of a sudden, unknowingly and unbeckoned, tears rolled out of the confines of his eyes, silently, like mute spectators, bound by their helplessness against all that is meted out in the name of reality… in the guise of the so called ‘actual life.’ Before he could raise his feeble hands to brush them away, it was done for him. Was he hallucinating, yet again? It couldn’t be. It was not actually possible for a brain drugged and numbed by over the counter prescri...

                         The early morning rays of the sun silently crept up on the sand dunes, casting a glow here and a shadow there. The air was still cool and the birds which had started chirping about an hour ago were slowing down on their melody. At this serene moment when nature and its living things were attuned to each other, the womenfolk of Pir Bagan Shah began their diurnal routine silently and swiftly without any rancor or misgivings. There was no point in sitting and doing nothing as in the end they alone were responsible for every iota of work done in this small hamlet of about twenty odd houses. Fifteen year old Tara, swiftly started to brush her house and the surrounding area clean, then there was the morning meal to be cooked and then a trudge of ten kilometers to get water and another ten to come back home laden with four pots filled to the brim, supported one on top of the other. Then the endless m...