Abheek fiddled with his smart phone for the fifth time in the last 20
minutes. His Facebook homepage didn’t show any further updates.
He was seated on the window seat of the 234/1 mini bus, on the way to
Howrah watching the office going crowd, bumper to bumper traffic, red
signals that never seemed to change their colour and listening to the
honking of the cars and the bus conductor crying “Sojja Howrah..flyover
er opor diye”.
At the Dhakuria flyover a car passed by with a lady
seated in the rear, with windows pulled down a couple of inches as she
patted a cigarette from her right fore finger outside the window and
smoked again. To Abheek, it seemed all too artificial. “She must have
acquired this habit newly.Today’s women usually smoke to show ‘keta’ “, a
sexist thought escaped his mind.
The city was in the cusp of monsoon and outside the rain poured
merrily. The humid air started to blow fast as the weariness nudged him
into a slumber.
His mind wandered to a glass of iced whisky, in
his Jodhpur Park apartment; the sweet smell of alcohol that wafted
through the air when you poured the liquor…and the sofa where he sat,
reading a large and difficult book that he couldn’t read more than 2 or 3
pages a day. He thought, it must be one of those books where you had to
pry up the introduction to get into the real book. And then partake
another sip of whisky when the flavour of the previous sip had worn away
and he could feel the longing of another cold sip and a draft of that
sweet alcohol.But, by then the ice cubes had loosened weight and were
circling on top.
And even though it would be hot, he would gradually
feel the wind of the ceiling fan as it rippled through the loosely worn, little torn
T-shirt. And he knew that he had settled into an ocean of calm by then.
It must be sometime that he had dozed off to sleep, when, somebody knocked him.”Dada..ticket ta?”
