Hollow notes of broken strings and a thinning air of sin,dissolving in the creases of a marred memory.A stagnation that refuses to muse in the flow of Truth.Sharp trickling water,down the crevasse of the white walls,now grey under a grim cloudy canvas,menacingly pitch in its veil.
The arched board could be seen mounted on two pillars.
The name’s not visible,it’s buried beneath years of rust corroding an existence that lay beyond those iron bars shrouded by ivy while its leaves slowly faded into death.
The pebble stone-walk had become a coffin of the steps dragged thus long by the grassy needles growing in untamed sunlight and a moist undergrowth in the plagued soil.
The doors had chains dangling that resounded in eerie echoes.
A belief had made not a living soul wander near the said campus that covered a large area of four acres.
A piercing stench ran and hung in the howling wind housing in the grim dark chambers of an abandoned guesthouse.
The windowpanes with their scorch marks ratified the rumours yet heard wafting in the town ears.
There had been a fire on a fortnight’s residence of someone from Vasparool* ,they said.
The backyard transformed into a graveyard a month later to the incident. The tombstones bore engravings almost on the verge of disappearing into a plain monotony.The smoke residue marked the ground spared of life as it directed to the insides of the ramshackle wooden frame in the two-storied building.
The information board read the cost of maintaining the decaying corpse and the earthly ink in letters and dried flowers from years since except one by the Gulmohar tree that held none.
A metallic aftertaste of questions in the subdued anxiety of an approaching fear.
The wind blew like a silent roving rivulet through the narrow myriad alleys that contained eight years of dust blanketing the floor for insects to crawl up the Hall where linen curtains burned to the scared ceiling;heavy rosewood chairs cornered in ignorance as if huddled against the spine wrecking chill of the air that had brought along the strewn leaves of dried Banyan.
A dismayed disarray of belongings still intact.
The fathomless quiet broke with a chirrup of a frail Indian Robin-an apparition to the living,situated in solitude to the third room on the right corridor from the balcony which opened into the graveyard.Within lay a well,lined with pebbles,its depth couldn’t be measured for the eyes remained incapable of sight inside into the still waters,in-satiated in the fading threshold of a nightly darkness,living in the crevasse of the white walls.
In the rushing abyss of rain seemingly condensed into an identity that had stifled under the creeping freedom of Nature.
I hope it finds the right audience..Happy reading
