The Criminal...

       He checked his pistol, two bullets left. He continued ahead, in a daze. He didn't know where he was going, what he was running from; just that he had to run. The trees and the walls and the buildings all merged into each other, each with their features accentuated. 

      Run!

      Looking behind to see an empty road, he let a sigh of relief. With the sound of approaching footsteps, he quickly hid behind a small wall. 

      It's not been long. I know what I am doing. I know why I am doing it. I know it. In some part of my consciousness, I can feel it. It's like a bug in my ear. It's so painful, I can't get it out. Run!

      He peeked through one of the cracks in the wall. A pair of feet. Black pants, black shoes. 

      This is it! 

      Stealthily, he aimed at the person approaching and pulled the trigger. He waited to see the face of the person he'd just shot. The one mistake. Gloating. 

      Before the person slumped to the ground, he heard the shuffling of feet from behind him. 

       "Put your hands up in the air! NOW!"

      He turned around in an arc, with his outstretched gun, but it was knocked over by the man. 

      "You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say or do may be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to consult an attorney before speaking to the police and to have an attorney present during questioning now or in the future" 

      He looked up to see the officer. But he couldn't make out his face. His face seemed an ugly mash of eyes blending with each other only separated by a nose which amalgamated with his mouth. He laughed, hysterically. 

      Promise me, you'll not leave me.

      

      The bars of the cell slammed closed. This was his home now. Four walls and darkness. They had told him that devils lived in the darkness. But no one ever told him, that people were sent into darkness to become devils. In the court hearing, he didn't remember much. They pronounced him guilty of murder. The number, he could not say. He had offered no defense, not because he felt guilty. Guilty people got away as much as not-guilty people went to jail. But this was his life. He had accepted it.
      Promise me, you'll not leave me.
      The words still got to him. They came and went like tornadoes. Calm before they came, but they left him screaming and screeching, pulling his hair and skin, pulling his ears till they bled. But the voice would remain. 
      It's like a bug in my ear. It's so painful, I can't get it out. Run!
      The guards would have to come in and hold him down. He acquired super human strength at those times. The strength of a mad man. The strength of a schizophrenic. Afterwards, he would laugh hysterically for hours and hours. He was the devil.
      The four walls gave way to even smaller four walls where there was only space for a bed and a latrine. More solitude, more attacks. 
      The past was like a distant memory to him, just like it is to most people. The pain of the past had diluted to such an extent that he could not remember his vengeance. 
      Time is a cruel concept. It takes away pain, but it also takes away purpose. It's funny how the people who mattered to you so much, the people who you would die for, the people who you would kill for, become inconsequential over time. Time takes away our best memories and also the worst. But sometimes, the worst memories are the one you want to hold on to. Because those are the ones which give you strength. Because sometimes, you act on those memories and as time passes by, those actions seem futile and the purpose of life fades away.
      Promise me, you'll not leave me.
      It has started. My boy. My sweet little boy. So young and innocent. Has eyes just like me. Big and brown and full of life. The way those eyes light up when we are on the swings in the park. His laugh. So carefree. We're returning back from the park. It's just a moment. Oh the dreaded moment. I wait on the sidewalk, turning around to get him his ice cream. I hear a big screech of the tires and a small thud. The world spins around. I know it's my boy. Those big brown eyes. They're full of blood. 
      Please don't leave me.
     I can't take it. I need to get these things out of my head. I hate myself. I want to get out of my skin!
     The doctors say he's dead on arrival. Something burns. It burns a hole inside my heart. I will avenge him. I'm facing the owner of the car. There's a gun in my hand. He's pleading for mercy. My boy's big brown eyes, no more life in them. Full of blood. I kill him. 
      I face the ice cream guy. He's pleading for mercy too. I hear the screeching of the tires. The thud. I cover my ears in pain but it's still there. I kill him too.
      Six months on the run, and the pain has receded. The purpose has dissolved. The memories are gone as quick as salt in water. They only come in bursts. Not the memory of my boy dying. The memory of those two people I killed. The memory of me not burying my child and having one last conversation with him. Making my peace with him.
      My ears! I can't take this. I want to pull it out. Pull out my ears. Pull out my memories. My memories which could have been of happy times with my boy. But they're just of those big brown eyes full of blood. They're of the screeching of the tires and the thud. They're of two innocent people begging for mercy.
      RUN!

       

The Red Moon...

Everyone has seen sunset. It's majestic and beautiful. The vibrant colours and the rapid colour change gives us the feeling of nature as a confused artist, suffering from the same conundrum that all artists face; that of never being satisfied with their masterpiece. And so nature changes and makes iterations. From the shades of orange to the shades of pink before it rests for the day, hoping to get it right the next sunset.

On the full moon, the moon is exact opposite of the sun. Just as the sun sets, the diminutive moon rises. As the light of the sun fades, and as the pink slowly turns to black, the moon turns red, maybe crying for the sun as the Earth comes in between them.

None of us probably have seen a simultaneous sunset and 'moonrise' but when you're marooned on an island roughly a hundred square feet in area with just one solitary coconut tree for shelter, company and every relation we humans have, surrounded by the endless blanket of water, nature shows us much more than we normally see.

As he sat there below the coconut tree, his only companion in the whole wide world, he pondered whether human companionship was overrated. After all, we are surrounded by nature on all sides. On a purely logical level, we are all made by the same fabric. On a fundamental level, we are all made of atoms, molecules and consciousness. It's probably our senses which mess it all up. A blind person will hear much more. For him, the wind and the trees, the singing of the birds, the rustling of the leaves, the crash of the waves register much more. He feels much more a part of nature. Remove hearing from the equation and the main sense becomes the feel. Same as most of the living organisms. With no sight and sound, everything is nature. You are not a separate entity of the universe, you are not standing on the ground, you are the ground. You can feel the vibrancy and the life of a tree when you feel it. You can feel the sunshine on your skin, the warmth instead of just saving yourself from being blinded.

Maybe mankind's greatest gain was also it's greatest loss. When we got these senses which apparently make us much more superior than any specie on Earth, we also lost the chance to be a part of the Universe.

The moon was rising slowly, changing it's red hue. He was reminded of the old times, when a red moon signaled an apocalypse. It was human condition to fear the extra ordinary. And it was also human condition to squash anything that scared us. Countless geniuses had died that way. But it was baffling to him how something so beautiful could be thought to be a signal of the world ending.

In all their smartness, humans had probably forgotten what the other side had in store. The side which wasn't like theirs. The side that humans could only think of when they were marooned on islands and surrounded by nature.

He was drifting...... 

The Flight...

I folded the paper to make two equal parts, vertically oriented. Each side was folded to make a half triangle on each side, combining to make a proper equilateral triangle. One more fold was made along the middle line on each side. The paper was then folded inwards of the middle line and three folds later, I had my device. A vintage 1936 (just making up the year) classic rocket with advanced aerodynamic capabilities.

This was no ordinary rocket. It was made out of a thin glossy paper, six inches by eight inches, intended for the poster of a college festival, but this was war and in war, all college festivals were suspended and hence all college festival posters were public property.

A dozen other students were participating and I was the manufacturing chief of those 1936 vintage rockets. We were trying to achieve the impossible. From our sixth floor department, we were making an attempt at being the first college students to fly solo across the busy main road of Gulmohar Road into enemy territory popularly known as Beyond Gulmohar Road. No such feat had been attempted before. Many had tried and most had failed miserably.

One of the earliest recorded instances of someone even imagining to come out of their shell and attempting this feat was eight years ago in 2007. The boy had a weak aeronautical background, a poor rendition of the much inferior 1932 model rocket and was badly ostracized when his rocket crash landed on the fifth floor itself. Because of violent winds, the rocket turned back on its head and crashed into the fifth floor department building. The boy was widely ostracized and he made no further attempt at proving them wrong.

Legend suggests that a solo flight had been made as far as the divider of the mighty Gulmohar Road two years later in 2009 when a guy, favoured by the winds, made it as far as anyone would expect. The sad thing was that he had no eye witnesses.

Over the years, the treacherous air space between the college and the territory Beyond Gulmohar Road achieved legendary and cult status. The winds were often violent because of the nearby sea and they often turned back rockets much before they could even stabilize their flights. The streets of Gulmohar Road were no less treacherous as they eagerly devoured any rockets that fell into their paths as a hungry shark would. Rockets were hence irrecoverable and this added to the cost of manufacturing. The unofficial commission for the Beyond Gulmohar Road Project decided that there would be a hiatus in this mission.

Years went by and as folklore spreads, it reached the ears of the very aeronautic-ally interested batch of 2012. The first few flights were tested by yours truly and a need for better design was cited. Over the year, the material was improved from light papers of our notebooks to thick posters. The posters provided perfect weight balance as they were neither too light to be blown off by the wind, nor too heavy to pummel through the heights into the gorge that was the Gulmohar Road.

And that brings us to the legendary day, when after collecting all resources, twelve very advanced rockets were to be flown in succession, hoping that one of them would reach Beyond Gulmohar Road. It was do or die. We had collected for over a year and there would be no further flights for another two years. The commission for the Beyond Gulmohar Road project thought it would be more useful to spend it on other useful stuff like marathons (internal college joke).

The winds were good. Calm and steady. We lined up, each in silent concentration. The weight of our ancestors rested on our shoulders. We all made a silent prayer to the ostracized first pilot, who we presumed must now be working for TCS.

And it began. The first flight took off, and nose dived too early on its flight and crashed down onto the parapet. Not a good start. The second followed a similar result even though it nose dived a little further away from the college. Two more followed with no better results. We were one third of our strength down and none of them had even made it to the deadly Gulmohar Road. The fifth plane nose dived too and just when we gave up hope, it steadied and changed direction to face us. Swiftly against the air, it changed its course in a smooth arc and pushed on towards Beyond Gulmohar Road. The swift movements had taken their toll, and it succumbed just before the middle of Gulmohar Road. There was hope afterall! Buoyed by this relative success, we launched another two rockets, both unsuccessfully. Seven down, five to go. The eight one was launched, and it turned 360 degrees on its body so that its wings were on the bottom. It steadied to a level that was unheard of. The rocket seemed to glide in the air as if it were part of the winds that made up the air. In that perfect moment, the air and the rocket were one. If you've ever seen the flight of a kite, it was perfectly symbolic of that. The rocket was pushing on beyond the middle of Gulmohar Road, each sway and jerk felt by the battalion of pilots watching in silent anticipation. It veered lower and lower, often in danger of a sudden gust of wind messing up its path. But the gods were good and there was no gust of wind. Ecstasy and loud shouts filled the corridor as the 1936 Vintage ALTF rocket crossed the threshold that had eluded man since times immemorial.

There is something about the phenomenon of flight which leaves us exhilarated. Maybe it's because of gravity. Humans want the most what they can't have and that's why we covet flying so much. Whatever be the reasons, the small rocket is our way of experiencing the thrill that we cannot enjoy. The feeling of truly being free. Afterall, flying is freedom personified. Flying signifies endless possibilities. Flying requires us to be in accordance with Nature's laws. Flying is being One with Nature.

P.S- We do fly rockets in our college, but not with such fervour. At least not all of them. All these incidents are made up and fictional, especially if our college HOD happens to read this :)