So this week’s update is a short story. I’ve been wanting to write one ever since I restarted my blogging journey but I find it real hard to write short stories as opposed to poems and prose. So here’s my short story and I hope you like it as much as I liked writing it. A shout-out to my friends BHAVYA( she writes sonderponderdot.wordpress.com, do check that out) PRIYA SINGH and PRITHVI who’ve more than once, been the first readers, suggested changes and motivated me to carry on my blogging journey. I always thank such friends anonymously but I thought true appreciation must be announced so here it goes. And now… (drum-roll please) presenting to you, “The broken china”
It had been three months now and Anita was growing restless. It was none of her business of course but it was impossible not to think about it, especially, when the noise echoes through your house. It is only natural to investigate something that affects you, or that was how Anita tried to convince herself.
Anita had moved with her husband Jatin Mukherjee into the 11th floor of a posh apartment in a popular residential area in their city. It was a big apartment with a perfect city-overlooking balcony. It was close enough for Jatin to come home for lunch; it had round the clock running water and electricity with ample malls and supermarkets just a stone’s throw away; Anita found it beyond perfect!
But what kept nagging her was the curious case of the Mishras. Neeta and Carl Mishra were right above Anita and Jatin on 12 B. Only Carl and Neeta were not exactly the outgoing couple and no one really saw much of Carl, he was a shut-in. All the activity that ever came outside the house was Neeta leaving at 9 for work and returning almost exactly 12 hours later at 9 in the pm. Neeta was the kind of girl who’d never invite anyone inside, irrespective of whether you wanted to borrow a cup of sugar or invite her to your house-warming ceremony. All one would ever see of her was her head, poking from the door and a forgotten body for your mind to conjure. The only proof that a couple ever lived upstairs was the crashing sounds and the loud voices that Anita would hear in her bedroom coming from the apartment above. At first, there were one or two loud remarks you would hear intermittently but as time progressed Anita was convinced that full blown fights were breaking out above their roof.
Anita could never understand how Jatin would sleep through it. She would lie awake next to her snoring husband unwittingly listening to the ruckus that permeated through the walls of her apartment every other night. It was such a delicate issue that she felt she was crossing an unsaid line even to think about mentioning it at the first home-owners meeting. Throughout the meeting, she kept looking at Neeta, trying to decipher what ailed her. Neeta was an attractive woman in her early thirties; she always wore her hair up exposing her bare neck; slender and attractive. She had big brown eyes and diaphanous lids that repeatedly shuttled up and down as she sat there listening in the meeting. She dressed not very conservatively but appeared to be meek and submissive. She sat on the furthest chair always looking a little out of tune from the setting she was in. One look and Anita knew, poor Neeta was trapped in the snares of a perfidious Carl, who fought with her during the nights. Delicate little thing, she hardly looked like she could put up any defense.
She subtly asked the Sharmas on 11C and Anjali Sharma was more than willing to let her know all about it.
“Yes Yes, I hear them too. They are quite loud aren’t they?”
“It was a love marriage apparently, and her parents were against it. Now she can’t go back, can she? Sometimes we are stuck with our choices in life”
“I heard that her husband hates it that she goes to work, male ego and everything I think. Then again, he never steps out, somebody should earn he bread, don’t you agree Mrs. Mukherjee?”
“I think he hits her, do you see how she hides the bruises with make up?”
It was clear that the general sympathies of the female home-makers rested with Neeta. Especially with Anjali Sharma steering every conversation anyone ever had about the Mishras. Her immaculate beliefs about things unknown to her, her convictions about her judgments and her innate ability to garner every ounce of gossip that might ever exist made her the building’s one-woman radio. There wasn’t any news that Anjali Sharma didn’t know! Anita always thought that there was nothing she couldn’t find out if she put her keen and probing mind to it. She laughed to herself that Anjali would have made a good investigative journalist in another life.
But things only started to get interesting when Neeta stopped coming out. The Mukherjees, Anita and Jatin, had gone away for the Diwali weekend and when they returned a pungent repulsive smell invaded their nostrils. They threw open every window and hit all the fans but the smell just wouldn’t go. Eventually, the Sharmas too started complaining late that evening. The security had narrowed it down to apartment 12B, “the Mishras.” He tried the bell, banging the door and Neeta’s phone numerous times to no avail. Neeta hadn’t stepped out as the entire city shut down for the long weekend. Eventually, the president of the home-owners association waded through the crowd in his baniyan and lungi and declared in his standard baritone that the door would have to be knocked down. The entire apartment watched expectantly as the house was being broken in. A forbidden entry was finally being forced open, and heads bobbed up and down to catch a glimpse. And once it was down, the smell only got stronger and everyone instantly covered their noses and stepped back, unwilling to venture in. The president crinkled his face, covered it with a towel and walked through the doors in a manner that would befit a brave explorer sailing to the unknown and uncharted. He returned saying that Neeta was dead and that no one else should enter the scene and that it should be handed over to the area police. It was a curious thing Anita figured how quickly one’s home can become a scene of crime.
For the next two days, all sorts of policemen and reporters raided the building. Everybody wanted to know the story. Anjali Sharma never seemed so close to her calling as she fed the thirsty reporters her home-brewed cocktail of assumption and hearsay. But what really happened remained an enigma enclosed in the mouthless walls of 12 B. A newspaper article soon came out enlightening Anita about what they found inside. Neeta, the deceased was a mangled heap on the floor with a deep gash across her right wrist, which probably caused her to bleed to death. Next to her was an over-turned shelf which had previously been filled with china dishes, now all broken into pieces and strewn around. The weapon of choice was a broken piece of china that lay unaware on the floor next to her body. The kitchen had barely any utensils, the cupboards had clothes for only one. Only one room had been in use and the other two seemed to have been locked up all the while. The bed looked like only one person had slept on it as it sunk a little on one side. There was no sign of her husband, it was as if he never lived there.
Anita sat up on her bed that night pondering over all of it, making an unwilling Jatin listen to every question that crossed her mind. So where was Carl? What happened to him? Did he leave his wife? Was she mentally disturbed ? She did commit suicide after all. How was she able to go to work every day with something so serious? Whose voices had she been hearing then? There were two voices, weren’t they? She had been told that a couple lived upstairs. What shocked Anita more was that something so novel and enigmatic could happen in a quaint residential building, in a house right above hers!!
And then Jatin for the first time in the three months of the voices and the episode offered a personal comment on the subject. “But Anita, don’t you get it darling, there never was a Carl in the first place.”
Image Courtesy: Pinterest
I’ll catch you again next Sunday with new content
Janani Janarthanan
Yarns of Ideas 