Brief Encounters: A moment of ethical dilemma

When you are not enclosed in an air-conditioned vehicle, the drill of treading in Delhi’s jammed roads on a sweaty July afternoon takes torture to a whole new level. Sitting in an endlessly stuttering auto-rickshaw, waiting for the signal to go green, I plugged in my earphones and switched to coke studio playlist to drown out the traffic cacophony. Just as Lucky Ali started humming into ‘O Sanam’, someone tapped on my knees.

Dear Nepal

I hope this letter finds you in the best of spirits. No. Hope isn’t the right word. Hope is timid, and expresses neither conviction nor promise. I’d rather pray than hope. A prayer has faith, a cosmic push towards a better future. And I am not sure about the best of spirits either. How do you carry the idealistic burden of keeping high spirits despite life destructing catastrophes? So I pray. I pray this letter shares some of your pain and restores faith in the struggle that is life.

Sitting miles away from you, I just felt the ripples of the doom that was cast upon on you, and it was heart shattering enough. The feeling of ground shaking beneath my feat, the sensation of walls shuddering against my back, the realization that my home, my safe place, wasn't a safe place after all, brought me face to face with the fragility of life as we know it. It is funny and horrifying at the same time how for a couple of days I could not sit at one place without flinching at every movement around me. I would periodically check the ceiling fans, chandeliers or mirrors for a sign of aftershock. The long crack on one of the beams in my house, that wasn't visible till a couple of days ago, now threatens me and mocks me for my erstwhile plans of adorning that place with decorative lights. The memory of sitting in a corner, shivering with fear, and waiting for the tremors to stop still gives me sleepless nights. My mind inadvertently draws safety plans and I evaluate all feasible options to take my family to a safe place in case of any emergency. On the outside, all of us wear a mask of nonchalance and share the stories of our experience with the earthquake like last night’s episode of a thrilling television series. But on the inside, we fear and question, ‘Are we close to the end yet? Is this how everything will go to dust?’

It's a hell of a thing killing a man

I paced around my room in worried steps. It was one of those rare moments when I saw cushions and papers strewn around the room but didn’t fidget to put them back in place. A restlessness surged in my heart and overpowered all the compulsive instincts. Once again I looked at the papers that detailed my next move. I hated such crossroads. More than a crossroad, right now it felt like walking on a tight rope, I was doomed to fall on either side. I sat on the floor and hid my face in my hands, as if that would hide me from the trouble that lingered in the air. I heard the door of my room open and was relieved to see Zahir. 

“I can’t do it” I threw my hands in the air in surrender, “I can’t kill Jay”

The Illusion of Wisdom

Wisdom makes you old, or does it come with age, I could never understand. But the irony is, when you are wise enough to know what’s right, you might have already lost the time to do the right thing. We lose many battles to win a few. And in the end, when our life has nothing but a history, we revisit its pages and pause at the unwritten words.