short story

REWIND

As she caressed her little baby to put him to sleep, she switched off the lights of her room. After hours of crying the baby had slept, finally. It was her time to catch up on some sleep, before the baby wakes up.

She was half asleep within a minute. She started seeing random images of incidents that happened to her in last few years. The images went backwards.

She saw the nurse handing over the baby to her in the hospital. She remembers looking with all the happiness at her husband. Next she saw herself  being married to a man she had not known properly. She had just turned twenty. This was not an uncommon thing in India. As she went deep into her sleep and her past, she was seeing more images of her life.

Her bus stopped at a small tea shop in Kangra, a hill station in Himachal Pradesh, India. She got down with her family. After a seven hour journey from Delhi, this was their second halt. It was 11am in the morning. There were patches of white clouds on hills full of pine trees . She must have been sixteen then. Though still young, she already seemed like a lady who had pretty big eyes and was well blessed with a good body. And she was well aware of that.

The whole family sat on a table. A little boy brought four glasses of tea. She still remembers the song being played. It was perhaps Kumar Sanu's hit of the 90s. A rage at that time. She took her glass and went to explore the small kiosks and shops. They were selling small souvenirs that were certainly out of fashion. But may be were a craze in the hills. This was the first time in the journey that she felt excited. While going through the shops, she stopped suddenly. Something caught her attention. There she saw a  poster of Madonna, among Bollywood stars like Juhi Chawla, Amir Khan and Govinda. It came as a surprise. A pop singer she loved listening to. Her idol.  Her cassette player knew no star but Madonna.

She had to to own it. She immediately asked for the price. The young boy at the shop, perhaps of her age, looked at her with a blank expression. May be he  could not understand her. He looked back at her, without batting an eyelid. After she asked him for the price again he called for his uncle or father. The man who came apologized saying the boy did not know Hindi as he is from small village in some interior part of India. She simply did not understand the name of that region that he  named. The boy was very fair and had little mustache.

A soon as she started calculating in her mind how much she had in her bag, and how much did she need to purchase it , she felt a slap on her back. It was her mother who had seen her and was certainly pissed off with this western influence on her daughter. She dragged her back to the bus. No wonder she had cried and pleaded with her mother to let her buy the poster. But it did not help. As she was made to sit in the bus, she saw that shop young fair boy staring at her. He was smiling or laughing at her, she could not make out. Her holidays had surely begun on a bad note.

Few days later, on the way back to Delhi, the bus stopped at the same tea shop. The sun was bidding adieu to the day.  After her mother got busy purchasing some shawls from the shops, she quietly went to that poster shop again. Damn! The poster was no more there!

She heard the bus horn and knew it was time to board the bus. She went inside and sat near the window, cribbing about not so happening summer vacations. Just as the she heard the horn again, she looked for her mother who was standing near the tea shop. A loud thud on the bus caught made her shift the focus. The same fair boy was standing on the road next to her window. He gave her a huge sheet of a paper rolled and tied with a ribbon. She opened it and saw that they were the same Madonna posters. She immediately rolled them back and kept them aside. Full of surprise, she stared back a him. He was also looking at her, with a smile.

The driver started the engine. All the passengers were now inside. The bus started moving slowly and the boy started walking beside it. They both looked at each other. The bus gained speed and he started running. She could not have said thank you aloud. As the bus gained speed, he stopped and started waving. In a rush she blew a flying kiss to him, making sure her mother didn't see. The bus made its way to a turn and all she could see was pine trees and the tints and hues of orange in the sky.

The baby cried again to wake her from her sleep. It ended her visit to the only love story she had ever known. But she smiled, after a long time..

(images- google)