Sunday 3 October 2010
Far Away...
It was raining outside, and the raindrops trickled down the windowpanes. She stared into the glass and her image looked back at her, piteously. “Far away”, she thought. And deep into her thoughts, she flew away, away to a land where everything was blissful. Colorful. There, she dreamt of a life of unhindered joy, where everyone was gentle and kind, where everyone did their business without poking each other’s noses.
She had been staring into the glass for more than an hour when she came to reality, with a start. She checked the rooms. He was still not home. It was 10 PM already. Where in the world would he be at this hour, she wondered.
Dead into the night, he was with his friends, drinking and making merry. Time to time, he took out a lump of dark matter nicely covered in plastic. He took a portion from it, pierced a needle into it, took a match, lighted it, and burned the portion to some degree. After that, he mixed the roasted matter with tobacco, rolled it up in a paper neatly, and appreciated his handiwork from an arm’s length.
They smoked the roll, passing it round like a relay-race token. On the other hand, they held a plastic glass of the finest whiskey the country produced. The bottle was labeled “Special Courier”. Shortly then, someone stood up and shouted “photo session”. Everyone tried to put on his or her best smiles, and as the camera panned, a statue of the Lord Buddha rose as the background. Once the photo was taken, they shouted their lungs out, in a way of making merry. Someone even, lumped down, out of sheer drunkenness and intoxication of illegal matters.
As Chayphee reached out for his mobile, which was ringing incessantly, he spoke into the mouthpiece so loud that a good deal of saliva had accumulated on it. On the other end, a crazy lady was blurting out, questioning him of his late outing. It was sometime before he realized it was his wife. He told her he would be home as soon as possible that he was in town attending to some urgent work. He hung up only to realize it had passed 1 AM in the morning. Few more sips from the glass and more puffs from the joint rendered him almost senseless, afterward.
He crawled on the slippery grounds, without either the benefit of his legs or his friends carrying him on their backs. His friends had dropped him till the motor-able road. His chest was bruised and he was bleeding profusely.
He swam across a small muddy puddle, across the drain and crawled his way up the stairs. He knocked on a few doors up late into the morning when finally he discovered his right flat. His wife opened the doors for him.
He was dripping blood mixed with mud when he slumped into his bed with his boots on.
His wife grimaced, thinking of that far away land. And as she slept on the sofa, that image of the beautiful faraway land loomed across her eyelids and soon fell into a deep slumber. It was there that she felt real, in her dreams, and she slobbered late into the sunny afternoon…
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