"Love Maya": My entry for the Get Published contest

It was quite unbelievable that he recognized me, it has been 10 years since we saw each other after college, I had added good amount of fat to my tummy and rest of the body; To him I might have looked like an inflated balloon that took 10 long years to inflate day by day, bit by bit, fat by fat, cell by cell.  

Eventhough I had totally forgotten him in the mundane life, the words immediately flashed on my mind

“Every atom in my blood

Says your name

Maya Maya”

It was not great poetry, whether it can be called poetry at all is debatable, but I remember it vividly as sun rays through a glass window in Chennai during May, was due to the fact that it was the first time that I saw something written in blood!  

Movies maybe have shown such nonsense but to see it in real life was a no nonsense experience.  The smell had climbed on to my nose and somewhere as the fat grew bit by bit it had rented a cell and rested comfortably on my brain like an old retired man sitting on his verandah in an easy chair bare chested, watching the traffic pass by having nothing to do but wonder about the son who is away in a foreign country.

Raghu looked the same, short and lean making anyone think of asking when was the last time he ate; the thick moustache looking like a black worm was there between his nose and lips. Lips were as dark as the stark reality of night, tarnished day by day by the smoking he did right from college days. As though smoke had settled, his hair had shades of grey. The only difference was the rim-less glass he was wearing now, this made him looked smarter than what he liked to pretend he was, rightfully so.

Neither I nor Raghu were the easy mingling types but seeing someone from college must have refreshed his memories and the smell inside me suddenly woke up clinging to his love story. The smell suddenly spread like milk spilled from the dropped open feeding bottle of a child, spreading as much as it can, as far as it can, raking the curiosity of the child with every move it made. Like the child splashing and playing the spilled milk, I began playing with it, the division of the class, sudden silence of Eashwar, the cries of people and irritatingly my lack of the full picture woke me up. 

I cared very little to know how he was doing and how he coped up with life after. The smell was only interested in knowing what really happened with him, Maya and Selvam. Sure this was a triangular story of love, betrayal, and hatred but was there more… death?  Why would Eashwar not talk about it? Now that I had the heart in front of me, it was time to dissect it and see what’s inside.  I sharpened my knives, blades, foreceps and clips, put on my mask.

Do you want to enter the operation theatre with me?

This is my entry for the HarperCollins–IndiBlogger Get Published contest, which is run with inputs from Yashodhara Lal and HarperCollins India.

Click here to vote if you want to read the rest
Love Maya