JUST AN EXPERIMENT TO ROBE IN ALL FIVE THOUGHTS ON WHICH DIFFERENT STORIES ARE EXPECTED OUT OF A WRITER.

It was a weird dream. Woke up, precipitating, in middle of the night. Though a cold January night, but I was sweating within. Something which happened years ago on that cold winter night in 1995, when blizzard struck the city. I recalled being alone in the supermart and could hear warnings of the storm approaching and engulfing the city within an hour. I decided to let go the rest of groceries and rushed towards billing. My feet stopped, hearing a feeble wail of the child. Looked across but found none. And then I dropped my phone and beneath the racks while looking for it, my hands touched his hands….cold as in ice. Somehow he had managed to hold my phone in his tiny hands. Pulling him out from beneath the racks, I noticed those blue eyes for the first time. Curly Golden hair made him resemble a Greek God. In my arms his tiny body made itself comfortable and he slept. There was no one in the mart except me, him and the last of the attendants who was pleading me to fasten my gait before the automated gates closes. He was running out and signaled me follow. I had few seconds and an infant in my hands. On the way to the gate I picked up a warm thin blanket and a carry bag from the shelves at the billing counter, praying hard that they were not tagged lest alarm goes up. I wrapped the kid in a blanket and put him in the carry bag. The door closed noiselessly barely missing my hand bag getting stuck. Once outside, I thanked the attendant and rushed to my car. But before I could close the door after keeping the bag having the kid, on the front seat, two burly men appeared from nowhere and held me by my arm, handcuffing me. One said they know what have I done and I stood there wondering if saving a kid was a crime. I had no idea till then what was in stored for me. I was happy that atleast now they would take him off me and re unite him with his parents. But it never happened. I was already tensed as next day it was my turn to board the rocket to moon. It was mandatory for every 25 years old to spend six months at a colony on the moon. And I was the chosen one for that year. 1995. And then I realized that they had come looking for me since I had not reported at the space station at 7 p.m. I think destiny had something else stored for me that night. I was living alone, had cut myself away from the rest of the world once on that fateful morning, just 20 minutes before my wedding when I saw my mom and my fiancé kissing eachother passionately. I had decided not to get married ever but being a child lover always yearned for a child of my own. So when I disclosed and explained about the kid with me to the officers, they generously agreed to take me the address of the kid’s parents, in fact a single parent, the father. The mother, the computer said, expired at the child birth. Upon reaching the address I found a pale lanky man who seemed to have been lost. He did not accept that child was his but kept repeating that he had to board the rocket to moon the next day. Seemed he could not come out of the shock of his wife’s un expected death. The officers confirmed that he was chosen to go to moon in 1995 but then because of pregnancy of his wife, he was dis qualified and as the luck would have it, I was chosen. Suddenly it struck me. I called up my mother, who was working as space research scientist and asked her if they would experiment sending a mentally disarranged person to moon that year. I told her the whole story and conveyed if she could manage sending the father of the child to moon instead of me, I would consider forgiving her for what she did. She agreed. She further managed permission from authorities for child to stay with me for six months before his father could return back to earth under the programme.    It was later learnt that the father of the child expired within a month of reaching colony at moon. Dave, as what I started calling the kid, had become my lifeline by the time court granted me permission to legally adopt the kid. My mother too had developed fondness for Dave. That man, who hoodwinked my mother during my marriage preparations, stood exposed later as what my mother told me. She regretted what happened.

Now in 2020, this fateful night, everything came back in a flash. I was still trembling and feeling cold though sweating all over. The coldness which I felt on Dave’s hands when I found him, I was experiencing it yet again. Something was wrong somewhere. As if he was buried somewhere in the snow and his hand was pulling out of the white sheet and when I touched it, I found coldness of a dead body. I immediately rushed out to his room only to find it empty. The car was also gone. Blizzard had hit the city and I wondered where had he gone in middle of the night. I called Irs and Molly, my two burly friends from the past and mother too but only to find out that on his way space station to board that doomed rocket which was supposed to carry him to Moon this year, his car met with an accident and he was no where to be found in the snow. He never told me that he had been chosen this year for that project. I started crying. May be this was the end of my journey with him. I found him on a night filled with despair and cold and today I lost him in similar circumstances. I rushed out defying the blizzard and there, much to my relief and happiness, I saw him right in front of me, across the street, smiling at me. He was saved by the police and this time when we hugged, he wrapped me with a blanket which police had given him to fight cold on that Blizzard night. Far away in the sky I could see the rocket soaring up in the space carrying someone else to the Moon city and there on the road I could see my two burly friends and my mother, fighting the cold, with their faces covered, walking towards me. They carried a letter from Mathew, my fiancé of yesteryears seeking forgiveness and to meet upto to what he did to me years back, he volunteered himself to be the next specimen sparing Dave to be taken away from me. That was the last trip to moon. The space programme was scrapped for good. Blizzard had calmed down. Sun came out. Life was good. And I required a good sleep. 

SANJAY MANCHANDA

WORDS 1208