Waiting for the code to break open again

This something is happening around here. Out of the depths of a helpless man devoid of lust or any excitement akin to it this something is happening around here. Inside a single-room with no prospects of an immediate future, the man ponders on the interpretations of his last night's dream, being a man who saw the grin of disappointment quite early in the morning he had nothing much to do but to wait, and interpret dreams. His contrivances now rested in the hands of an ATM machine which would not work according to the rules of his heart but according to the principle of numbers. It so happened that in an attempt to withdraw a hundred rupees note he had exceeded the number of times he could insert the card in the machine. He found out that a hundred rupee note does not come out of a machine- it has to be in multiples of hundred. And when a dear someone had added a hard earned hundred rupees note to the former, taking pity for the man with no money, the ATM machine stopped functioning because the daily limit had been crossed. So the man waited like the colonel who waited to his death for his pension to be granted by the government, without any anger or hatred, but because he had nothing else to do but to wait. And ruminate on old days, days of the hundred years of war (in case of the colonel), or, the days of youth, when he as a seventeen year old boy in the town of Guwahati could not remember the PIN no. of his card: it so happened that the brain had been changed forever, with happiness, on account of his first division-letter marks in the state board exam. The irony was obvious: here in a different city he could not get out two hundred rupees with a PIN no. And there, in another city, he could not get out ten thousand rupees because he had forgotten his PIN no. all of a sudden, due to happiness. And in both the cases waiting had to be done, in spite of what the heart longed to do. The heart of the present longed to be inside the tutorial room with his popular fiction teacher and his fellow students, listening to the lecture. The heart of the past had longed to spend easy cash on his friends at the hostel, and outside the hostel. Time, that same very time described as "this something happening around here" happened slowly, painfully, etching down feelings of the entire semester of the time of the college, and Delhi, in the cloth of infinity, frozen down to this momentous moment which i would remember as the time when i was in love with college lectures inside closed rooms among friends whom i would never see anymore in a year or two. Yet, i would not linger on. Yet, i would not fail to accept the blessings poured down to me in the form of this slow and painful torture of etching down feelings into the embroidery of time, today, as i wait for time to elapse until the code of the ATM breaks open for me again.

 

(To, Garima ma'am.)

Author's Note

Please feel free to comment. Every word will be a boon to me.

Reviews

[Reeti]

it's very touching. the despondency from near-destitution and the nostalgia are pungent, which also makes it poignant. It seems the Murphy's Law has occurred to the narrator, indicating that 'bad things happen in wrong times'. The feeling of fear is also very perceptive as the man is all on his own with his youth past him, and he must face the hard life. I really like how he longs for being back in college. That's something i have in myself too. Although i'm still a student, i don't mind going back in time.

[c k doley]

Thank you Reeti. You have such an incredible way of putting it: the despondency from near-destitution and the nostalgia are pungent, which also makes it poignant. If i can evoke such feelings in a reader then i really might be getting better in my vocation. Thank you so much.

[Reeti]

you're welcome! keep writing.

[bOhEmIa (mahim)]

Good Job.