A Tale of Perpetual Fatal Affinity

The month of March was quite singularly, and rather unsurprisingly, sweltering this time. Boys had found their own coping ways – by staying confined to their dingy, air-conditioned hostel rooms. The lesser privileged or unfortunate ones, lacking air-conditioners in their rooms, would scurry across to the bathroom to take a prolonged shower session or apply copious amounts of talcum powder to beat the heat. Climate change, even though staying unacknowledged and unheeded, was indeed getting real.

The famed comedian, Anubhav Bassi had also iterated in one of his shows how wild a typical boys’ hostel tended to be – whereby one often would stumble upon “animals who can speak.” And ours was no exception. The soaring temperatures would do little to dampen the pandemonium or zing during the nightly hours. Adjoining rooms would be frenzied with too many people grooving excitably to music blaring from the Bluetooth speakers; the corridors would be filled with wannabe cricketing enthusiasts, trying their luck out with a tennis ball and a bat in a strategic position to avoid the prying eyes of the CCTV cameras intended to catch miscreants.

On one of these nights, most of the inmates (as they were apparently called by the university officials) were indoors, necessitated by an irrational in-timing of 9 p.m., and were mostly either confined to the claustrophobia-inducing air-conditioned rooms, as aforementioned, or suffering at room temperature.

It so chanced that I’d to step out momentarily from my room to fill up the water bottles, cursing warily at the distance to be traversed, and wistfully hoping for a facilitator mate to pop up out of nowhere and rescue an indolent prat from going bonkers. A warm gust of wind rattled me as soon as I stepped out as if it was a way of Nature to disparage my disposition. 

The corridors, on that particular day, were unusually relatively quieter than usual and not as crowded as on regular days, with loitering, dawdling hostellers. Even the tube lights illuminating them had been prematurely turned off, probably because someone might have encountered an earlier than usual state of somnolence.

I still don’t know whether the architect cheekily wanted to place the taps supplying potable water in close proximity to both the washroom and the bathroom or whether it was a strategic decision supported by factors of civil engineering and fluid dynamics, per se. Either way, one could argue that the intended effect was the same: no one wanted to stay on for longer than was necessary, as the pungent stink was exhorting enough to drive even the sturdiest people away - something that oftentimes proved crucial to saving wastage of water.

After the bottles and my system both had been replenished with a fresh supply of the questionably consumable hard water, I decided to foray into the washroom to rinse my face and infuse some temporal wakefulness to help me stay productive for the remaining 2-3 hours before calling it a day (or night, for that matter).

Just as I was about to finish splashing the last handful of water onto my tired, weathered face, a zapping bee in the vicinity startled me. I looked up towards the tube light. There were about half a dozen, seemingly hyperactive ones constantly gravitating towards the tube light as if the electromagnetic field around it had excited the ferrous elements in their bodies and taken control of their consciousness to pull them towards it. 

Nasty encounters in my childhood had conditioned me to fear bees and as a result, I bolted away as fast as I could to avoid getting stung. 

*****

After an hour’s worth of dilly-dallying to get the nightly sessions of academic studies done, I ventured into the washroom yet again on the pretext of taking a minuscule break from the monotonousness. I was immediately greeted by a swarm of frenzied bees, this time in greater numbers. My initial reaction of horror transformed into comprehension when I saw the sink and the basin.

Six completely immobile bees lay spread-eagled at varying angles and it was evident that they’d breathed their last. The other bees were circling randomly, apparently flummoxed by the cause of the demise of their fallen comrades. Some of them charged at me furiously, automatically assuming me to be the culprit, being the most recent man to enter the graveyard. What they probably didn’t rationalize was why would a murderer venture with profound imbecility into a crime scene that he’d almost immediately before contrived? And like always, I sprinted away and locked my door from the inside, waiting for the angry swarm to pass, cursing them for occluding access to the washroom at night.

 *****

Daylight was seeping in through the narrow partitions left by the slowly drifting curtains in the early morning’s sultry winds. Needless to say, the streaming beam of light woke me up, as I cursed at the thought of undergoing through Monday blues all over again.

I dragged myself to the washroom in my semi-groggy state for the usual morning chores. Just as I entered, I stood dumbfounded for some time. The entire sink painted a morbid picture with more than two dozen corpses of the bees. There were no signs of any survivors or any companions of the fallen legion. It was as if the liveliness during nocturnal hours was suddenly robbed as the grim realisation of the morn’s tidings came.

And all for what? A seemingly innocuous, radiant source of light, namely, the fluorescent tube, had fleetingly and single-handedly carried out the massacre. An alluring core of illumination had ensnared them; only to snuff the light out of their lives, forever. 

It was highly possible that their bodily phototactic composition had brought on them this present catastrophe and perhaps, they got wiser after a while about the deception of the scintillation and the Joule’s calefaction that had laid waste to their unsuspecting comrades. 

The emphatic, deathly silence that followed, was, perhaps, the only way of eulogizing the mishap.

 Their perpetual affinity for the light had ultimately proved to be fatal.