The Three Shadows

As I stared at my slippers lying on the floor in the formation of a right angle, I heard the sound of glass shattering. I closed my eyes and took in a deep breath. I slowly opened my eyes and continued to stare at my slippers. They were quite plain, nothing extraordinary. You know the kind that won’t be stolen from in front of the temple gates. They were like me- simple and worn out. Strands of hair fell into my eyes that I would occasionally brush away and sometimes I would just let them be. I looked up and stared out of the window- no spectacular view , the only thing that held my attention was the lamp post- rusty and scratched. In hindsight, I could see the ceiling fan in my room moving slowly- almost unwilling. The broken regulator allowed it to work only on this speed. It didn’t serve much or any purpose in the July summer heat. But its movement created a sense of reassurance- a routine. The monotony was not something I minded. This is what my entire life had been- a series of events passing by in front of my eyes. Though it was my life, all I had ever been was an onlooker on the sidelines. As I was still staring at the lamp post – that was now lit up even though the setting sun was still keeping it bright outdoors. There now was a little girl near the lamp post – bent to (what I presume) tie up her shoelaces that had somehow come undone. As the warm setting sun hit her body, a shadow was formed. My fingers instinctively moved to the black hair tie on my left wrist. My fingers expertly pulled at it, moving it, twisting it. The shadow waved at me and I continued to stare at it and then the little girl stood while the shadow of the little girl stood straight and waved at me, making a motion with her hands for me to come over. I stared at it unfazed as I continued to tread with the hair tie- keeping me tied to reality. Soon there were three shadows – all were little girls in frocks. It didn’t shake me up at all. I had grown up with this for a big part of my life. This was how my life had passed by me- I had always been staring at the shadows, listening to the sounds, focusing on the movements of the three little girls- while my life had whizzed past me .However, sometimes it just dragged. As my mother walked up to the room, she stood by the door. I knew it was her, I knew her footsteps even though my back was turned towards her.  After a few moments of silence she asked me if I had had my lunch, I just nodded. I knew that she hated the silence. She always wanted the house to be filled with good natured conversations so she tries her best to talk but in observing the sounds around me, I had grown silent. Maybe I was more like my father. She then asked me if I had started with my homework and I shrugged again, though now I turned to look in her direction and stared at her. I don’t know how she could so casually ask me about homework but I remembered that she didn’t know. Her expression was filled with hope- hope that I might talk to her but all I could offer her was silence. On occasions when got fed up she would scream and say how the silence bit her. She hated it but I couldn’t do anything about it. She gave me all her attention but my mind was filled with voices – voices whose owners wanted her attention. She finally got tired and left, like always. Her expression was one that of aggravation. She was responsible for all this but I didn’t blame her. As I turned to look back out of the window the little girl was gone and so were the shadows. But unlike about the girl, I knew the shadows would be back. They always came back- sometimes as voices, sometimes as something else but I could always tell that it was them. I could feel it. They had never hurt me, not yet. Their intentions weren’t all nice though, I knew that. I had gotten into trouble because of them many a times. They would always call me to them. I think two of them came when I was seven, the third one came when I was nine or ten.  I uncrossed my legs and got off the bed. It wasn’t very dark outside yet but the light from the lamp had become more significant. I switched on the lights in the room. Too bright. I moved to the bathroom and switched on the lights. I looked at the mirror and my reflection stared back at me. I was there in the mirror but there was someone else too. And she was all I could focus on. My hand moved to the hair tie- my anchor to reality. The mirror appeared to be cracked. The small crack in the corner kept on expanding until the reflections in the mirror were distorted. My fingers grasped at the hair tie a little tighter. This had never happened. Usually a small crack in the corner would appear nothing like this. The point was always for me to look at her, to notice her and feel hollow on the inside. I let go of the hair tie and brought my fingers to touch the mirror. As I was tracing the crack, I cut my finger. The crack was real. And the mirror was broken. As I looked up from examining my finger, I saw that she was still there but I couldn’t see her expression- it was all distorted. Her eyes seemed to be downcast, looking at my finger- she too was shocked, or maybe she was examining her handiwork. But then I focused more on the mirror. I thought that it would break completely, sending glass shards everywhere but that didn’t happen. The lights went out and I heard the sound of something crashing somewhere in a distance. I heard my mother call my name and as I turned towards the direction of her voice I felt a chill run down my spine , I felt a touch on my neck- the touch burnt against my cold skin.  I shivered and brought a hand to my neck, as I touched the skin, it felt like a burning sensation. On my right, I could hear the sound of someone taking in deep breaths. It felt as if the temperature had suddenly dropped a lot. My hand went to the hair tie on my wrist and I closed my eyes and took in deep breaths to calm myself. That was when I heard it, the voices. They weren’t threatening. On the contrary, they were merely more than a whisper, but in the dead of silence I heard it all too well.  ‘Your time has come.’ One said. ‘Tell her to listen to us, to talk to us’, the second one said about my mother. ‘The mistake was made a long time ago; it’s about time someone paid for it. You thought you could run away from it forever? Did your mother think that her precious little daughter was safe? That she could survive?  Blood once spilled can’t be wiped, its essence always stays. Did she think that you were better than us? Why should you get to live when we can’t? You shall come with us, Sister.’ the third one said tauntingly. The last word was almost a hiss. A few moments later I felt a hand on my shoulder. I jumped from the sudden contact and as I opened my eyes I saw that it was my mother looking at me concerned, I had been tightly gripping the wash basin and soon I let go of it. As I looked at my mother, I wanted to scream. It was her fault that I had to go through this, I had to suffer. She thought that I didn’t know what had happened, that her secret was safe. But I knew, and I was reminded of it every single day. It had been her choices that I was paying for.  I shrugged off her hand and moved to my room. I lay down on my bed and soon I could hear my mother leaving the room. I stared at the ceiling blankly. The fan went round and round all over again. As I continued to stare at it, I could see faces, nothing was very clear and the features were not very well defined but I could still make them out. I went to touch the hair tie on my wrist but I couldn’t move. It was like something was holding my hands against the bed. My breathing became heavy and I tried to calm myself but I couldn’t. Tears prickled my eyes as I tried to move, but to no avail. I was stuck there. I couldn’t move and I couldn’t stop seeing. I don’t know what took over me but I couldn’t look away. I was terrified to the core but there seemed to be nothing that I could do. The lights of the room went out but I could still see the faint light coming from the hallway. The door was moving, never fully opening or shutting. It made creaky sounds and wind was blowing, I turned to see that the window was open. As I stared out of the window, now the yellow, dull light from the lamp was the only source of a light for some distance on both the sides. And there it was again, the shadows, waving. This time they were moving towards the house and due to the position of lighting, the closer they got, the shadows kept on elongating. They kept on drawing closer, moving slowly and now I couldn’t breathe. It was all too much to take and as I closed my eyes, those faces were all I saw. As I opened my eyes, I could see a faint shadow beside me but I was paralyzed with fear. And then it occurred to me that my mother was also in the house and she had no idea what was coming for her. After a very long time I wanted to scream, to warn her off, to tell her but I couldn’t and suddenly, as if someone had loosened the binds on my body and I felt free. But I didn’t move an inch. I stayed there, exhausted.

I woke up in the morning, not feeling even a little refreshed as I dragged myself through the routine. I forced myself to get ready and go to school. At the dining table, my mother gave me a look of disapproval either for the condition of my uniform, or because she knew I hadn’t got any homework done. My father as usual did not look up from his newspaper. In school nothing out of the ordinary happened, throughout the day I walked around the halls hugging my books close to my chest and trying to ignore everyone and everything around me. In the last period suddenly the weather turned gloomy, it seemed that it was going to rain and something about that felt very wrong. By the time school ended, the outdoors had grown very dark, the sky was grey and it didn’t feel like it was daytime at all. It would start raining any time now but I had to walk home since no one was going to come pick me up. I didn’t live very far and decided to quickly make my way home. I looked around one last time and spotted Jai. He had been the first and perhaps the only boy I had ever liked but the spirits had made me seem like a lunatic in front of everyone so I had decided to always maintain my distance from my classmates. They thought I was crazy, I knew with the way they would look at me or always move out of my way, but no one ever really said anything about it to me, for which I was grateful. Maybe I didn’t exist for them; maybe I was a ghost for them. As I was starting to leave, Jai looked up at me and he almost froze. He was scared I thought and quickly turned away. I didn’t talk much and I didn’t mind being alone but being neglected, and not being accepted by the ones around me made me lonely and sometimes I would cry. But not today. Today I was too exhausted. As I made my way outside the school gates, there was lightening. I quickened my pace and took some shortcuts to reach home.

Once I got home, I quickly changed out of my uniform and lay on the bed. The weather outside had worsened and I heard the telephone go off. As I went to take the call, the line went dead. I couldn’t say for sure if it was the weather that did the trick. The windows were constantly banging since the wind had picked up. Suddenly I felt the room temperature drop. Just then I heard keys jingling and the front door opened and my mother walked in. As soon as she spotted me, she said that she had tried calling but the line had gone dead but my focus was on something behind her, on the two girls that stood in the doorway. I slowly brought my hand to the hair tie on my wrist and tried to calm myself. The girls weren’t looking at me, they were looking at my mother who had stopped talking, realizing that I wasn’t listening to her. As she turned around to see what I was looking at, her back stiffened. I stared at her back in disbelief. She could actually see them. Slowly, they moved in the door shut behind them. My mother moved backwards until she was standing beside me. She had never seen them but somehow she seemed to know just who these girls were. She turned to look at me, perhaps to check if I could see them too and I think she got her answer. As I looked at the girls, I could see their lips move but I couldn’t hear a single word. However, my mother could. She was shaking her hand and saying incoherent words. She seemed scared and I just stood there, I felt a presence behind me and soon cold fingers were gripping my wrist. The third girl, the youngest one stood beside me. ‘You let her kill us’ one of them suddenly said. My mother frantically shook her head. While they threw accusations at her I stood there, completely unmoving.  What could I really do? They were right. It was her mistake. When I had been five, I was told I was going to get a brother, I never got one. Then again, when I was seven, they told me the same thing, and once again, nothing had happened. I was still here. My grandmother had told me that my mother would not love as much and I would have to share her. I didn’t want that. I wanted my mother all to myself, so I kept her for myself. I mixed her medicines with the ones that my grandmother gave me. I never got a brother. That wasn’t so bad until I got them- these “sisters”. I stared as the two of them moved towards her, and suddenly the hold on my wrist was gone and she too moved towards her. The three of them hugged her, tight and slowly I was her face loose color. Her mouth was open to scream but no sound came out. Soon she lay there on the ground. Her lifeless body was limp. I felt my stomach drop as memories of her came back. ‘Dad’s next’ I heard a mere whisper as I stared ahead blankly. I swallowed and sat by my mother’s body, holding her hand. And then I talked to her, about everything that came to my mind. She always wanted to hear me talk.

 

Two weeks later, I sat in a white room. No one was allowed to visit me; I was “too dangerous”. When they had asked what happened, I told them truth. I already regretted not talking to my mother when she wanted me to. But talking didn’t do me much good. I was declared “mentally unfit for this society”. “Sick teen kills mother” had been the headlines in the newspapers the next day. There was just one window in my room, which had been sealed shut. As I stared outside, there stood a lamp post-old and rusty…