To Put November Sky To Shame

The dim lit sky of November looks like sleepless eyes. Heavy and dull! It can put to shame the light of lamps, as nothing can illuminate the mundane of it. The leaves have given their resignations and the letters are falling all along the streets. People prefer to stay inside, and silence has become a routine. The November sky puts people to sleep. But Srijan is sleepless. He awaits his cat, Lizzy, that has gone missing. People say that the hungry dogs of the mating season must have devoured her. He resists. He has repeated a bunch of words too often this week. "Lizzy comes back from the grave". Must he not have known the difference, somehow, his mother thinks. 

Lizzy was white as ice, lustrous as gold and slender as her feline cousins. She has a peculiar ingenuity when it comes to hunting fresh meat. Her proclivity in possessing the most precious set of skeletal remnants made Srijan awestruck, others considered it grotesque. His mother hated her. Lizzy used to bring corpses into the backyard, where she planted the 'holy basil'. The blasphemy used to instigate her but not her husband who handled the case with as much kindness as he did his suits.  

The neighborhood despised her. Lizzy was resplendent and slender but quite a kleptomaniac, she was liberated. The neighborhood never appreciated the audacity of Srijan's father to let a young boy have an expensive pet. They considered this opulence rather obnoxious; they had their reasons. Srijan was as autonomous as Lizzy. Srijan would beat the dogs if they ever tried hurting Lizzy. Little did he know nobody could hurt Lizzy. One day he must have found her on a rotten bench with fungus creeping out of the hinges delved in rancid rust. Lizzy seemed dead. Was she? 

We never know because she had been with him even after that. Srijan told his father with sheer innocence "Lizzy comes back from the grave". He loved the optimism and love Srijan has for the white cat. Srijan must have been playing in his little room with his little toys in his little hands when a little strand of wind blew his little hair with a little blow. Little did he

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know that shining in sunlight entering the hall from the silver lining of the grey clouds, Lizzy was beholding him. Srijan creeped back into the bed while he kept staring at Lizzy. 

"Lizzy comes back from the grave" He kept chanting. But there was no one who could listen. When his parents came back home, they were stunned to see Lizzy in the hall. Mounted on the dining sitting with a proud head she stared the death of out them. Peeping in their soul. Lizzy seemed ferocious. Srijan came running with joy and hugged them. The neighborhood cried the day they saw the white cat playing in the streets. The dogs were hopeless yet again. His mother gave up. and went on picking up the carcass from the backyard.  

Srijan used to think sometimes. What makes Lizzy go again and again. Why did Lizzy come back from the grave?  

He had heard his father say that his mother and Srijan's grandmother once left them never came back. Grandmother, as people say, was a widow but rich. So, they concluded she must be as loose as a harlot. We know they killed her; they hated the grandmother too; the daughter-in-law was afraid of her sanctity as people would consider her loose too to have married a boy who father was nowhere to be found. The hungry man of the town used to approach her way often, but she pushed them away, the grandmother we know was tough. Srijan's mom would not live with her until she died, and she did when Srijan was a year old. Rotting on the bench she had had a heart attack. She was found all white by the people. But she never came back unlike Lizzy. The grandmother fought the world till she could and loved Srijan the way she should. But time rolls like dice. Granny would never let Srijan see the bad of her or hear what people said. She chose death, I know because she was a nothing less of a sorcerer, she could do miraculous things once she put the dim lit sky of November to shame. What could she not do? 

Her legacy lives long and immortal so does Lizzy, Lizzy is too inhuman to die of shame. Thus, Lizzy comes back from the grave, however they try, she ain't no grandmother.