A Bleeding December

A lot of you will agree that utopia for us was back in our school days. Hitherto, whenever i can i go back to dwell in the hammock of those memories weaved strongly & carefully with in my heart. These were the days when our lips tasted from the chalice of love for the very first time & like a rookie we kept on drinking until we passed off. Years later, this is one hangover that just refuses to dull...Years hence we are still under the weather.

Imbued by a lot of souls that fell apart without any reason to fathom, this is the story that still leaves a girl in a knotty quandary whenever she tries to reason with the past. This is the reason for her deepest sighs in the darkest hours of night.... After all It still seems like yesterday, even after a centenary it will seem like yesterday... how can something so deeply engraved in the slab of memory fade..!!

By the banks of Garone she sits gazing at the beautiful portrait on the canvas of flowing water, of stars twinkling up above smiling as if aware of being rendered by nature with most exquisite colors. An aeronautical engineer she is now pursuing her masters from tolouse thousands of miles away from home. Years hence, all it took for her soul to liberate from the thrall of her body back to the December morning of the year two thousand & five was the melancholic music of rustling leaves orchestrated beautifully by the wind... The same morning when she saw him for the very first time...

All the memories that she had deliberately tried to blanch have lacquered back to elegance so vividly as if she is re-living them once again.

There she stood with her friends by the palm trees outlining the wide pavement running from entrance arch to the main building when screeching of tires turned everybody's head around to the gateway asa through & through black SUV came to halt. The windows even the windshield was tinted into absolute raven making the concern for privacy of the occupants evident. For a couple of minutes no one came out piking everybody's curiosity, but then suddenly both the doors flung open. From the drivers end came out a man in early thirties sporting an elegant grey & white suit with black shades as if meant to keep the movement of eye balls discrete & from the other end .....a face that is going to haunt her for the rest of her life, unaware as she watched spellbound.

He seemed to be molded from a different cast. The mountain cheek bones appeared chiseled into shape by a master craftsman, sculpted and pared to perfection. His Saturn round eyes dipped in milky pond shone as bright as the lode star, bewitching all those who fell under his steady gaze. His hair so neatly coiffed in spikes that resembled geometric perfection. As he walked with a tiger like tread, so easily, so naturally, every single soul was left captivated..

But as time went by, it was divulged that he was much more than just superficial transcendental charm. Here was the new topper of the school & no matter how hard she tried, she just wasn't able to reclaim her old spot anymore, invoking a kind of sweet jealousy in her. Here was the new striker for the soccer team who would ensure every single inter-school championship cup eventually lands upon the proud display shelf of his school. She cant help but remember how every single set of eyes hitched upon him without blinking as his fingers danced on the uneven black and white stage of grand piano.... even the choir master's jaw dropped in awe.

But her best memories came from the moments when she accidentally caught him glaring at her camouflaged from a distance, as if trying to touch the contours of her face with his eyes..They both sensed that what was blooming was much more than mere infatuation

Affable yet extremely reticent, it always seemed that an invisible veil always concealed something about him...something that was not obvious to the naked eyes but can only be sensed. There were lot of wild speculations about him, but the most widely accepted one was that he came from a filthy rich family, how else could the different suv's he came in daily & the sharp men accompanying him who seemed less of a driver & more of trained professional body guards be explained.

Tonight as it all starts coming back to her, she couldn't help but fall in love with him all over again. Years have passed ever since the day he disappeared as abruptly as he joined... without even saying goodbye. Infinite thorough searches on all the possible social media platforms never yielded any results & till date she doesn't even have the slightest clue of his whereabouts, like everybody else... after all his name is still mentioned time and again in the alumni meets over the years. Whenever she went back to school and stood by those palm trees, her eyes couldn't help but turnaround & gaze back at the entrance arch hoping that once again a black SUV will come to halt, once again the doors will flung open and this time she will immerse in his eyes that always resembled an endless stretch of midnight sky & will keep looking unless all of her questions are answered.

By the spark of a firefly in front of her eyes, the spell broke and she hard landed back in reality from the fantasy land. The chilly wind of October which was herald of the coming winter made her shiver & reminded her that she has been cajoled by her parents to marry a techie like herself in a year as soon as she "ll return back to India. she wrapped her stole around her arms and walked back to her apartment.

A year later:

A picturesque lawn amidst the mountains was impeccably decorated to host an autumn wedding and the flowers and leaves shed by the surrounding trees seemed to be nature's own way of gracing the wedding with artistic perfection. With the dawn of dusk, the sun merged with the sky, changing to hues of orange and then almost tangerine, yet the breath taking beauty lost to that of the bride sitting on an elevated platform next to her groom. Friends & family danced merrily to the beautiful songs rejoicing the eternal concord of bride & groom ...

As exquisite was this occasion, contrarily in a jaggy terrain of dense eerie woods that can send chills down the spine of even most daring souls, a unit of Elite Special forces was indulged into a fierce combat with hostile forces defending the interests of their country men.

As fingers were snapping on sir's in a wedding hundreds of miles away, they were being snapped here as well...just not on slr's but on the triggers of automatic firing weapons. Shots were taken at one place to make memories for a lifetime but were fired on the other to erase a lifetime of memory forever. Realizing that his unit is heavily outnumbered by enemy forces and need of a sacrifice penultimate for his comrades to be shielded from the fate of certain death, the officer in charge knelt and closed his big round Saturn eyes taking a deep sigh. With lightening speed he then emerged from behind the cover running towards the enemies with tread of a tiger spraying bullets in all the possible directions. With in a fraction of seconds all hell broke loose as he emptied rounds after rounds of bullets & hurled grenades with absolute precision towards the enemy positions. In the blink of an eye the deafening gun shots as loud as thunder were replaced by spooky silence of death as black smoke enveloped the entire area. The unit only came back to senses to find piles of bodies lying all around them & the bullet riddled body of their commanding officer lying motionless in a pool of blood.

As champagne was dribbling from the bottles in celebration of a wedding, blood was oozing out from his body as if toasting the safety of his compatriots. He read somewhere that in a few seconds entire life of a person flashes in front of his eyes before the soul leaves the mortal remains & as a strikingly beautiful face loomed before his eyes that he saw for the very first time on a December morning of the year two thousand and five, he now knew for a fact that this was true.

The beautiful bride woke up next morning by the side of her sleeping husband & walked towards the kitchen, not having the slightest clue that that enclosed in the newspaper that she grabbed along the way are answers to the questions that have haunted her for years...answers to all the late night jitters that time and again deprived her of sleep.... Her eyes Sruck wide open with surprise on what seemed to be a familiar face, the news below read:

In a covert operation in enemy territory, an officer of elite special forces laid down his life displaying exemplary courage & valor. The officer was part of the most elite & highly classified division of paratroopers. This wing of Army recruits handful of cadets right from adolescence & impart them with brutal training over the years, molding & crafting them to absolute perfection. Most feared by enemy forces, this unit specializes in highly covert special operations across enemy lines.

Pain came out like an uproar from her throat in the form of silent scream. The world turned into a blur & so did all the sounds. The last painful emotion slammed against her before the feeling of feeling was lost & the bright sunlight darkened into nothingness as the newly married bride passed into oblivion of unconsciousness.