For all those who haven't read (n hated) it already..here is the 1st of 2 short stories i wrote (n loved) long back...accolades n brikbats are most welcome....
PART I
Mr. Sharma, his wife Renuka, and their only son Rohit were the three inhabitants of the huge mansion named Shantiniketan that stood proudly at 83, Crescent road. Serenity, it seemed, was entrenched in the walls of this respectable house. The peaceful ambience of this house was so overpowering, that even the most ferocious of souls became gentle as they crossed the periphery of this colossal structure. It was the general belief of the neighbourhood that no misfortune could ever disturb the calm that seemed to be embedded in the very bricks of this ‘divine’ house, and their belief had been proved true, year after year, until one day, when it was shattered by a dreadful happening. Mrs. Sharma, who had been her usual cheerful self the previous day, had suddenly been struck by a massive heart attack and had fallen prey to it, leaving Mr. Sharma and four year old Rohit as the only inhabitants of Shantiniketan. The neighbourhood, whose belief had been literally devastated by this occurrence, accepted it as a ‘one-off unfortunate incidence’, and forgot all about it as time went on. Little did they know that this was only the beginning of the terrible end that awaited Shantiniketan and its residents.
Mr. Sharma felt that Rohit’s upbringing would be incomplete without a mother and that it was unfair on his part to deny Rohit the love and care that only a mother could give him. So, within two months of Renuka’s death, Mr. Sharma married a young girl named Savitri. But as it turned out, that was not the only reason behind him getting remarried, as within one year, Savitri gave birth to a baby boy whom both of them decided to call Ravi. As Rohit grew older, he started understanding and incorporating the customs and traditions that make the society that we live in. By the age of ten he knew (and thought that he understood) all about his mother’s death and the fact that Savitri was his stepmother and that Ravi was his stepbrother. From that very day, without any logical reason, he had hated both Savitri and the 5-year-old Ravi. Rohit’s hate for Savitri, who tried her level best to make him happy, was particularly alarming. But he loved and respected his father, and so, he had to keep his fury buried inside himself. As he grew, so did his hate and it kept piling up inside him like logs of wood kept one over the other, until it formed a huge heap and there was space for no more. All that was required now was a spark to ignite the heap and only god knows what misfortune would have been unleashed.
Today Rohit is 21 years of age and has grown into what you may call, a ‘perfectly spoilt brat’. It had all started five years ago, when he had accidentally stumbled upon a secret drawer in which his step mom kept huge bundles of currency, to be used only in the case of an emergency. Every alternate night he used to sneak into his parents’ room and ‘borrow’ some cash from the drawer. He knew that even if he made some noise, his parents wouldn’t wake up, as both of them took huge doses of sleeping pills before they slept. He realized that this was the best way to make his step mom ‘pay’ and extract some benefits for himself while he was at it. The combination of this unending gold mine, which was constantly replenished but never counted by his step mom, and the bad company that he had fallen into, could result in only one thing, alcohol, and so it did. Once started, Rohit ‘progressed’ from one stimulant to another till there were none left to try. He became a nervous wreck and started having phases of emotions that fluctuated from one extreme to another within the blink of an eye. On the other hand, Ravi, who is 16 years old now, has developed into a calm, emotionless sort of a person, who speaks only when spoken to and never gets intimidated by any situation. He is the converse of what Rohit is in every way possible, which is the way every parent wants his child to be.
PART II
One morning, Rohit woke up with a start. He thought he heard someone scream, and almost immediately, as if in an attempt to confirm his thoughts, Mrs. Sharma screamed again. Rohit ran to his parents’ room and what he saw there almost paralyzed him. There on the bed lay the dead body of Mr. Sharma, with a dark red fluid covering his shirt and a look of disbelief in his lifeless, but wide-open eyes. The police was summoned at once and when interrogated, Mrs. Sharma told them that one of her diamond necklace had gone missing from her locker. That one statement finished the case of Mr. Sharma’s death, even before it had started. The police couldn’t have been happier, and they concluded that Mr. Sharma had been killed by a burglar, who saw him waking up while he was stealing the necklace, and put him to rest before he could call for help. But Rohit knew better. He knew that his father, considering the huge dose of pills that he took, would have woken up only if the burglar had made a noise loud enough to wake up the entire household. Also, the police’s theory failed to explain the astonished, ‘how could you do this to me’ sort of a look that his father had had in his eyes. But both these flaws in the police’s theory were eradicated if you replaced the imaginary burglar with someone else, and Rohit knew exactly who that someone was. All he needed now was a proof.
PART III
It was Ravi’s turn to wake up with a start this time, but he didn’t have to think about what woke him up, as he could hear constant cries of “I killed her” that emanated from his parents bedroom. When he got there, he saw his mother lying dead on the bed and Rohit beside it with a bloodstained knife in his hand, crying. There was nothing more to be done. The police came and took Rohit with them, as Ravi prepared for his mothers funeral.
Ravi’s tears seemed endless. It seemed that he would keep weeping till eternity and much beyond it. People could do nothing but feel sorry for him and hope that he would recover from the shock. They tried to console him for as long as they could, but to no effect, and so, one by one, they gave up and started leaving. In the evening, when everyone had left and the commotion had died out, Ravi went to bed, and started thinking. It is ironical, he thought, how your grief could prove to be the measure used to gauge your love. How you can express the joy that a person gave you by showcasing the sorrow that you feel at his death. He kept lying there on his bed and thinking about this for some time and then, for the first time in 16 years, he actually smiled.
PART IV
Ravi had hated all three of them. He had hated Rohit because Rohit had hated him. He had made repeated efforts to tell Rohit that he thought of him as his real brother, and all he had got in return was insult. He had hated his parents, because they spent all their time pampering Rohit, trying to keep him happy, while he was treated like a stray dog, which sometimes got a bone or two to chew on, but never knew if and when he would get another one. He remembered how he had cried for hours and hours and no one had noticed and how that ignorance had made him cry even more. If Rohit’s hatred for his stepmother was a heap, then Ravi’s hatred for all three of them was a mountain of wood and two days ago he had decided that the time had come to light the fire and let it burn all those who had fuelled it.
But Ravi wasn’t reckless like Rohit. He planned his revenge. He had every move figured out. He had considered every eventuality that might have occurred and had adjusted his plan so as to avoid it. It was only when he had gone over his scheme several times that he took the final plunge. That night he had gone to his parents’ room with a dagger in his hand, and had stabbed his father once in the heart. The blow didn’t prove good enough, and it woke his father up. In excruciating pain as he was, Mr. Sharma saw Ravi, but before he could make any noise or call for help, he felt something hard and cold go through his chest and then he felt no more. Next came the masterstroke of his scheme. Ravi took the locker keys from underneath his mother’s pillow, who was sound asleep thanks to her usual dose of pills, and took the necklace from the locker and kept it into her secret drawer, whose location he had learnt by following Rohit one night. He knew that the police would conduct a superficial search and would never find the secret drawer, and that his mother had no reason to open the drawer that day, and even if she wanted to, she wouldn’t dare to open the drawer in the presence of all the people that flooded the house after his father’s death. It was common knowledge that Rohit considered his stepmother to be the culprit, and with some luck he would be the first person to open the drawer and discover the necklace, and that’s exactly what happened.
The night after his father’s death, Rohit drank, as he never had. In his own mind he had already declared her guilty and sentenced her to death, and he drank in an attempt to keep himself calm until he had some solid evidence against his step mom. He ran out of money, but his thirst wasn’t quenched, so he came back home to get some money from his ‘bank’. There he saw Savitri sleeping and he felt a storm of anger and rage build up inside him. But he was there for the money. So he opened the secret drawer and as usual, found the money, but along with it he also found the missing necklace, which was kept there, waiting to be discovered. That was the last straw, the Spark. His suspicions were confirmed. He now knew (or rather thought he did) that his stepmother had killed his father and had hidden the necklace to make it look like a robbery. He waited no more. He took a knife and stabbed Savitri repeatedly, until his hands gave up. But he was high on booze, and suffered from one of those emotional fluctuations, and instead of trying to hide his crime, he just sat there crying, and accepted it. Ravi’s revenge was complete.
PART V
15 years later, and Ravi is the sole owner of Shantiniketan and all of his father’s wealth, but he isn’t the sole inhabitant. He lives there with his wife Priya and his two sons Rahul and Rishi. No misfortune has struck Shantiniketan after the events described above, and it has regained the divine ambience that it once had, but which had been lost for some time. The fact that such extreme hate had once filled the heart of a resident of this house seems quite amazing. But is it really that hard to believe? Isn’t it an inherent trait of Nature itself, that it is opposed to extremities? It seems to have an inbuilt mechanism that detects any such extremity that crops up, and creates the opposite extreme which nullifies its effect. This is exactly what had happened in Shantiniketan’s case, and Ravi, having understood this fact now, is somehow troubled by the peace that his house has regained.
