Skip to main content

What if you see it yet don't

-
Henna got her fourth cup of coffee and sat down. Eight tabs remained open on her laptop. The formatting on the proposal she was working on remained moodily erratic from page to page. She fidgeted with the pen and notepad.

Nothing helped.

Around her, colleagues handled client calls and purposeful correspondences and insistent managers. It was a regular Tuesday afternoon for the rest of them. It was a regular day for Henna too. Except that for Henna, today, regular wasn't good.

Some deep inhalation later, she tried to get back to work. But she couldn't for some practical reasons.  You see, she sat opposite her boss's cabin and unlike others, she could see her mildly attractive boss hanging from the ceiling. Everyone else, on the other hand, saw their mildly attractive boss polishing his fountain pens with a silk handkerchief.

There are some things people don't put on their resumes. The ability to see prospective death is one of them.
Henna shut down her computer and decided to head to the gym. She'd lost enough sleep in the past to bother about the inevitable now. Henna wouldn't be completing the proposal by the end of the day. She wouldn't be turning it in by the due date. However, tomorrow when everyone would turn up at work, they'd all see what Henna saw today.

And then missing the deadline wouldn't matter.

Comments

DI said…
That was SO dark, I almost felt guilty for liking it as much as I did!
4:53 PM
Mukta Raut said…
You don't think it could be a true story?
4:57 PM
DI said…
It could be, I guess. But I am sure I would never want to be Henna, or even know a Henna. It is tough to live with a power that's almost a curse no? Unless you are also capable of changing what is destined. So, I hope it is never a true story. It is a great story nevertheless.
6:31 PM
Anonymous said…
This is my first comment here. But I have been binge reading your blog for a month or so.

Two things:
You are an amazing writer. I am surprised that you are not a published and famous author. Or are you?

I loved this story. It has an odd premise with a really twisted ending. The story reminds me of etgar keret's short stories. Have you read them? You should. There are a bunch of his stories online. Give it a try.
7:17 PM
Anonymous said…
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
7:19 PM
Mukta Raut said…
Hi Anon, No...I haven't read Etgar Keret. Will look him up. Thank you for the recco...and the compliment! :-)
2:37 AM
Anonymous said…
Mukta,

You are SUCH an amazing writer. I didn't see this story developing even. Initially, I thought you were posing as Henna to give your blogging a different style (I Know silly me!!)

The story just began and hit me towards the end, if you know what I mean.

You are gifted, woman!

Much luck and love,
The one who calls and remembers you as Moo Moo :):):)
12:58 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Check (the) mate

-
My cousin, who was born sixteen hours before me, got married recently. I am expected to follow her footsteps soon. Thankfully, I have been granted more than sixteen hours to do that. My father’s health has taken a turn for the worse. My mother is completely exhausted. Rationally, points 1, 2, and 3 would be distinct from each other. But in my family there is no such thing as ‘rationally’. Therefore all these points are inter-related. Strangely, here, we believe my marriage to be an antidote to mortality and fatigue. I happened to be sitting in my parents’ room while Ma looked through Papa’s blood reports. They didn’t look good. Ma was worried and Papa didn’t help matters much. He kept talking about Sourav Ganguly and why he deserved better. Ma got further agitated and after flinging the reports somewhere inconvenient to retrieve (I should know), she snapped, “So what? There are many like him.” Papa doesn’t believe that and would have no one in his family believe that either. He went to
Read more

Not the same, all the same - Rang de Basanti, being a Hindu, uniform civil code, and Hostage – in that unrelated sequence

-
I watched ‘Rang de basanti’. That, however, is not the point. Everyone now wants to go to Delhi and cruise around in jeeps at night. And that too is not the point. I need to say something. That, really, is the point. ‘Rang de…’ is a good movie but frankly, I’ve seen better. I’ve seen ‘Yuva’. It is creditable, though, that the movie could say what it did without using the ‘sage on the stage’ (as we say in Instructional Design) approach. The movie does have a couple of ideas that I have been besotted with for a long time now. One is the life of a story. There is the germ of an idea about men who go to their deaths cheerfully. There is fascination about what could inspire such courage in ordinary people. That story lays inside a diary for a long time. How long? Long enough for history to play itself out and begin the process of repeating itself. A nation goes the ‘Animal Farm’ way – humans out, pigs in. The story lays untouched – fermenting in latent vigor. Then someone discovers it. She
Read more

Save the Indian (male) child

-
This isn't exactly a feminist tirade, but this is written by a woman, and it is written in annoyance. You raise your girls to be sweet, strong, and independent. (Wise parents teach their children to listen to opinions and discard or heed accordingly. The other ones just teach their kids to bullshit everything that everyone says. Still others bring up girls to be on guard and forget that spine so that everyone thinks well of them. I am not sure which is worse, but I detest people shoving their opinions down other people's throats in a show of liberation, so I'll lean towards the former. But only slightly.) As the gender construct of being a 'female' is pushed even further, you teach your daughter complicated activities – driving, perhaps, sending them off away from home, wearing a sari (those freaking pleats!), cooking and de-veining prawns for added advantage. At the end of that, you have a person who genuinely dislikes blending into anything, doesn't like bei
Read more