Sunrise

It was quarter to five in the morning. The man in security uniform got up from his chair and walked close to the apartment gate with his eyes fixed in the sky. Although there was still time for sun rise, he nevertheless stood there waiting. It had been over twenty years since he joined the security team at the apartment complex. He would come in late in the night and would leave before the residents woke up. Not many people knew him as much they knew the sound of the stick that he would thump on the ground during his numerous strolls around. There, however, was an air of nonchalance around him as he sat on the chair near the gate, humming tunes from the old Bollywood movies. He liked it there; may be was too habituated to the night and the accompanying solitude that he even turned a blind eye to his child’s request to quit the job. Now at the cusp of dawn he stood there waiting like a curious child for sunrise. When it was time, he bowed with his hands together to the rising sun and then walked back to his chair with a gentle smile of satisfaction on his face.

Period.

The Previous Night

Fiction

It was May of 2016. The sun was scorching the ground to fire as I walked out of the auditorium along with my group mates after delivering one of the worst possible presentations. It was our final thesis and the last step out of engineering. I reached my room, picked up the bags that I had neatly packed yesterday, and made my way towards the waiting cab. The campus never looked more deserted that day; the people who made it beautiful for me these four years weren’t there anymore. It’s always terrible when you are the last to leave, too many emotions and too little time to digest.

The airport was over an hour away and all I could keep wondering was whether I had achieved what I had set out to be when I showed up to this esteemed place as a scared yet somehow optimistic seventeen-year-old. The matter of truth was that I still didn’t have an answer to that. Four years had passed and I had enjoyed every bit of it, both its ups and downs. However, when it came to being an engineer, I don’t think I quite picked it up. I knew this very well, maybe that’s the reason I couldn’t convince myself that I was finally able to achieve what I wanted. I boarded my flight to Bagdogra where my family was waiting for me. We had planned our trip to Sikkim and may be Tawang if time permitted. Dad had only gotten a week off for vacation, so we didn’t want to waste any more time, therefore I directly joined them there from college.

I looked messy, long hair and skinny structure, both of which any parent would never want to see their child go through or live by. But before all this could get to me, I felt happy, at last. I was really glad that I was about to meet my parents and my brother. It was getting too lonely out there, I desperately needed their company and there they stood, smiling. I ran to them and hugged them real tight. I was finally home.

It was close to a five-hour ride to Gangtok, despite the driver claiming it to be only four. We had planned to station ourselves at one of the hotels where we could drop all our luggage and travel ahead. It was a quiet place, more serene than the photographs shown on the website, quite contrary to my experience. It was already eight in the night when we reached there, we decided to call it a day as most of the shops had started to close in the surroundings. We freshened up, ordered food indoors and had a long chat about where my career was supposed to go before everyone went back to sleep. I shared the room with my little brother. He was fast asleep as soon as we fell onto the bed while I kept staring at the ceiling. It was over an hour but I couldn’t get any sleep so I walked out to the lobby with an old novel in hand.

I am not a voracious reader or even an average one, I hardly read any books but if I did, it would be in parts which might take months to complete. I am more of a movie guy, the one who watches Harry Potter movies to learn more about the story than read through the pages of the esteemed series. So there I was sitting in the lobby, with ‘Murder at the Orient Express’ in my hand when I heard a woman sob profusely. There was no one at the reception at that time. I was quite startled as I stood up and moved closer to the room adjacent to the lobby, the place where the sound was coming from. As I almost reached the door and was about to knock, the crying sound stopped all of a sudden. The door immediately opened and a lady in her mid-thirties walked out with tears in her eyes. She went and sat right where I was sitting while I stood at her door staring at the severely sweating moustached husband, at least that’s what I thought, in the front. There were no words exchanged, as I went back and sat in the lobby while the moustached person shut the door from inside.

‘Are you alright?’ I asked the visibly shaken women.

‘I am good. Can you pass me that water jar?’ She replied.

‘Sure.’

She slowly poured water into her glass as she asked me whether this was my first day of stay here. I replied in affirmation. Post that, we got talking where I realised that she was the owner of the place and had moved to Gangtok, her maternal place, only a couple of years back. She answered all questions except about her, except about the recent fight she had with the moustached guy. Finally, I saw the time and it was close to midnight, that’s when I decided to bid adieu to her and walk back to my room. However, she relented and asked if I was comfortable to have a walk around in the neighbourhood, to which I replied negatively. It isn’t advisable to trust a stranger that too in an unknown city. I went back straight to my room and slept. The next day, we left for the northern part of Sikkim where we had planned to stay for a couple of days. It was on the third day that we returned only to find that the moustached guy was nowhere to be seen. The police were all over the place, questioning the whereabouts of this person and the twenty-five lakh rupees that were missing along with him. The same lady in mid-thirties appeared from nowhere with the inspector and pointed her finger towards me.

Part 1 ends.