Home- A Story of Divorce and Devastation

Dev sat on his knees as if in a confession, staring at the bright red shirt spread on the bed in front of him, his eyelids dropping with a sadness that sits so heavy on the soul that it makes one’s shoulders droop. Tears welled up in his eyes, fogging his spectacled vision, as he ran his palms over the soft fabric lying in front of him. He felt as if he was trying to touch the person for whom it was meant. His eyes narrowed as if trying to find something in a distance. He looked from one side of the wall to another, as if trying to ease out the lump in his throat, as if trying to loosen the sudden stiffening of the neck. He threw his head back and stared at the blank ceiling for a while as if looking for some sign from above. He could feel his desperate silent prayers rising up and eventually falling on his face unanswered. Sadness does not come at once, it comes in waves, one after another, each more cruel than the one that went before. He felt as if the space and heaven was shrinking fast and he was going to be crushed between to unfeeling sphere colliding around him.

Questions were floating around him in the sad, solitary and stale air of the fourteenth story room of the Hotel.

“Will this, this perpetual pain, end with death?”

“When will death come?”

“Could this all be a bad dream that has gone on for so long that it seems like a reality of his life?”

Questions floated around like serpents floating about, eventually tying themselves around his neck, threatening to stifle his soul. He longed for someone to shake him by his shoulders to wake him up from this nightmare which hounded him. Tears rolled over helplessly over his angular, near-impoverished faced.

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