The Missing Ring

Rahel's thumb kept going round and round around her ring finger, hurting it with its nail, like punishing it, like looking for the ring that used to be there. Broken patches of color on her nails made her fingers look unkempt, more bony. She was alone after a long time, sitting in a coffee house, staring outside.

Outside it was numbing cold. There always was a certain limit till which you felt the cold, beyond that you were numbed like it was incapable of hurting you, because your senses wouldn't respond to it. Rahel wondered if reaching that stage was humanly possible, where emotion was irreversibly frozen, and no warmth could melt it ever again.

If you took a closer look, the thin cracks on her lips showed, a nearly invisible wrinkle just below her left eye squeezed her skin, everytime she twitched. And sighed. And looked at her coffee, looking for a reflection of her face in the black liquid. It formed though, the image was irregular, outlines deformed, unrecognizable, just like the person Rahel had become now.

The cause behind the missing ring kept irking the insides of her mind, so hard that she fiddled with the zip of her purse, trying to figure out if she could do still without a smoke. There was a threshold of stress she had fixed for a cigarette, hadn't she crossed that long ago, she gasped!

To the Reader: Rahel, the name is inspired from Roy's God of Small Things. The book, every bit of paper in it, is deeply deeply ingrained in my conscious. Rahel, the character I stole here, is one of the twin children who almost narrate the story. I wonder if Rahel would have grown up to become someone like the one I wrote about. Because writers close their stories, not caring for the plight of an intoxicated reader, who can't bear to see the book end. And the intoxicated reader, keeps wondering whatever happened to the characters after the book closed and keeps writing failed sequels!