Stories from Nowhere-I

Some twelve odd years ago, when these coasts were hit by a demonic cyclone and when she was too young to document anything and too naive to proclaim the insanity of young love, goes back this story. Bottoms of the Indian Ocean conspired a mean depression and the mercury dipped, winds blew away asbestos roofs, coconut trees swayed in drunken fervor, birds were left homeless, and fear gripped her tiny heart. Trunks of mighty old trees uprooted, the roads deserted, no light in sight. It tickled her to imagine that they might run out of food. Though there still were some potatoes quietly sitting near the legs of a rickety ancestral bed. After seven long days that smelt of death, in between nightmarish nights, she survived to get back to school on the eight. By then she must have forgotten those pangs of first love. That afternoon from the last day of school a week ago felt slightly outside the purview of recent memory. That cyclone must have taken it away, as its black waters receded into their mysterious origins.. So, this forgetful, pubescent, sixth grader wondered, if she still loved him after the short hiatus.

Ten years from then and two years before now, a dormant volcano erupted somewhere in the middle of Europe they said.  Air traffic wouldn't be that paralyzed ever again. Soot enveloped clear skies..Days were whiled away in sleepy airport lounges. He could have been on the last flight that flew out of that loveless continent. But he wasn't. Stalled, he sat and mused. That volcano, Satan's  shadow had some uncanny sense of timing. Why else would it now! Only now? And no matter how hard he tried he couldn't not think of the shrewd calculations of fate vis-a-vis the naivety of the woman who waited for him by the sea..

Love and related disasters!