She wore black and white floral palazzo pants, a grey printed t-shirt and a pastel coloured shawl wrapped around her neck. She sat in the side seat of a sleeper class train. She had a knitting set in her hands and had completed a quarter of a cap. Her father had bought her first knitting kit when she was thirteen years old for her school crafts class. She was very good at it but she stopped when the craft class ended. Recently seeing a DIY video she rekindled the idea of knitting. Incessantly knitting, she had created twenty three sets of woollen clothing within a span of four months. She disbursed them by gifting them to her friends and colleagues. She couldn’t stop knitting.
Her eyes were glued to her knitting sticks but she saw and evaluated every passenger in the train. Having studied in an all girls’ school, she had grown up hearing horrid stories about male strangers. Even though she was never directly affected by the perverted ones, she always imagined herself to have had such experiences. She was always cautious. She inherited her mother’s compulsive fear and obsession of hidden thieves under the cot and behind doors. When she was young, she made fun of her mother’s peculiar behaviour of talking to her and raising the bed sheets in attempt to surprise the thief. But, with the passing of time, she found herself doing the same thing that her mother was doing. It surprised and irritated her. She started doing this when she went to her first hostel. Now it was her friends turn to make fun of her obsession. She detested her behaviour and she knew how much she resembled her mother. The very thought made her more resentful towards herself. But she couldn’t control herself from looking under the bed or behind doors while she was having a conversation with her friends.
She saw him looking at her. She gripped the scissors she carried with her tightly. He was looking at the window behind her. But in her deep rooted fear, she knew that he was staring at her. She made her angry face and swore in her mind. He was middle aged, the exact kind of man her friends used to warn about. She groped through her bag for her scissors and checked the sharpness of the scissors with the blue handle. While sleeping she kept the scissors under her pillow and kept her hand near them. She dreamt many a times about how she would attack anyone who would come to harm her. In her dreams she was a gallant warrior fighting injustice. Anytime she saw news regarding crimes against modesty of women, she dreamt for days how she would have rewritten the story if she was present with all her fearlessness and justice and her scissors. She had heroic speeches to reprimand the defeated ill-doers.
The lights in the train were all turned off and a meagre blue night light gave enough brightness for the on-coming travellers. The compartment looked like the dark lab of a photographer. When she woke up from a dream he was sitting near her. He was a slender young guy. His fingers, like a scorpion, were going through the layers of her palazzo. She never could believe that she had the courage to raise the scissors and stab him in his back. A desperate cry shook the compartment. When the lights were turned on, he was no where to be seen, except for a small trail of blood. She acted like she too had only woken up by the sound. Too much attention was something she disliked. Inside she was gallant and excited. In the lethargy of the midnight no one was particularly interested in following the trail. Only one fellow went to call the police. The light was turned off and she closed her eyes.
Nayana Sivanandan lives in Bangalore, India. She works in a bank and enjoys writing and photography. Her poem has published in Wingless Dreamer.
Modern Flash Fiction 