A (very) short story

The boy started making patterns on the snow with the soles of his shoes. He had been feeling a little scared and the relief that suddenly came over him started manifesting itself in random nervous energy. “I miss you”, he said. “Some of my friends keep asking where you are”.
The man gave the boy an expressionless look. “Sorry bud, but I can’t come by the house or school without complicating things”.
The boy continued stamping a Timberland logo in the snow. “You know, we learnt this week in science class that birds have hollow bones which makes them very light”.
The man sat down on a snow covered headstone and put a hand on his bald pate. A muscle momentarily twitched on his stoic face.
The boy continued “Are your bones hollow now? Is it from the grey powder I used to see mum put in your coffee when you were not looking? I watched you come down the hill from behind that tree but you did not leave a single footprint in the snow!”

 — at Grove Hill Cemetery.

Parallel Lives

My parents and I checked out of each others lives sometime in the mid 70s. We were just victims of circumstance. However, our parallel lives did converge along one facet - our love of movies of a certain variety. That is not to say that we loved all the same movies, but by and large we gravitated to similar ones. Popular movies did not fare largely in our viewing habits. I think my mother had occasional pining for the "hot" Hindi movie of the day and I believe my father had given her company to watch a few of those in the last couple of years of his life.

Maybe it was environmental. We did not have video players when I was young which means that I did not get an overdose of "their" movies in my formative years. I don't remember all movies I saw when I was young but it must have happened to some extent. I recall a time in 1977 that my parents took me to see Close Encounters of the Third Kind. They likely had nowhere/no one to leave me with. We made the trip to Lighthouse on a mini bus. I don't recall how we got back, I must have fallen asleep by then. The ten year old boy was probably as awe-struck with the mini bus ride as Richard Dreyfuss was when he got his first sight of Devils Tower. However, I distinctly remembered the shot in Dharamsala, with the hundreds of hands raised to the sky saying "Upar".

The last movie I saw with my parents is "The Tree of Life". We actually did not see the whole movie. I had gone to Kolkata for a weekend in July 2012  and we tried to watch it one evening. My father was not well, he kept falling asleep and we stopped fairly early into the movie. I am not sure if they ever saw the whole movie. The other day, driving through upstate New York somewhere near the Canadian border, I happened to catch a glimpse of this sunset. I stopped to get off and take a picture. The phrase that went through my mind reminded me of that weekend in July. I have yet to finish watching that movie, now I think I will.