DROWNING- A Short Story

Little Uma was on her way back from school that afternoon like the usual days but something unusual happened that day. As she was cycling down the tortuous path of the field stretching right from her school till the end of the village demarcated by the existence of a dismantled piece of construction once known to be the temple of the Almighty Shiva. Uma always heard chronicles about its establishment from her grandmother and how she had been present herself at that time when the Raja was just coroneted and he himself came to inaugurate the ceremony. The place had been the sole witness of all the incidents taking place at Uma’s village since a long time even before her birth and was continuing to do so even at the time we are referring to here. She decided to visit the place before going back home as her school got over early that day.

As Uma took the bend along the temple, she heard some eerie voices coming from inside the place. She stopped with a jerk and found it bizarre to encounter human voices from a place she only knew to be the habitat to some of the local stray dogs or a few microchiropterans.

She neared the wrecked wooden gate of the temple with shaking feet and opened it with a creaking sound. “Help! Help!”, cried out a fragile, desperately panting female voice presumably in the age group of eight to twelve years. Uma approached in her little feet towards the source of the voice and to her shock found a girl drowning in the pond located in the temple premises but well hidden from the entrance to the main attraction- the fifteen feet high idol of Shiva at the center. What came to her as more terrifying was her Mahesh uncle standing on the ground and relishing peacefully the view of the child drowning. Mahesh uncle was Uma’s confidant and best friend, he lived a few houses next to hers and her dad had been a childhood friend of Mahesh uncle. Uma has always shared her deepest secrets with Mahesh uncle, the day she had stolen raw mangoes from Karim Chacha’s garden, the day when she had skipped school to visit the local fair in town with her friends, the maths test paper that she had hidden from her mother because she failed in it- Mahesh uncle or “Mohi kaka” as Uma would call him, knew it all. The person whom Uma would trust blindly was at the temple today enjoying seeing a girl almost as the same age as hers drowning in deep waters as if he had himself thrown her in the pond for getting away with a dirty secret she could be the witness to.

“Mohi Kaka! Mohi kaka! Help her! She is drowning….please…why are you not helping her? Do some…”, Uma almost cracked her voice as she was petrified and shouting out loud to her ideal friend. Mahesh took a glance at her and was baffled but gathered the courage in the next moment. “Uma, you should not have come here! Go back to your parents right now!”, he ordered Uma almost with a stentorian voice and red eyes filled less with grief and more with an emotion Uma was unaware of. The girl was still struggling to save herself from drowning and crying out for help. As Uma hurried her way towards the stairs down to the pond, Mahesh grappled her from behind and did not let her go. Uma never felt so helpless before and she started shouting out for help too. The girl finally gave in and succumbed to her fate, her voice started fading till it could not be heard any longer.

Mahesh took Uma to a place in the premise where even a ray of the sun could not penetrate the amount of darkness already prevailing. Uma cried and repeatedly asked her beloved Mohi kaka what went wrong with him that day and how he could let that little girl lose her life. As she stared blankly at his face, she noticed a difference unlike other days. Mahesh uncle’s eyes looked her at a way she never realized before. He approached slowly towards her and with his right hand he tucked the strand of hair from her face to the back of her ear. “Relax Uma, you are panicking unnecessarily...finally you and I can be together and no one can come between us….You are the woman my body always craved for and today I can quench my thirst by making you mine…”.

Little Uma could not read between the lines what Mohi kaka exactly implied. But the way his dirty hands were touching her at the spots on her body she was feeling uneasy of was enough to insinuate her to the reality of the situation. She realized she had to run from this demon before it was too late but she neither had the courage nor the strength to detangle herself from the grip of the filthiest human being she had ever seen. Mahesh would not stop and slipped his fingers below her skirt and as he advanced towards losing his sanity and humanity completely, Uma mustered all her spirit and heroism to fight this evil and with all might bit his ear till it bled. Mahesh started groaning in pain and cursing Uma for letting him fail in his salacious attempt. Uma in the blink of an eye gathered herself and got up from the ground and started running in the dark completely unaware of where she was heading. Mahesh was following all her way till now. She burst open a door as she was running her way out and came into a room she never knew existed inside the temple.

“Where will you run from me? I’m right here with you…no one can take you away from me…..”, Mahesh laughed at the helplessness of the little girl who was the same age as his daughter Chandra. Uma started searching for any piece of artifact that can save the day for her and finally had her hands on this. She bent down to lift it and once again Mohi kaka was about to grapple her from behind. Uma lifted the “Trishul” or the trident of Shiva and lashed out at the demon with both hands and planted it on his chest. Mahesh fell on his back and died after a few seconds of shock and struggle.

Uma sat near his corpse and stared at it with raging eyes. She did what she had to. Ma Durga once ended the unholy and humanity’s disgrace Mahisashur and restored our faith in the good. Uma is the face of all those women today who are facing their worst nightmares, a notorious and heinous criminal and rapist, every day and in order to save humanity from drowning in the pool of despair, she has to rise and end such demons.

Uma came out of the room with the trishul in her hands and immersed it in the pond. She cried and sobbed for hours sitting on the stairs for not being able to save the innocent girl from her ill-fate. As the dusk painted the sky in red and orange hues, she started off on her cycle back to her home with a heavy heart. The day might have ended but Uma’s journey just began to breathe its first.