Life is like walking in the rain. You can either get beneath a shade, or you can just get wet. And he loved walking in the rain. Infact, he had been doing so for the past many months now. And as the season was reaching its pinnacle, he wondered what will he do when they stop, if they do.

Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get. And she loved surprises. She was used to them, the pampered little princess. She was born in wealth, raised in luxury, and lived life as it’s meant to be. Now that the business empire was crumbling, she wondered what will she do when it finally hits the rock bottom, if it does.

A life gets halfway around the world before truth has the chance to get its pants on. But here, their meeting was chance, the exchange of nervous glances an excuse and managing a simple greeting, courage. What started with a cup of coffee turned out to be an affair to remember.

Life is too short to rue missed chances. They knew, for both understood the way to live. The relationship was open, the repercussions absent and the chemistry, platonic. But can you control the emotions which creep on, the complexities which develop, the intricacies which magically appear?

Life is too dynamic to live by a single rule. Even if the rule is obeying no rules. What if love hits you the very instant you are trying hard not to believe in its existence? What if you try to despise love, and love becomes a solitary vice, eating the prevalent beliefs in your system?

At the end, does it all matter? At the end, is it at all worth plunging into?

For there he stood, with a box of chocolates. And. There she went, soaked in the rain.

The rains haven’t yet reached this part of the world, but it’s damp nevertheless. The cell is devoid of light. Both the omnipresent form and what lies inside.

The inmates cannot sleep, for waking up has lost its purpose. They do not shout, they do not make a racket, they do not utter obscenities at the guards under the foul breath. The years inside have succeeded in making humans out of the monsters they were once. But does a person remain human if he has lost his spirit, the will to fight, the hope to smile?

He sits silently at the corner of his cell shared by three others. The smoke hasn’t left his lungs, he butts down a cigarette to light another. He has a date with The Chair tomorrow.

His cellmates are clueless to on what can be said. How can you comfort a twenty five year old who knows he will be dead in another couple of hours. How do you look at life when mighty death stares at you, inches from your face. ‘The boy’s will is strong’, they thought, ‘he hasn’t shed a single tear till now’.

The society had given up all hopes on them when it sent them here. But to him, it was a little more merciless. It had shunned him when he was a kid. Illegitimate, penniless and living in the gutters. He had no sense of relationships because the basics were denied. He had no sense of morals, for the society had forbidden itself to him. Like some others, he grew up surviving on petty thefts, oogling on the ‘goris‘, ‘beedis‘ and the occasional ‘pauwa‘. The voices told him it was all good.

But one day, she smiled! ‘That one, with her perfect round breasts, that curvy body, in THAT expensive car, she smiled at a piece of shit like me’, he thought. The voices in his head were very helpful, they were his only friend- his best friend. Here, they told him to follow the ‘memsaab‘.

Follow he did, but was left shameless and flabbergasted when she failed to recognize him. He couldn’t control the pain of the humiliation of the self, but the voices got him past that. The voices told him to wait for a chance. The voices told him to wait for the night.

He caught her unaware. His organ was hurting for the past two days, His loins pained from excitement as he pinned her down. She struggled, she tried to wriggle out, but couldn’t. He raped her, mercilessly, once, twice, thrice till the voices told him to let go.

He left her by the road like he had done the last time. “But why the fuck did she have to have the gun in the car!” He thought again and again. It was self-defense, the bullet had escaped his bald head somehow, but with the missed target, the girl lost her licence to live. The voices told him to end her, and he did, with his own bare hands.

The voices had long deserted the time police arrived. There, for the first time, he saw what he had done, took it all in, the mind was without his guiding light, his only friend, his best friend. But it felt calm.
—

He carried the same calm the next morning when he smoked his last cigarette. While walking to the chair, he once again remembered what the voices spoke before they went far away –
‘things have made you what you are. what you are will make you what you will become. don’t hide, they will hunt you. don’t run, they will catch you. don’t fight, they will hurt you. there is only one way out.”

The execution was tidy. He was dead before he knew it. Alone when he arrived and alone once again.

“some things hit so hard to home that you’ve got to create some distance.”
these lines echoed over and over her head while she drove past his home.

It wasn’t easy for her being a successful woman in a country where the gods are female but the females are goods. Though she understood from some points there was simply no coming back. She knew that in this event, there could be no gradations. The zero cannot be the same zero after it became a one.

When you are searching for something so desperately, the worst that can happen is to get what you want right away. For her, love wasn’t a way for survival, it was the means of her being. But the quest for love is a long road, and when we arrive at it, the results can be a bit of a letdown. She wanted to feel that love exists because we insist on believing in it. But when you try to despise love, the love becomes a cruel, isolating vice pushing you into a shell, cutting the very wings on which you wish to fly away – from it.

He knew of the past when he put the proposal. For him, the past is not one’s to own, it is the past of the whole world. And he knew he had to let it out. For the best moment to talk about love is when you realize that love might be lost.

She listened to him peacefully and bid a hasty goodbye. We’ve known each other too long, she thought as she left, we can hurt each other with memories a decade old. He had always been there. And there is a difference between staying and coming back, and he had never left.

She knew the consequences. She left the place without a sign. She knew he will be heartbroken, but destruction has to be blind, You never see your victim in the eye.

Their story does not have an end. For an end requires closure. He had none, for he never found her again. How could she, when she died a Jane Doe in a mortuary the next street.