BETWEEN THEM
Part 27
She made her way lazily around the park....
Cubbon Park in Bangalore...
The train that runs around it was making slow rounds... She watched it as she sat on one of the metal benches there...
A nice way to spend a completely useless morning... She could have rather gone to work... Stupid of her to have taken leave....
A couple of kids were playing around.... Shriya watched them with interest... The younger one was bossing over the other.....
It brought back memories of her own childhood....
She had mostly been bossed around.... a meek kid trying to cope up with the flaws in her world... a child to whom every day seemed magical and every night seemed mysterious....
Dawn spoke of birds twittering, but always just out of reach.... the sun spreading out with a million rays.... some that she believed she could catch... the stars fading away slowly into the morning glaze... promising her their special promise of returning later in the evening.... just for her....
Dusk was always the better part of her days.... She was also afraid of the dark... as most kids then... but then somehow in the comfort of her family and her bed.... she felt safer.....
And then there were the dreams..... Long ones, short ones, medium ones....
But they always inspired her... gave her a million meanings ....
And she sought them....
It was like she prayed daily to whatever Dream Fairy there was that existed....
Shriya sat there lost in herself... yet she found herself laughing at the antics of those two kids....
The morning was slowly fading away...
Maybe high time that she head back home....
And back to dull routines.....
She decided to just take a small walk around again to stretch her legs.....
It was when she was winding up her walk that she came across that clump of trees..... She didn't know what variety......
But they were real thin...... And tall....
Their height scared her... Gave her a curiosity that was only second nature to her Self....
She moved closer.....
She was too near them suddenly.... peering into the center...
It was like nothing that she had ever experienced before.....
There was a huge circular patch on the ground around which the trees spread their roots..... And they rose from there..... bent around the roots and gradually straightening up....
Leaves and twigs dotted the patch... The patch itself was nothing more than a meter in diameter.... And the dark center...... shaded by the shadows of the trees and lit up by the threads of sunlight that seeped through........
It scared her.....
No, that is an understatement.....
Shriya was lost in a primeval past.... Something seemed to have effortlessly lifted her from the present presence of Cubbon Park and placed her elsewhere....
It was like the park was nothing that mattered.... like it was not there.....
Timelessness within the present.....
And then there was that roar rushing into her ears.... A kind of a muted scream..... Chilling her with all its intensity.... Yet sourceless....
Suddenly she moved.... Away.... Back....
And found herself stumbling over some broken branches littering the grass in the park.....
She turned from there and almost ran down to the exit... Without looking back once....
Out of Cubbon Park.... Near the Mahatma Gandhi Circle....
She took a cab from there.....
And reached home in what can be described best only as transience......
For never before in her life had she felt as close to Krish as she had felt when she looked into the clump and heard the scream.....
It was like he was holding her.... closer than she had ever imagined possible... and was shielding her away from whatever memory that place held....
And also....
She had seen him on her way back home......
She did not mind that she had been too shocked to call out.... that she had been dumbstruck and euphoric all at the same time.....
It did not matter....
Just this did....
He was here...........
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