//Wound//

When Nandu reached at his home after waking up from a three days death, his family members were astonished for all of the family members knew his death excepting him. He didn’t know even that he was dead and trying to reason out why he found himself lying in this deserted land. When he opened his eyes it was horrible experience for him:



Nandu opened his eyes with a pain. The pain was somewhere form his neck side that made him opened his eyes wide although the heavy light of the sky did not allow him widening his eyes. No objects seemed visible to him other than the illuminated blue sky where he could imagine the moving black spots could be flying birds. But his pain due to the frozen wound around his neck could not allow him to watch the broad canvas of the sky painted colorfully which he never allowed to escape from him until this time.

It was a different pain than other pains running throughout the body starting form the neck curve through shoulder. He tried to read, lying down as before, in order to know where actually the pain centers. He found, after deeply introspecting him that the pain comes out of the neck area due to fermentation of a wound. He lifted his hand thereby in order to touch the feelings that clustered at the area. His fingers touched a deeper than a normal wound due to a division at the folding area of his right neck at a span’s length. He felt two small mounds have been found installed around a thick hole, which had become rough with dry blood and dust pasted with sands. He tried to get up being surprised with the kind of the wound and how such wound could found on his body.

His whole body was agonizing like an old machine rumbling to function. He did not hear the noises though he was sure that his membranes are dried up due to some reasons unknown to him. Some how he pulled himself up to the sitting position. And made himself capable of looking at the big circle known to him as world.

The world, he found was extended up to horizon’s extreme that appeared to him like a radius of the huge circle, which had made him its center. He swept his eyes around him and saw the circle flat due to his sitting position. The scar of his wound didn’t allow him to locate this beautiful world. He wanted to know why he came to this place and how the wound could be found around him.

He thought introspection in to the memory could take him to the past world where he could get his answers of all the questions cropping up in him. But the psychological travel could at best take him to his domestic horizon. He remembered his house, his family and everything. He thought, returning to his family might get him back to his reasons.

He tried to lift himself like lifting a sack stuffed with heavy stones inside. Some how he could gather himself to his standing position and shook it thinking to move towards his home. He appeared to himself like an old ox driven cart that makes more noise than it s motion. His dragging could fetch him to the adjacent road, which he could manage locating soon after his moving in a particular direction and helped him identifying it along with the direction that leads him for his homestead.

This was a kind of experience he never had during his lifetime. He had never felt that he has a body and that needs to be carried always. This time his body gave him utmost pain hanging like the pinching nails piercing through out his body and expected to be out of its nailed area. But he dragged and dragged him until he could see a picture that resembled him with the picture if his home he had remembered a while ago.

He recognized his home and his compound that square his home and the plants that he had planed in the sapling form to yield him fruits and flowers for he years. He reached his gate that he himself had hung in order to protect the yard from the cows and other trespassers, which he opened slowly without any noise and reached at his door. His urge to open the door made his heartbeat quicker that he did with vain care due to his sole focused concentrated on what would be happening inside the house until he reached there and found normal.

The normalcy in the outlook of his home kept him in happiness until he found a gathering of clustered surprises seeing his presence at the house. The natural faces of his family glow suddenly went pale and dim. He couldn’t get rid of the fading away lights from those faces and thought of that its reasons might have some connections with his wound. Even his wife whom he found her coming out of the kitchen with a speed got stuck at her legs having him found with his accidental presence. He found her trying to conceal her face wrinkles that could bring her surprise seeing him. She somehow made the whole situation dramatized and adjusted the matter asking him when he came and were had he been!

He couldn’t answer her questions for he hadn’t found any of reason that could suffice his or her answer. He was thinking that she could have supplied some information on his wound or finding himself amidst the ground. But her hopeless question multiplied into many anxious folds on his face and he was thrown out to another world like thing purely unknown to him. He satisfied her first question answering with a simple word ‘now’. But her second question was more a dilemma for him and he joined with his family for skipping off the whole matter and the dilemma to be answered later, silently.

They all struggled to normalize the situation although their whole focus was not descending from the wound. His only son and wife showed much attention by cleaning him and giving him his clean dresses. His wife even went to the extent of cleaning his wound and asking him how he was wounded to which he only expressed his fruitless blinking as her answer until he was served with food to his hunger and left in a room for rest.

But soon his in coming slumber turned to painful disturbance as search for the cause and effects have not been reason out yet. The closed eyes brought many moving pictures related to his wound that just had stared itching and oozing. He wanted his wife to do the needful rub. But to his astonishment his wife did not turn up to provide him her company to his loneliness and help him to his relief. She instead of sharing with her husband preferred another room with her son.

Nandu waiting for some time emerged in his itching wound. He felt the remembrance of a few incidents that could have caused him the wound. He heard his wife chatting with her grown up son about something that he never had thought of before. She was asking her son for why he threw the man in the open field instead of burring him after his death. He had the jolt of a heavy shock shirring through his nerves that shook him. He did not know that he was dead which he came to know from his wife and son’s talk. They even were found discussing them regarding his lying in the open field for three day might have brought him breathing to life. From their conversation he got confirmed that during the last three days he was lying dead in the open field where he found himself.

He cold not imagine the truth that whether he could survive for three days even after his death. He wanted to leave. Leave everything that he thought as his own. His wife and son no longer remained as his own. They had already left him and resumed to their lives deducting him from their relation.

He was dead since last three days. But why? How? He thought of and thought of until he found the beginning of his wound. It happened once, long ago; form a rose thorn the thorn pricked him while plucking from its stem. And was that the reason for which he had been carrying the wound! It appeared to him illogical He still traveled further back to the memory.

Initially it was difficult for him to reach at its end where the thing began. But later he could churn out the exact picture. The picture of that lonely woman who had actually wounded him or he was wounded by the woman for a rose.

Did she it badly or he found her wanting from her eyes?





( to be continued )