Siddharth Gupta. Sid. Alone since he was fourteen years old. He had moved to Pune when he was 20 to study. Having completed a master's in English literature, he worked for a small advertising firm as a junior copywriter.
He was fond of writing in his spare time. Stories, poetry and memoirs filled up page after page in his diary. he had a few friends who he hung out with sometimes. But they never seemed to want to stay with him for long. He wasn't exactly an extrovert and had trouble getting along with most people. He had had a girlfriend once - a girl he was almost sure that he had been in love with in school but she had disappeared from his life like a speck of dust in the universe. He had probably been a speck of dust to her as well. He wrote about her in his journal for a few months. She said she had gotten bored of him and the relationship. She was a great girl. He wasn't a great guy. She wanted adventure. He wanted to play it safe. It blew up.
Sid lived alone in a house. The owners lived on the ground floor. He lived on the first. He had a nice big bedroom, a kitchen and a living room and had access to the terrace as well. That was the favorite part of the house. He would spend nights up there, looking up at the sky and writing in the dim light that seeped in from the bulb on the stairs. He went to work early in the morning and came back early evening, went to the terrace and wrote in his journal, came back and see that dinner had been served, ate dinner, listened to some music and then fell asleep. Most of his days were the same. The exceptions were the days he would meet a friend for dinner or a drink somewhere.
It was the 16th of Dec, a cold night. Nevertheless, Sid would be going up to the terrace to write. He felt particularly inspired that night. He put on a jacket and wrapped a heavy shawl around his shoulders to keep arm. He put on some woolen socks to keep his feet warm. He hated distractions while he wrote. And the cold seeping in could be a distraction; he knew it very well. As he added the final touch to his outfit, a woolen cap, he looked at himself in the mirror and smiled. Maybe he would skip dinner tonight, he wasn't particularly hungry. But maybe all the writing would change that.
He jogged up the stairs and opened the terrace door. It creaked open. Almost immediately, there was a shout from the ground floor - "Sid, make sure you shut the door when you are done, it's cold outside!"
"Yeah, I will Uncle!" Sid shouted back.
"He has the ears of a cat" he thought to himself.
But he was a good tenant. Uncle did not have any complaints about him. Neither did Sid plan on getting any dirt on himself. It was difficult to find houses to rent for single males like him. Single Male -The toxic combination!
He sat down against the railing around the terrace. The night was pretty lit up from the bulbous white full moon that hung low in the sky. A dog howled somewhere. He opened his diary and started writing.
"The world lit up in white
the body lit up in white
the moonlight shadow the color of the insides,
black.
What a night,
glorious!
Glory be thy name, night.
(Somehow that sentence seems the most fitting in old English,
I can never write Glory be your name, night!
What is it about the sentence? Just habit or a degradation of it's worth?
I digress.)
The shadow.
Black as my insides.
The night,
Oh so glorious!
But why is there such a feeling of doom?
Impending dominance of the unknown.
Like sickening gasps swallowed
In an upturned body."
He paused and read it. When he wrote poetry, he usually let flow whatever churned out of his head. Guess this was the flavor tonight. Doom!
"
Don't worry about a thing,
It's in nature to move up and down,
to slither in and out
of view, of touch, of peace.
Like the moon, transitioning
over a month back to who She was;
but every time She comes back,
She is a little different,
a little more weathered,
a little more forgotten
by those with perception.
So go, get changed, change, make change
be a little different everyday,
a step up, a step down, who cares?
Keep changing your body from white
to yellow to red to blue
through the whole spectrum;
your shadow remains black."
As his thoughts trailed off, he looked sideways to look at his own shadow on the ground. He started when he noticed he wasn't casting a shadow. He stood up and looked around. What! How is that possible? There was a full moon in the sky! He looked up and saw the moon had been covered by a cloud. The wind picked up, a chilly death of a flurry! He looked up again. The clouds parted and the moon shone out again, white and fluorescent. Still a little startled from a few seconds before, Sid gathered his shawl around him hurriedly and looked down again. No shadow again. What was happening! He ran towards the stairs. It had been an hour he was up on the terrace. By this time, dinner was usually served. He thought of food as he ran. When he reached the top of the stairs and stood under the light, he looked around himself again. No shadow! What was happening?
He ran down the stairs to his apartment and opened the door and turned on the lights. It was cold inside and smelled musty unlike other days when it usually smelled of dinner. He looked around again and noticed he wasn't casting any shadows again. No idea what to do, Sid made his way towards the kitchen to look for food. Weird! There was no food cooked today. He usually cooked and served dinner so that once he was back, he could eat. "Strange evening!" he thought. He ate some cookies and drank some milk and decided to go to bed. There was a slight throbbing on his temple.
He decided he'd tackle everything the next morning. As he closed his eyes, drifting off, he heard Uncle shouting from the ground floor, "Sid! Have you left the terrace door open?" He muttered a silent 'Shit! I'm gonna get it tomorrow' and rolled over to the other side and dozed off.
Uncle came up the stairs and knocked on his door once and went up to the terrace. Sure enough, the door was open, the chilly wind barging into the house. He closed it and went back down the stairs. As he came to Sid's door, he debated if he should wake the boy up and rain down holy hell on him. He decided it would be done the next morning. Sid seemed to be asleep, the light was turned off and he didn't hear a sound.
He went back downstairs and called Sid's mother and told her what had transpired. It was unusual for him to do something like that. He usually had the same routine everyday. "Just check on him once tomorrow morning." Sid's mother told Uncle. "Sure!" said Uncle. "I hope he took his medicines. Well, anyway, I'll call you tomorrow morning! Goodnight." said Sid's mother. "Goodnight!"
Next morning, Uncle went up and knocked on Sid's door. There was no response. He knocked again. No response. Taking out his key copy, he unlocked the door. He found Sid still in bed, two cans of yellow and blue paint beside the bed. He called "Sid!" and turned him over. Siddharth was naked under the sheets, his whole body painted yellow and blue, quite dead. His diary lay by his head, open on a page where he had written in large letters:
"There was no dinner. The shadow had disappeared."
