The Cemetery

It was dark and green.

My friends apparently lived in the first floor of a building, the balcony of which faced the main road. The balcony had vertical iron railings. From the balcony, one could see a grocery store from where my friends usually bought their kitchen requirements.

For some reason, I went to visit these friends. From my place to theirs, I went by foot. I crossed a small pond on a beautiful bamboo-made bridge. All around the pond were beautiful green trees, greens creeper leaves, everything green, dark green.

I finally reached the first floor of the building-my friends’ place. As soon as I reached, I found out that they were out of salt. I had to buy the salt from the grocery opposite the building, by the main road. Wanting to take a short-cut, I went to some other way instead of crossing the road to the shop directly, which would obviously have been the shortest way.

 I took this other way. It took me to this very scary kind of place. It seems that the place was Bungalow Road, Kamla Nagar. But it was nowhere similar to the real Kamla Nagar of North Campus, Delhi. The place gave an eerie and sinister look, with lots of big buildings. One was really big painted in red, like those old English style houses.  One odd feature of all these buildings was that it seems re-painted over and over again, over dust and moulds. The place seems unhealthy to live in. In fact, no soul was in sight.

I walked swiftly to reach the shop, trying all the time, to ignore the surrounding. I reached a place which was a different from the earlier surrounding. This area was a little brighter. And it had odd stone structures and I was walking over the stones. And suddenly I realized it was a cemetery. I got really scared and I started running. It was a big space and no one was around. At last I reached an opening where I saw some people. All the while, I was running over the burials of individual. The last I ran over was a newly-made brick structure, a burial of someone who died recently.

I continued running and reached the shop, bought the salt and went back to my friends’ place. They asked me why I took that much a time. I didn’t reply. I just gave the salt to one of the girls and went straight up to the balcony. From there, I kept looking the shop thinking, “Why the hell did I take the so-called short-cut?”