Anand Prakash

                Something fell from my neighbor’s roof, making a thud noise. From distance, it look like a block of wood. I went closer. I hadn’t seen a bread this dry.  A part of it was black also. Not tough to conclude it was infected with fungus, the one invariably grows in food stuff, if left outside.

                I didn’t touch it. I could have picked it up and dumped in the waste basket. But I was lazy, so I cursed my neighbors. I felt that I would never tired of cursing my neighbors, until the bread disappear.

                Sunday came. The cube of bread barely moved its place. Then, it rained. No wind,  just torrential rain. I heard an electrical transformer exploding nearby. I sighed. The light was gone. I was force to sit out.

                Then, from somewhere a pigeon came. The pigeon must have come before. Maybe he had come when I wasn’t around. So many birds fly over my roof that I had hardly time to notice. I didn’t move from my chair. The pigeon stared at me. The bread, now softened, was halfway between me and the pigeon. I started breathing slowly. My chest rose up barely from my slow breathing and my eyes remained fixed on the bird.

                The pigeon took one step, hesitatingly, toward the bread. Then, one step back when I suddenly coughed. I didn’t intend to cough. It came from nowhere, just like the pigeon. After that, a staring contest between me and pigeon started. It went until, my breath stabilized. First step was again full of hesitation but his next steps became smoother. He must have seen laziness in my eyes, so he approached the bread with fervor. He was coming closer to the bread and me. Though he didn’t open or move his beak unnecessarily, one could easily find hunger in his eyes. The way he dug his beak into the bread, my doubt of his hunger were confirmed. He seemed to be in some kind of hurry.

                Now, I knew for sure. He must have come here before. I hadn’t seen him waiting for the rain. He must have been waiting for rain to soften the bread. His wish had been granted today. He arrived. I bet he would have relished it more, had he not found me staring him.

                The pigeon poked the soft bread with his beak and kept gulping it. I thought to throw something at the pigeon so that he won’t eat the blackened part, infected with fungus but what would I know about hunger, the one who get to eat three times a day. The infected part might kill him but if he didn’t eat, hunger would surely kill him. So, I just stared. Once in a while, he would raise his neck to stare at me but for the most part he kept going. He kept on eating till he reached the black part. It might be that he knew the part was infected or it might tasted bitter like old and squished lemon.

                Or he might as well be full.

                If he would ever comes back, I would throw some biscuits toward him for making almost all the bread to disappear.

For so long, we’re a happy couple. Even more ideal than the couple in romantic comedies, we actually never fought with each other. So, when I fought with her for first time on some random thing that I had now forgotten, that day, I felt like as if I had seen and smelled a putrefying carcass and felt like vomiting then and there. But for strange reasons, I couldn’t vomit. If you had ever felt such a feeling, where you smell something obnoxious and vomit stuck in your system, you know how horrible that is.

I didn’t have anything to compare to, like how much you fight and when you need to stop and start loving each other again. Neither did she. For this was our first love.

Whoever’s mistake it was, when I realized it had gone long, I said, “Sorry!” and touched her soft arm, she pulled her hand away from me. “Need to sleep!” she said.

It brought silence. You know me, rejections hurt me, even a simple rejection of not giving the last ice cream. I had already given the money to ice-cream vendor and he chose that girl over me and said, “Sir, sorry next time.”

Since that fight, we didn’t say a word until I said sorry to each other.

It was then I came to know how powerful that silence can be in destroying a relationship, even worse than fighting. I wish we would have fought more. At least, in those bitter and caustic words, there was truth. In silence, guilt and doubts perpetuated and tore us apart.

After couple of weeks, she did speak to me, telling me that one of her friends’ roommate had left and now she had room available for her.

“Hmm.” She didn’t even mention the name of friend; I knew all of her friends, unless this one was her new friend.

“You said I don’t have to stay here for forever. I can go whenever you feel like. Remember!”

“I said that,” I said to her.

She nodded. Her face hidden behind her raven colored tresses. So, I turned my back to her as well.

“If I said so … then you are free to go.”

She didn’t even give me benefit of doubt: she didn’t even say that I don’t remember exactly but you said something like that. Or she could have simply said, I want to go.

Did I say something like to her? I don’t remember. I might have. Those were early days! We used to tease each other by saying such things. And it has been over two years, do you think, I would remember this sentence of all the sentence she had said to me.

There were magical sentences, there were words that I would love to hear again and again from her, heck even whispers were better than remembering this sentence.