(This short vignette is written as a part of Game of Blogging (#celebrateblogging) contest by Blogadda.com. This is a group activity in which a set of bloggers write installments of the same story.
Read the first post here.
Mine is 13th post. Read the 12th post here.
You can read the next post here)
Tara couldn’t believe her eyes. There was so much of fire everywhere. She could see the smoke coming out of windows and doors. She could hear the cries of the child trapped above and her mind went to Roohi. Tears flowed down her eyes and she felt a searing pain in her head.
“What the hell happened here,” Cyrus screamed and whipped out a phone. Tara expected him to call fire station, but he talked to some Johnny to send his team here.
“Breathe, Tara. The help is on the way,” Cyrus whispered, reminding her of the shallow breaths she had been taking. Smoke stung her eyes and she almost lost herself to darkness once more. Cyrus’s arms came around her, forcing her head on his chest, away from all the smoke.
“Tara, breathe. You don’t want to go to hospital again , do you?”
Tara tried to breathe in and out, tried to forget the orange flames eating up the building behind her. She felt like a coward—one who couldn’t do anything to help the people struggling in the building, the kind who needed a crutch to even breathe. Distant sirens approached her self-incrimination.
“You know people at fire-station?” she asked.
Cyrus didn’t hear her. She raised her head and noticed that his eyes were on the approaching police van. A fire brigade came and the people around the building scattered to give way to the firemen with huge water hoses.
A policeman knocked on the window and saluted Cyrus.
“Are you sure there was nobody in this building?”
“No, sir. Only a man named lived here, one who makes attar. The whole building is his.”
“But I heard a baby crying,” Tara protested.
“TV or the recording, Ma’am. This building is closed to all the visitors,” the policeman said.
“But, Shekhar comes here every month for his supply of attar. He is allowed,” Tara said again, wondering about that child trapped somewhere in the building. She wished to be the courageous woman who leaps in the building to save little kids, but she wasn’t that. She was a woman who reported the happenings from the bottom of the fuming building, who cried her eyes out at the hint of the fire.
Something passed between Cyrus and the policeman, but before Tara could decipher it, that feeling of being watched by someone returned. She looked around, trying to spot that hoodie, her kidnapper, but there was a crowd all along as the people stopped to see the burning building. She tried again, but nobody stood out.
Her attention came back to Cyrus and she heard policeman saying, “There had been a blast in that building too.”
Cyrus whipped out his phone and called his Johnny again, and wheels in Tara’s mind turned. The policeman had been reporting to Cyrus. Why? Who was he? And who is this Johnny he calls every time?
Tara looked at Cyrus again. He looked the same—as geek as he had in the first meeting, then why was she getting the sense that he was more than a geek?
“Who are you, Cyrus?” she asked as soon as he closed his call.
Me and my team are participating in ‘Game Of Blogs’ at BlogAdda.com. #CelebrateBlogging with us.
Parichita Singh 