Siona was flinging her arms around herself in a slowly controlled manner. Her fingers and hips grazed the air and the fellow dancers around her, in a titillating manner.
The changing lights above her were like the spasmodic and ever changing canvas of a sky and its weather sped up to an eternity whizzing past in a miniscule pocket of time.
Life and all of its storms and cloudy days— naught but mere flashes of bright and darkening colors— now exploding alongside her dance of eternity. No longer a prolonging of vibrant mood coloring a monotony of flustered existence. But now a phantasmagoria of feeling and passion— gyrating her body and sending the thrill of exhilaration and adrenaline coursing through her chest. Beads of sweat bloomed all over her body. The catharsis of drudgery and livelihood.
In her trance, free from the pressures and heartbreak of the day, she but barely noticed the string of red-clad faces that whizzed past the green-stained windows on the two walls on opposite sides from her.
The old man gently rocking in his wooden armchair was draped in faded green and red fabrics. He was to visit the site of the birthday party for the sake of his granddaughter and of family siesta tradition.
His long leathery, drooping brown face was so wrinkled and his eye-lids were so dazed and close to each other that he looked about to sink into a slumber within the forlorn edges of his armchair, closed off from the excitement around him.
His daughter, the middle aged mother of the teenage birthday girl, had just left his side to retrieve some dishes.
Alone, the old man looked about to sleep. Just when his heavy eye-lids suddenly paused in their slow descent, his murky brown eyes, warm with sleepiness, but now turning to the icy grimness of hardened earth. His eyes opened wider and his snowy eyebrows creased together.
He stared at one of the dully dark green windows adjacent to him.
He’d seen three moving blurs of red like rosy splotches of paint against a green tint, seeping outwards. They were only to be replaced by the dimness of night, returning to the dark green. The only things he could discern through the window were small green plants bordering the edge of the window below and the rolling darkness of the fields beyond.
The old man opened his mouth to make a noise, but was silenced by yet another sight of a red blur. It was a fast-moving entity, wrapped in an aura-like bundle of red cloth. Swinging limbs propelled the body, flapping cloth before disappearing again.
Another blur of a man ran past. This time, the old man saw a narrow band of dark skin and white eyes poking through a red headwrap, making an appearance before vanishing along the trailing red cloth into the confines and dark recesses of the night.
The old man wheezed, sounding like cracking ice. He choked around the words of warning he wanted to shout.
He shifted his shoulders ever so slowly to his right, looking for his daughter.
“V-vinika?” he muttered.
His voice was drowned out by the warble of the party.
“Vinika?” he repeated in a louder voice.
The lights of the room dimmed ever so faintly, before returning to their normal colorfulness and luminosity.
G.R. Nanda 