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Encounters

Posted on June 27, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

Like most families returning from their first trip abroad, they wandered around the airport trying to figure out how to get outside without being slapped with huge duties. He was becoming increasingly exasperated with his parents’ behaviour. Maybe it was the ceaseless stream of questions in stereo…

“Do you have all the bags?”

“Did you take all the ketchup sachets?”

“Where are the forks and spoons?”

Maybe it was the knowledge that they didn’t buy anything the customs officers would be remotely interested in. All he knew was that he was ready to spend a year isolated from anybody related to him by blood.

He looked around and became slack-jawed at the realisation that the plane seemed to have brought them more than just a few thousand miles because all around him, the world looked like it had regressed a couple of decades. To a time where the bottom two feet of all walls of the airport were painted a quintessentially government-approved shade of green and all entrances and exits were barricaded with the iron grilles that slid across on badly made rails causing an infernal racket designed to leave an imprint on the brain.

He was staring disbelievingly at the gates when the level of noise swelled momentarily and then subsided to almost nothing. The crowd parted to reveal mop-topped Sonny and straight-haired Cher walking through.

His jaw dropped even further.

When recognition struck the crowds present, all hell broke loose and everyone rushed to touch her and get his autograph. In the space of a minute, everybody save for his family, was milling around the famous couple.

Though they took slightly different routes, all of them were headed for the temporarily-abandoned duty free section. When his kleptomaniac family reconvened mere minutes later, his father nodded his approval at their acquisitions and made for exits left unmanned by security guards seeking autographs.

As the morning sun blinded him temporarily, he raised a hand to shield his eyes and sensed more than saw movement. His head moved out of the way purely on instinct and got to see the eight-inch steel blade slice past the front of his nose and embed itself in the aluminum of the exit door.

The fear in his mother’s eyes galvanised him into action and he chased the man on the motorcycle, going the wrong way down a one-way lane. A whistle-blowing cop stepped into the path of the speeding vehicle, prompting the motorcyclist to skid to a stop, abandon his vehicle and run back in Kiran’s direction.

He planted his feet and braced himself to meet the running man, who didn’t seem to have noticed him. Until he reached into a pocket of the leather jacket that was totally out of place in the sweltering Mumbai heat, flicked his wrist and sent off another piece of sharp shiny steel. He dropped onto his haunches and shut his eyes at the same time, only opening them when he heard the soft thud of the shuriken (or what he thought looked like a shuriken) burying itself in a nearby tree trunk.

The motorcyclist slipped past him and he took off in pursuit, taking care to watch for any other dangerous objects the man might be preparing to deploy…

As he gave chase he tried to make sense of it all so he missed the sight of his prey taking off his helmet. One moment it was on, the next it was off and he saw that he had an Oriental face.

He was unqualified to guess the country of the man’s origin as his fingers closed around the fork his mother had made him take from the plane and as the man surreptitiously attempted to explore another unsearched pocket in his jacket, he plunged the fork into his chest. The man’s eyes went wide and the two of them went down in a tangle of arms and legs.

As he tried to get the fork out, he wondered why he was doing this and realised that the man would kill him if he didn’t get him first. The Oriental man’s chest would not give up the fork but he said the words “Seven Thirty”.

His lips hadn’t moved. It was as if the words were spoken directly into Kiran’s mind, as if an internal projector had displayed the words on the screen of his mind, with sound. The words became numbers and he yanked with greater force, closing his eyes to concentrate his energies…

When he opened his eyes again, he was on his stomach, in bed, with an unfeeling hand trapped under his pillow. He rolled over and sat up, grimacing as long-denied blood raced towards his fingertips.

It was bright and sunny outside but the inside of his head felt dark, cobweb-ridden and dank. Residual images still flashed through his head, What the fuck was that!

He had to use the bathroom but he didn’t feel rested at all. And totally unprepared to face a new day.

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