SUSPENSE STORY

                                                    "SCRAPBOOK"

It was a lazy afternoon so I went to the stationary and bought a scrapbook. I had nothing to do- at all, and thought that I could use the time to fill in a new scrapbook. It had been long since the last, and I had just come back from a journey to the south; so it was important to catalogue my life.

The scrapbook was a normal flat book with black pages. I threw the book casually on a table and went to collect all raw material- photos, bills, notes, tickets. When I came back, I saw a corner of old-yellowish paper protruding from the inside of the new book. I opened it to that page and found out that it was a very old birthday card addressed as ‘Dear Son, I am sorry’.

I wondered how it could have come here so I flipped through the pages in the front but they were blank. I turned page after page. Black after black after black, black black…birthday card. I turned another page and there was a photo. It too had turned yellow but only at the edges. The image was of a child and his mother at a beach, embracing the wind and each other. The next page was a collage of too many photos jammed in a single page. Photos overlapping other photos, new as well as old. All of them were of the mother, at a restaurant, at a zoo, at a playground, at a fair, knitting, cleaning, and everything else I couldn’t make out.

On the next page I found casette boxes, game disk boxes, movie posters- I had grown up with these things as well, but I wondered how the book seemed flat with all these inside. I shut the book and it became flat again. Nevermind. I reopened it and found a walkman box- without the walkman but the silhouette of the device and earphones carved in the package. Postcards of different countries, postal stamps, calendars, board games, wrestler cards in the following pages and cutouts of beautiful girls from magazines near the last.

I was sad when only the last page remained. It was like looking at a life so similar to mine and now it was about to end. But as I opened the last page, it wasn’t a page anymore. It had become a huge carton box, the size where a washing machine could easily fit. Many stacks of books made pillars around the walls of the box, some pillars had broken and few were about to fall. There were toy cars, school bags, and things protruding from the dark bottom. I peeked in and found more things from the past of somebody’s life- building blocks, a cycle, old fashioned goggles, half eaten apples, a teddy bear with no eyes, broken watches, a small jacket, a shoe box, the walkman, a brown pebble and countless other small things. I knew there was more. There had to be. I could get inside and live with all these things. Things I could trust. Things that were certain. But outside this was the possibility of new. I thought twice.

***

                                                                                                     SOURCE BY-AMTITA GANGULY

PUBLISHED BY-OURHELLO.COM