Dark Horse Arts and Sciences

The man who was once a defeated athlete, is now bed-ridden, counting his days for the final defeat of his life, death. Seldom had he ever won a premiere championship in his sportsman career, gathering harsh criticism, rude comments and many more stuff that are way nastier than just hateful comments. As he is laying down on his bed, cornered through the suffocating and unfair means of life, he begins to recollect his old days. Though he is much old now, he is still able to retrace back the memories of his struggled and not-so-good past. Even though you are old and completely sick, devoid of any sign of consciousness, there is some part of you, that’s still there, within you. It’s there, helping you cope up with the outside world, however hard and distant it may be. Your memories may have faded away, but some of it is still tethered to your subconscious like an umbilical cord.

Same was with the case of the old man. He could clearly recall how he would go to practice everyday despite the hindrances the circumstances offered him in his path. His economic resources weren’t that good, yet he managed to pull some strings and afford the expenses for his diet and sports necessities like shoes, clothes, laundry. He was well-determined and completely focused towards his fixed goal. But something happened; something that derailed him of his smooth track. Something so loathsome and abhorrent that only compelled him to stop pursuing his dream.

A close encounter with a bomb explosion ensured that the man would not resume his athletic career for good. It was done and dusted; his years of sweat and toil had been dismantled through a certain chain of events that had nothing to do with him or even his profession. The building he had been building up brick by brick had been shattered away by some earthquake that occurred through collision of tectonic plates.

The rest of his life, he had to remain bed-ridden with two of his legs entirely gone to the other world, and one of his eyes, devastated with the frequency of the explosion. But was there anything the man could have done? Was there anything wrong he did for which he is being punished now? He is one of those guys who doesn’t even kill a mosquito, where could it have gone all wrong? If there is a thing called Karma, what was the action for which he had to bear these consequences?

Well, no one has any damn idea. It’s all a mystery. He wasn’t the only one to lose something in that devastating explosion. There were many who lost relatives, parents, children, many vital organs. But what are their mistakes? Nothing. The thing is that they were just at the wrong place at the exact wrong time, completely devoid of any idea what fate had in store for them.

The moment the image of the bomb explosion appeared in his retraced memory, suddenly his heart rate begins to escalate to higher digits. He began to experience a certain sense of helplessness. A feeling of anger starts swelling up inside his pumped-up veins in response to the fact that he didn’t deserve this fate; that nobody deserves this fate. He was filled with angst and malice with the fact that had he not commuted through that train and taken up the footpath that day, he would have been somewhere he always deserved to be; somewhere he spent all his sweat and resource to reach to. But that didn’t happen. What happened had happened and there was no other way around, he had to convince himself of this very fact.

Drops of tears came down his folded old skin as the old man closed his eyes for the one last time, ready to set foot in an uncharted territory, away from this withered body and defeated soul, somewhere far away from this realm of his consciousness to another world, where he may get what he ultimately deserves, solace.