Write...Edit...Publish : February 2014. What's in a face?

This month the prompt at Write...Edit...Publish is “What’s in a Face?” and it has been buzzing around in my head the whole fortnight, like one of those songs you can’t stop humming no matter how hard you try.  Thanks, Denise for an amazing prompt.  I ended up writing reams - flashes and a short story, a spoof, poems; but fear not, I shall not force all of them on you :)
I am posting the flash that fits the word limit best, though there is nothing very Valentineish about it.  Not much of a VDay fan, me.  Sorry.





Sleepless

The bell has just chimed the hour, and I can almost see that dusty clock face down the corridor if I close my eyes.  Just a few hours to go till sunrise.  The dawn breaks every day and a circle of light hits the blank wall opposite me.  I have watched that for the last month.  Not tomorrow though.  Tomorrow I will be out of here, and there will be no-one to notice how a fuzzy moonlike patch coalesces into a hard, crisp disk.  A round hard face of light.

I see a lot of them.  Faces, I mean.  They have been good to me, generally.  I have no enmity left to sort out with anyone.  One of them had said to me, “You remind me of my father.  His eyes too were like yours, full of an unfathomable peace.” 

I had wanted to ask him what his father did for a living, but he had answered that himself by saying he had been some bigshot police officer.  Not a peaceful existence by any stretch of imagination, and no resemblance to me either. Unfathomable peace, indeed.  Must have made a killing on the kickbacks and confiscated goods.  Just shows.  The unlikeliest people and events endure, there is no accounting how things pan out.  But I have given up the peeves.

Some religious holyfellow turned up yesterday and offered to talk to me.  Anything I would like to say, anything I would like done now, tomorrow, anytime?  He too had a face full of a smarmy peace, awash in a kind of pseudo-serenity, and for a minute I had this wild impulse to tell him what is what and where exactly he could put his offer, and watch that smarminess crumple into shock. But then I did not.  Told him I was godless and if he won everybody here over then he would soon go out of business.

 

“Repent, O sinner,” he chanted in a melodramatic voice, “while there is time.”

I was tired of his drift already, so I told him politely to shut it.  Besides, I had repented, very formally, written a pretty letter about it as per regulations, but the outcome had not been much.  Repentance did not look like that moksha thingy to me, and could he go now and leave me to my own devices?

The clock seems to be melting its hands from the hour and reforming them at the half-past in one instant, rather Daliesque, the single chime rings clear in the darkness.  A half hour less now.  It is not just time and clock faces that come crowding around me as I wait sleepless.  Many others too form and dissolve like that light patch, waft in and out on the walls of my brain.  My mother’s, my brother’s, my wife’s.  My friend Amro, if I can call him a friend under the circumstances.  And the three king’s faces, the spade and club staring directly at me, the diamond in profile across the shabby, grease-spotted baize table.  The hard defiance on Amro’s face as he knew his luck had run out finally after such a long streak, his trick finally lying exposed in the diamond king in my hand.   A betrayal summed up in a sharp card face.

He said he cheated just that once, but that was a lie too.  I saw the reason for his winning streak clearly, nothing fuzzy about it.  He argued perfunctorily, he knew I could not do a thing.  I was a policeman with an impeccable record and an embarrassing addiction that was illegal as well; I was pinned flat like a bug under glass, my helplessness showing.   Things got ugly, what else?  My revolver was handy.  He did not see it coming, we had been more like twins than friends. 

I see that face here, with the neat round bullet hole in the neat round face.  A different kind of peace.   I had felt the same need to wipe that pseudo peace off his face too.  And I did it, kept at it till they came in and got me.  Worked it out of my system.  As I said, I have no enmity left with anyone.  His wife had to use some other body part to identify him, that is what I had heard later.

The whole city united in the demands for justice.  The activists bayed for more blood, this time mine.  Vicious. Police atrocity.  Brutal.  Some of the words that wore thin with use on the media reporting the juicy bits.  It did not touch me, not what the papers said, not what the strangers said.  My wife aligned herself firmly with Amro’s wife, I got to know that they had joint weeping sessions together.  That somehow bothered me more.  But not any longer.  We each find our comfort where we can, she is entitled to hers, I to mine.

These people have done what they could.  The lawyer steering me carefully through the lower court, the high court, the mercy petition to the President, the works. The holymen and women offering me routes to salvation.  The psychiatric counselling by long-haired motivated medico types. The eccentric journos trying to find the human interest angle.  All as per rules.   It has been rather intriguing in a way, standing on the other side of the dock.  If I had not combined policing with gambling, if the revolver had not been there, loaded; if I had not defaced him.  If. If. If.

 

The clock is chiming again.  One, two, three, four.  They will be coming any minute now.  I will be out of here very soon.  I wonder what they find when they remove the mask from the face afterwards?  Whether it reflects the final freedom of death.  If it wears the sense of inner peace, or just manages to showcase the bodily struggles of death.  Either way, I will never know. And in the final accounting, it no longer matters.

WC - 995

All feedback welcome.

Two points that I think I should mention in context.  One, Indian law has provision for capital punishment for extreme crimes, and execution is by hanging.  And two, gambling is illegal in India except in small enclaves like Goa.

And I would like to ask your opinions on using verb contractions - okay for just dialogues, not okay for the narrative, okay for both depending on context?  Do you think a story written in the first person reads easier/warmer if contractions are used?  I've left out contractions deliberately in the flash because this isn't a warm story.  Do you think it makes a difference anyway? Thank you.




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