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Temptation


              Undeterred by the unceasing drizzle and the gusty winds swirling around, plumes of smoke billowed up into the air. He knew the source of this. He did not know about most of the things transpiring beyond the confines of his cell, or the jail he was housed in, but he knew this all too well. When the smoke stopped, he loosened the clutch of his hands on the rods patterning the sky visible through the window, averted his gaze from the burning site, and slouched on the floor. A new inmate would come soon.
              Piercing the pall of silence, the door banged open. The floor-head dragged a man in by his collar- rickety in appearance and etched with a mark of surrender on the face. ‘When will his turn come?’ -he asked the head, pointing to the new entrant. ‘Next week’- came the swift reply in a tone implicitly warning him to keep mum. He looked down and almost immediately, a barrage of thoughts hit him. It would again be an agonizing wait of seven days, a duration which he had learnt to reconcile with, yet it was a time when he was, and would be, filled with a surge of envy, rage and an acceptance of bearing the onerosity of something known as human life. He was an outsider on the floor- the odd-one out- a result of overcrowding on the floor of ‘life-imprisonment’. Here he was, languishing and withering amongst men slapped with the deplorable punishment of death penalty, yet triumphantly relishing the imminence of the final release from this daily ordeal. When he first entered the jail, the thought would occasionally flash before him, but now the question assails him in almost every passing second- why hadn’t he directly killed the man? The road was completely deserted, it was pitch dark and most importantly, he could feel the neck of the man, wet by palpitation, firmly in his grip. From his instinct built over years of experience, he could sense the final air of life being stifled out, but not before the siren reached his ears. He instantly dropped him and made for the narrow by-lanes with the suitcase tucked under his arms, little knowing that the police had started searching the area akin to a comb running through hairs.
              On the third day, the news finally arrived, opening a new horizon of life before him and blinding him with the unbearable joy one feels on being greeted with sunlight after emerging from a dark, cavernous place. ‘It’s life imprisonment. He managed to survive, but the amputed leg and the acid-smeared face will remain.’ It was one of those rare and surreal moments when an acceptance of an inevitable and imminent demise, a cloud of reconciliation shrouding the intrinsic human zeal to survive day after day is suddenly pushed into oblivion by an announcement which makes one feel that being able to enjoy something as ordinary and commonplace as human life is nothing short of a new-found, priceless reward.
              But he was to be proved wrong. Completely wrong. It did not take long for the epiphany to set in- the long hours of compulsory construction work, the whiplashes for the slightest of shortcomings and the harrowing solitude of night in his cell. He could not have believed it until he had experienced how it feels to talk deliriously, shout, scream and cry-  solely out of an absence of someone to talk and converse with.  The arduous labour, coupled with grossly inadequate food, had made him wizened, but much worse than that, it was his mind which was bruised and broken, eroding like helpless coastal rocks- immobile, yet constantly being hit by waves of pain, of loss. It was as if his very existence was a burden too crushing to bear.
               The logs were being carefully arranged. Hours before, two convicts had been executed. Wrapped in white sheets, the bodies were placed on top of the pile of wooden logs. ‘Get up! You have to come today. There’s a shortage of men for making the pyres’, the floor-head had said to him. Now, he could see him lighting the two elevated wooden structures. In the blink of an eye, they were ablaze with dancing yellow flames. However, beyond it, he could hear the bones cracking and melting into thin air, alluring him to take the leap into a domain unknown but surely better than the one he was living in. It was, indeed, the ultimate temptation.


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