Telescope

The Telescope: Story Based on Nila's Lost and Found Diary

The Phone broke the silence to wake Nila from her drifting day dreams. She quickly grabbed the phone before the second ring.

“Hello…”

 “Hey, Nila, sorry, but I’m going to be late. There’s a production issue at the office. Let’s go out tomorrow... Ok?”   

“Ashok, it's Friday, You’ve two days to fix the problems. I am tired of sitting alone in this tiny apartment.”

“Sorry... Daa...This is a major computer system. The whole country uses it. I got to go, Bye!”

“Ba…yee.”  .

Nila felt like crying. She turned the phone off and threw herself into the couch, angrily beating herself on the forehead. As usual she complained to her favorite god, Lord Krishna’s statue on the TV top.

“I tell him all the time to move out of this place to a better one. He never listens, just blames his H1 Work Visa.  Oh... I forgot, why am I telling you all this? Your eardrums must be bursting after listening to those sixteen thousand whining wives of yours.”

After turning the TV on and off few times impatiently with the clicker, Nila rose and slowly walked to the window. She opened the blinds by pulling the string on the side like the curtain before the show. 

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Nila’s World!” the lonely extrovert announced sarcastically. The apartment’s wide living room window faced the always-busy Pennsylvania Avenue, which in turn made her feel she was in a crowd; a crowd that kept her busy all the time.

“Oh No! The whole window’s covered with moisture.  Maybe my cooking without running the exhaust fan is causing this.”

She looked through the hazy window at the cars entering the parking lot. The bump at the entrance made the cars bounce. Headlights made shadows of the naked tree branches like alien figures on the moist window. With her index finger she drew a smiley face with long hair and a dot on the forehead between her eye brows. Beneath the drawing, she signed her name ‘Nila Ashok’.  Giggling she went to the kitchen to grab a paper towel.  She wiped away her name, then cleaned, in circles sparkling, the whole window.

 “Wow! Look at you Moon.  You look so pretty tonight! You seem to like the fall and the snow better than summer, right?” 

“Hey Cinderella of the skies, I am going to give you company the whole night.”

“You might be wondering why I am all alone on this Friday evening. You know Ashok, right? Do you want me to tell you more?  He and his job... You know... His company will shut down without him working there.” She kept laughing. The moon, as if to tease her, disappeared behind a piece of cloud for few moments.

Nila opened the window by turning the crank handle a bit. Cool air rushed through the opening to embrace her.

“It feels so good.”

Nila breathed in the cool air. The chill made goose bumps all over her. Without taking her eye from the captivating full moon, she stepped back and stood behind the telescope placed near the center pane. She adjusted the tripod and wiped the surface of the blue Orion telescope, a gift from Ashok on her twenty-third Birthday. What could be a better gift for someone who lives in dreams the whole day, letting the mind wander with the stars and the clouds?  The telescope kept her busy making friends with the stars and the moon. She engaged in long conversations, sharing her little fantasies and little sorrows of boredom with them.

Parrot- that is what Ashok calls her when she forgets to halt her chatterbox. Whenever Ashok was late from work, Nila journeyed into the unexplored universe, dissolving into its mysteries. She looked for the newborn stars and plotted them into her notebook connecting stars to form different figures and shapes she loved. She identified the stars by referring to theAstronomer’s Pocket Guide; then named the newly found ones with that of her friends’ names. She wrote logs and stories of her encounters in the diary hiding behind the cursive revelations.

While taking a break from her discoveries of unknown truths of the skies, Nila humbled herself by looking down into the lives of earthly dwellers. She gazed at the people walking along the busy Pennsylvania Avenue and could easily recognize almost everyone there. To identify them, she gave fictitious names to them from the Greek mythology and Ramayana. She envisioned wars between the Greek Gods and the Monkey Forces from Ramayana in the busy street and the apartment parking lot.

Nila spied on everyone who passed through the territory under her control. Successfully, she predicted who would come to the street next and knew what bus they take. Looking in the bathroom mirror, she imitated them and mimicked their mannerisms. When people were absent for few days, or displayed bad temper for an extended period of time, she grew really concerned. 

With constant practice, she even gained the skill to move the telescope quickly to identify faces in fast-moving cars. Is this a skill or an addiction, not leaving any one alone, and invading the privacy of their minds?’ she thought with remorse, then shelved it. Reading minds and predicting their future with her telescope became part of her routine. On weekends, she tried to hide her obsession but at times instinctively touched the telescope focused to the street. Ashok never noticed or acted as if he didn’t; maybe he wanted her to be busy when he became deeply engrossed in his spaghetti of software code. He truly believed, without him nurturing the system, the company would be in deep trouble. Literally, he even took the water cooler jokes aimed at him way seriously. “Ashok, if you’re hit by a truck or a train, our jobs and the company will be in serious trouble.” So he avoided driving his Toyota Corolla near big trucks and was extremely cautious at the rail road crossings.

Nila pointed the telescope at the sky and focused on a distant star. Her mind drifted through the memory lanes. Her eyes quickly turned soggy, and saw no stars or the planets, but one star that was glowing more and more every moment she looked at it. It had been a while since she enjoyed the brightness of the moon, rings around Saturn, or the beauty spots of Jupiter with her telescope. Every time she looked through the eyepiece, she saw only one face –the face of her friend Shahana. The pretty face that came through her telescope lens like a meteor… then disappeared after spreading s few glimpses of happiness in her life.

It was during one of those parking lot spy missions Nila was overwhelmed in surprise to see someone like herself. She zeroed in on the starlit-eyed, beautiful girl with a teeny touch of gloom on her face. She was wearing a purple head scarf with scattered red roses embroidered on it. Nila quickly ran down the stairs to the parking lot, but the girl had disappeared.

For weeks, Nila kept looking everywhere for the girl she saw through the telescope. At last, Nila’s search fruited in the congestion of the noisy laundry room where she met Shahana for the first time face to face. The pungent smell of the bleach and the leftover detergent powder smudges did not impede her excitement. She felt like seeing her long-lost best friend after a very long break. 

The delight of finding a friend by surprise in a time engrossed in solitude made Nila the Talkative, nervous and scrambling for words. The smile and the unfamiliarity in a world of familiarity turned into thick friendship in few moments.  Shahana hardly spoke English. She went to school only until fourth grade in her home town of Bangladesh where the elders forbade girls studying further. Thanks to all the Hindi movies they both watched prior coming to theUS, they had a few words in common that came handy.  They created a perfect communication medium with smiles, laughs, and gestures mixed with the scarce words they knew.

They met every day in the laundry room, where when the machines removed dirt from the clothes, they relieved their sorrows. As days passed by, when the last snow on the ground melted away, they took their friendship outside the building. They spent time in the park and walked in the street. For hours they sat in the bus stop, as if they were waiting for a bus to a journey that would never end. The right bus never came to pick them nor did they stop waiting. They wandered around the apartment buildings. Nila laughed and talked way more than Shahana could listen. She just kept smiling while hiding all her pains under the colorful scarf on her head.

Despite Nila’s compelling attempts to invite Shahana to visit her apartment, she never showed up. She just kept smiling at her invitation. Nila was not sure what she meant, but was always hopeful. Whenever she asked about her husband, Shahana gave the same response and kept quiet. During the last conversation she noticed Shahana’s eyes tearing with the mentioned of her husband. She asked nothing more about him after that incident.

Nila was testing her newly acquired embroidery skills on the crochet when she heard a sudden knock on the door. She got little nervous, quickly stopped working, then walked to the door. Through the peephole she looked, then screamed in joy.

“Shaha…” She fumbled with the chain lock, and then opened the door.

“At last you came to my home!” She pulled Shahana in.

Shahana tried to smile but the sadness overpowered her. She just hugged Nila and cried. She wept for long time holding onto Nila.  Nila heard foot steps on the hallway coming closer. Patted on Shahana’s shoulder and closed the door with the other hand.

They walked into the living room.

“Sit, Shahana. Is everything OK?”

Her friend just kept crying, the tears rolling down her cheeks.

Nila didn’t know what to do but to cry with her. She couldn’t control herself, wiped tears with the tip of her sari, grabbed few tissues, and gave them to Shahana.

Shahana removed her head scarf. 

Nila saw the red eyes and the marks on all over her face “Oh No!”.

She closely looked and felt with her fingers the face blackened by beatings and the burns from a cigarette.

“What happened, Shahana?”

She cried. “Sameer… He beat me up and tried to kill me… I ran away”

Sameer, her husband was a butcher at the international market store. He cut and cleaned fish from morning to close. Some days he didn’t come home. One of her friends said he had another woman near his work and wasted all his money gambling. Shahana unloaded all her pains and shared her grief with her best friend.

Nila applied Neosporin ointment and stuck Band-Aids over the marks. She tied the scarf for her.

“You are so beautiful, Shahana! Merciful Allah will make him good, I will pray for you both.” Smiling, Shahana left to her apartment.

On a Sunday just before Christmas, Nila saw her for the last time. Shahana was going somewhere with her husband. Prior to getting in to the car, she looked back and waved in the direction of Nila’s apartment.  Nila didn’t know if she could see her or not, but thought everything had changed for the better.

After that day, Nila never saw her in the laundry room or elsewhere. Being extremely concerned, she thought of going alone to check on her in their apartment.

May be I will go with Ashok when he comes. That won’t be a good idea.., I will have to tell him everything and he may get mad at me. Her wavering mind didn’t let her make any decision, but it was attempting slowly, to transform her to a new person that she could never be.

At midnight, Nila and Ashok jumped out of bed and ran to the window, drawn by the flashing lights and sirens of the police and an ambulance. A fire truck was parked with lights flashing near the street. ...their bedroom window as a stretcher with a body covered in a cloth was brought near the ambulance. Nila, shaken, felt like her heart stopped and body became paralyzed when she saw Sameer walking behind the police officer. He had the facial expression of a hungry clown. It was hard to make out if he was laughing or crying.

 “Shah-” Hysterically Nila ran, pushed opened the balcony’s sliding door.

“What’s wrong, Nila? You know them? Why don’t you go to bed? Everything will be all right.” Ashok rubbed her back to calm her down. Silently, she walked to the living room, looked through the telescope at the street. The ambulance and the police car went away flashing the lights. Next day while she searched through the galaxies, Nila saw a new star among the familiar ones.  It was staring at her and was beautiful like her friend. She named it Shahana.

It is almost a year! A full moon like this took Nila’s friend away. Time was racing faster than ever, snaring precious moments into foggy memories. She focused the telescope on Shahana and began her never-ending chatter, forgetting everything around her. 

Thanks for Reading. Please don't forget post your comments and Suggestions -Cyril