Published on May 7, 2026

Categories

NYAC

One Fine Day

• Post author By tbrg
• Post date May 7, 2026

One Fine Day

It was a serene day in late July, the kind that makes you think nothing could ever change until I heard he was leaving. I tried not to think about it. But then, as usual, I failed.

I pretended to listen to the class. But all I could think of was him. His eyes, like a firefly in a gloomy sky, his smile, which I could see over a million times, his dimples, soft slopes I’d
fall into. All these are just pictures in my memories now. Or had it always been like that?

A sudden sound hit my ear and made me jump. ‘Smriti, what are you thinking?’ Maya asked. ‘Oh, nothing, Maya, I’m just listening to the class,’ I replied, trying to hide it. She would’ve found it by now.

I ran out of the classroom right after the recess bell, my heart aching to know if he’s really leaving. I asked one of my friends if what I had overheard that morning was true. She responded with a straight face, ‘Yes, Tanish is going to Mumbai. Don’t you know that?’ ‘Oh, ok, I didn’t know about that. When is he leaving?’ I asked her. ‘Tomorrow morning’, she said. T’ll talk to you later,’ I mumbled, my heart pounding, my hands shaking, hiding my anxiety.

With an anxious face, I entered the class. I tried to settle in, but my thoughts didn’t let me. ‘Maya, do you know that Tanish is going to Mumbai?’ I asked her, thinking she wouldn’t have known about it. ‘Yeah, I know about it. Were you thinking about that all this time?’ she questioned me.

“Then why didn’t you tell me?’ I roared. ‘I thought you’d be sad.’ ‘Do you believe I’m happy now?’ Maya was speechless. ‘You know that I love him, still, you didn’t think of saying it to me. Why?’
‘I..I didn’t mean to. I thought you’d be worried hearing that because you love him with your whole heart.’ Maya said softly. ‘I trusted that you’d tell me. But—’
‘Hey Smriti, don’t be serious. It’s just a small issue.’ ‘No, it isn’t. You know what, leave me alone for a while.’
My backbone hunched on the seat, my hands and legs shivering, I tried to forget everything which was never a thing that happened.

Drowning in my thoughts, I didn’t see her coming our biology teacher. She entered the class with her usual grumpy face and her purple glasses, carrying a pile of books in her hand. As she entered, she stared at m e a t my eyes-with an offended look. It was a new feeling, getting stared at by her judgmental eyes
I continued to drain into the ocean I built. Thinking of him made me cry like a baby, but that baby has a mature image in school, which she doesn’t want to ruin. So, I made sure I
blocked my ocean. But how can it be possible while he’s still in my mind?

My legs trembling, I started to walk out of my school and boarded the school bus, hoping I could hear his voice for one last time.

I dialled the number, my heart throbbing, my hands quivering. As I reached it to my ear, I heard it, his voice, like honey flowing, ‘Hello?’ He repeated it. I kept being silent. I didn’t listen to it again— forever.

Like all one-sided love stories, mine was unsaid too, with pain till the day that I die.

Published on

Categories

NYAC

My Fairy

• Post author By tbrg
• Post date May 7, 2026

My Fairy

I could smell the aroma of the sweet Kashmiri Kahwa tea. It was an Eid day. Greetings of hollow joy flowed in the house as I tumbled through the rooms. My mouj ‘mother’ asked me to dress up. In no time, it was the time of the Eid prayer. Ahh, I did not like to pray, like what 10-year-old does? But I had no choice but to follow my ‘Papa’ to the mosque. People usually say, You can’t hear colours and see sounds, but it is not true. On my way to the mosque, I could see the silence reflected in the closed shops and the empty lanes. In the courtyard, my neighbours greeted me, and I them, but their smiles did not speak joy.

Anyways, as it was to happen, the Imam led the prayer. In our prostration, there was a loud bang outside. It was a stone pelting. It was quite common in those days. The people present ran. My father and I hid in the bathroom, waiting for the situation to go back to normal. A tear gas shell was launched into the same room; the whole room was filled with skin-burning smoke. I remember hands pulling me. I remember coughing so hard I thought my chest would tear open. Someone was shouting my father’s name. Someone else was crying.

The mosque floor felt cold against my cheek. Then everything went dark. I never came to know how my father managed to get me home that day. At home, the smoke still clung to my lungs, and my eyes refused the words I longed to read. Silence filled the rooms, and a fairy appeared. “Kill the misery. Why are you sad?” Asked the fairy.

“ My eyes… they hurt! I can not see now,” I said.

“ Because they hurt or because you can’t see?” It asked.

“ Because I can’t read the story now. The lonely fox.. It is trapped in the cave, and then what?”“ Then imagine the fox in your mind. What does he do there? You see him?” It asks.

“ No, I can’t!”

The fairy spreads her wings around me.

“Do you see him now?” She asks.

“ Ah, it is a fox! He is still in the cave and is terrified of the fog and the stones. Poor him! He moves forward. Look, he sees a path, and now, he is not afraid. He learns the stones and can see through the fog. He finally reached the pond, and Ha, there are his cubs, and they are drinking water!”

“ He finally met his cubs! You see? That is the true beauty of your mind.” I rubbed my eyes again. The light did not return at once, but the darkness did not frighten me anymore. I could still see the fox in my mind, standing beside the pond, his cubs pressed against him.

The fog had not disappeared; I had simply learned to walk through it.

The fairy faded forever as my room was in lights.

Published on

Categories

NYAC

Indifference Is A Sin Against Life

• Post author By tbrg
• Post date May 7, 2026

Indifference Is A Sin Against Life

Today I saw another dead body.

It shouldn’t have been different from any other day, but it was. Every day is a new kind of grief when you are at war.

“War” is what they call it.

“War” on a people who have done nothing but exist in peace and try to survive despite everything the world has thrown at them. We are bombed. We are hounded. We are starved, even mocked for our pain. And still the mothers carry their young with them when they are forced to flee their homes. Still the grandmother cooks her special dish with whatever scraps she can find in a makeshift tent made of plastic. Still the children smile and play over the piles of rubble, unaware of the dead bodies buried underneath. The world tries to turn us into statistics every day, and every day they are given fresh evidence that we are not. This is not a war against my people. It is a war against humanity.

Our children have the same smiles, they shed the same tears. So why are they any different? What does a white man have in his character that they do not? I shudder to think that for all our intelligence, we come down to this vile system of awarding privileges on the basis of one’s skin tone. I’m sure you can tell I have a lot of thoughts on this matter. I am bitter. I believe I have every right to be, since you are sitting safely behind your screen reading this while I am fighting for my life. You meet your family, you hug and kiss them every day. We are not given this luxury. We must resort to praying that they will survive one more day, and meeting them is something most of us only dream of. If we do meet them, it is in heaven.

But the world will not listen. It will use the mask of ‘necessary evils’ to try and justify its complicity. It will try to drown out our voices and turn us into another desensitizing piece of history to be forgotten, as it has for the last 76 years. And yet, when I wake up tomorrow to my 2-year-old daughter crying because of the bombing outside our torn tent, I will remember. When I am struggling to find water and wheat to keep my family alive because there is no available aid in the city of rubble, I will remember. When I see the life fade from my last family member’s eyes, if I am still alive by then, I will remember.

So when I die and God asks me why I am not surprised, I will tell Him the tale of each dead body I saw.

Of every child and every soul that had the nerve, the sheer audacity to be born in the wrong part of the world. Whose only sin was to try and live. And I will tell Him of your sin too.

We will never meet. You will never see me, nor I you. But for once, when you are done reading this, do not think. Do not try to rationalize any of your guilt, anger, shame, or God forbid, empathy. Simply feel.

Both our hearts beat with the same rhythm. We love different things and different people, but we love all the same. And it is with this love that I bid you goodbye with the hopes that maybe, you’ll begin to imagine how precious life is. How indifference is a sin against life itself.

Published on

Categories

NYAC

Break of Dawn

• Post author By tbrg
• Post date May 7, 2026

Break of Dawn

Eyes in search of an omnipresent God, his wandering irises rested upon the storm clouds that had obscured the sun—though the stubborn sun refused to fade out completely. Not much further, people hurried out of buildings to get home as soon as possible—a storm was coming. Ever since the cancer patient had been admitted in the hospital, the break of dawn seemed more subtle, as if the adamant darkness refused to leave and rubbed its gloom on the dawn. The flowers seemed to droop as he approached and the dense clouds cried the tears that dried out his eyes each night. Quietly, the nurse approached him and politely asked him to rest. It was late now, and he must be tired. So yet again, he wheeled himself to the bed where he had spent the majority of his stay. A wide assortment of cards and notes lay on the stool towards his left, though he hadn’t had the energy to open even one of them.

The nurse offered to tuck him in and—staring listlessly into her painted eyes, he saw not warmth but pity, mounds of it. He saw it in everyone’s eyes these days, the visitors, the doctors, his friends, his mother and even his own eyes as he stared into the mirror in the morning. His days were spent gazing out the window, where each day a new sight engaged him. The window pane was crawling with ants that ate away at an insensate cockroach bit-by-bit. Cars zoomed across the road, as he wished they would take his thoughts with them too—far away from him. Life is a peculiar collection of events—some events end abruptly, and life along with them.

The other stretch relatively longer, but the worst of all are the instances where each moment is spent wondering if, with the next breath—he too would cease to exist.

He did not stand to lose much, for there existed no lover of his who loved him back, nor any friend who reciprocated his feelings of care. His father was long gone, and his relationship with his mother was strained. The world would not stand to lose much either. Only the one who knelt in the temple, wishing for his good health would crumble and bawl and the ones who wished his plight unto themselves would moan and curse their luck. For, despite his ignorance, there were numerous who cherished him. The sky itself wept for his pain, and the trees bent with the weight of emotions he buried deep as he painted a brave look for the world to see. He awoke suddenly, one morning—to a ray of sunshine. The sky had cleared up overnight and the clouds that had not budged for the past week vanished so as they had never existed. The nurse wept now, tears of joy. His faith in God hadbeen lifted years ago and he was not a believer of miracles but perhaps someone’s prayer had been answered, someone’s plea had been heard. Humans are strange creatures, holding on to hope even as their life breaks apart before their eyes.

Sometimes, their faith is tested, promises are broken and tears are spilt but the other part is magical, miraculous. Hope brings back a man from the mouth of death, a man who is oblivious of the fact that he is loved.

***

“Before you know it, it will already be dawn; and all your pain and sadness with the night will be gone.”

Published on

Categories

NYAC

Somewhere Out There

• Post author By tbrg
• Post date May 7, 2026

Somewhere Out There

Somewhere out there, in a little town far away, lay a little cottage. In it lived an even more little girl. She was Holly. Holly was a playful trickster. She had short, golden hair tied in a bun, obscured by the green hat she wore at all times. Her eyes used to glint with mischief. But the weirdest things in her were her pointed ears and translucent wings!

Indeed, she was a pixie! Not a fairy, mind it. It is an offense to mistake pixies for fairies.

What was the best thing about her? Well, she could use magic! Did she use it for Good? Yes. Sometimes, she would play harmless pranks on harmless people. Was she malicious? Absolutely not!

Holly’s job was to guard the Helm of Honor. The Helm of Honor was a headgear that looked more like a crown. It was bestowed onto the greatest Heroes. Heroes were “the most brave, kind and valiant” of humankind.

Now, who deemed heroes as Heroes? That is a most unanswerable question. We shall look at things from innocent magical creatures like Holly’s perspective. The pixies like Holly always hear a voice in their heads, telling them “To annoy other mortals, and protect the given artifact, is your job”. Then, the innocent beings would follow the command wordlessly.

It seemed like their commander was immortal, or they thought they were. No matter. The thing is: they didn’t pay heed to these questions, just followed the bodiless orders.

Back to Holly now! Each day, she would wake up early in the morning and wash her face in the nearby stream, and then she would get seated on her mushroom cottage’s roof and gaze at the passing insects androdents. Sometimes she would annoy them by clouding their vision with fog.

It was on an early morning like this that she encountered her first Hero.

She heard a small voice in the back of her head that told her a Hero was coming. It was her first time, but she still knew what to do. She quickly flew inside and opened a manual titled “Handling Heroes”. She flipped through the pages and found the chapter she was looking for: “For First Timers”. All it read was:

 Step 1: Greet them

 Step 2: Praise them

 Step 3: Exaggerate their feats and the artifact

 Step 5: Hand over it

Note: Be humble. Don’t talk back. Do whatever you are told to.

She prepared herself and went out, muttering all the steps. As soon as she stepped out the front door, a dark figure loomed over her. It seemed to be a male. She confidently flew higher to reach his height. He seemed not to have noticed here.

“Here I am, Hero! How do you do?” she called out.

He looked around to make sure she was the one squeaking at him. Holly could see him clearly now. He had blazing red hair and eyes the same color. He was staring at her. She gulped as fear slowly crept in.

She was done with step one, the next one was to praise him. But she didn’t know anything about him, how could she? She told him straight up, “I don’t know where you’re from or what you have done to earn this helmet. It looks pretty normal to me. I guess you’ve done something great to achieve it. Congratulations Hero!”With a swift hit from his sword’s hilt, he sent her flying in an arc.

However, she had braced herself; she flew back in a zap and attacked him, since then, the Hero was never found.

Holly became the queen and since then, the number of undeserving heroes has decreased. Pixies no longer follow commands. It is said that Holly still lives out there. She’s biding her time, waiting for the moment to strike. It is true, she is somewhere out there.