Disasters everyday. Bombs, terrorist attacks, accidents. It's become so common that it stopped being shocking and upsetting each time.
Until it attacks you and tears away two people from your life. When the news is about someone you know - when the train that caught fire had two people you saw just the day before, and busily waved a greeting to.
When they go missing - and it's their surroundings' remains and their ashes you see on the front page of a news paper, that's when tragedy holds you by the stomach and shakes you.
When you can still hear their laughter in your head, and see their glowing smiles, and when you have to go past their desks and know that they're not here now.
That's what I learnt two days ago. That fate has a ugly way of showing its evil self - unexpectedly. And unfairly.
The pain I feel and see in the eyes of the family and best friends and everyone who knew them, is multiplied each time someone asks about news or expresses their shock at the incident. And pain is all that is left right now - along with disbelief, and hundreds of questions, and hundreds of hopeful possibilities.
Today, two days since the incident, our friends are still missing. We've done everything we could to find a scrap of news or hope - but there are no answers. Only questions. And a refusal to believe that they're gone.
We're waiting for them to show up. Like they vanished into the smoke, they will come back when we're not looking.
Hari and Roshni, hurry back home.
No comments:
Post a Comment