Where My School Once Stood
World War 1 was over for over a week now. Peace had been declared after all was gone. We somehow managed to stay strong and hide in the basements below which were dark and hauntingly silent. Darkness everywhere – down there and in everyone’s life. Mightiest of the buildings fell down burnt, hands and heads popping out from rubble. Heaps of dead people were seen – some soldiers, some civilians but everyone a helpless victim. We lost our house, and many dear ones. We were senseless and numb as we grieved our loss.
I went today without telling my wife. I hadn’t spoken a word since days and I didn’t know what to do, what to feel and so I went to my school – the place my heaven before this war began.
I was shaken by a thought – if my school had collapsed, even the slightest hope of happiness would vanish. On the way, I saw the destroyed lanes, and people wailing somewhere now and then. My heart was beating fast – one turn in and there it would be in front of me.
I closed my eyes and stood there in front of it. As I immediately opened them, I slipped into an abyss as the ground swallowed me. The school building was gone – collapsed into powder and stones. I walked over those remains, and now I couldn’t control myself. My lips trembled, and my jaw was completely frozen as I kept my hand on my mouth and wept.
I could hear the school bell ring, and me standing outside the class – late as always. Now there was a test in the second period, and I did my best to copy the topper in front of me without getting caught. I missed those teachers who gave me piles of homework – they were a villain then, and now I want them to torture me again. I missed those social science periods where I used to get my beauty sleep, and those mathematics lectures I struggled to understand. I wanted to dance just like how I did when we were taken to the science lab, but now life has left me with nothing to celebrate.
“Come back my mates – let’s play again and run around, let’s beat each other once again, I want to steal your lunchbox again – your mom makes fabulous sandwiches,” I whispered as my voice broke while crying. All those faces flashed in front of my eyes – so many would have been killed in the war, and I wanted them to come and meet me again.
I bent down as my knees trembled, and took small stones and particles of my destroyed heaven back to the home which I had lost now. What can I say? What is left to say?
My Son Returned Home
She has wept a lot,
All tears gone now,
Dried,
Her fate now, her life now.
Today he will come home,
Killed,
Behind stood the neighbour, keeping a hand on her shoulder,
Two mothers at the same corner of life.
They both had come,
Both of them to sleep forever.
The neighbour’s son gave his life to his country,
Her son dared touch someone’s daughter.
Everybody stood there, fake tears in judging eyes,
They saluted the neighbour,
And looked at her with disgust,
Her stained womb.
All blamed her,
Raised fingers on her upbringing,
“Poor girl died,
Someone didn’t teach her son morals”.
Nobody understood her, her life,
The storms she fought to raise him up,
The neighbour’s cry a river of gems,
Her giving birth a crime.
The neighbour though never left her side,
She stood by her in all those pains,
She wept with her,
She wiped her tears, she understood those, she felt them.
“You have indebted me forever,” she said one day,
The neighbour smiled, only she knew a woman’s duty,
“They be fools, which mother teaches wrong,
Bereavement is bereavement.”
Shlok Pandey is a 17-year-old Indian writer who is a student of a completely different field and practices writing and reading in the very little spare time he can manage from his studies. He writes literary fiction and poems focused on human relationships, nature, daily life observations, human psychology and everyday emotional experiences. His stories have appeared in the Wise Owl Magazine, Setu Journal, Synchronized Chaos, The Drift and Dribble Miscellany and Wildflower Post and his poems have appeared in/ forthcoming in The Crossroads Review, cloudymoon lit mag, The Utrecht Pigeon Magazine, Poetic Practice and aesterion magazine. Instagram – @iamshlokp.