Meera woke up with a start. She silenced the alarm clock which was screaming at the top of its voice. The tune was her favourite; but she was not in the mood to enjoy it today. She was shivering despite it being a hot summer morning. And still her face was covered in sweat and her heart was pounding. She had been through the same episode again. Her mind was playing tricks with her. She wanted to consult a psychiatrist to decipher the meaning, but never got the time out from her busy schedule. This had become a recurrent nightmare now. She had seen so many versions of it. But in all of them there was the same man wearing a grey shirt. This time too, she had seen the same man in the grey shirt with a mask on his face. The mask had covered all his face, except eyes. His dark, deep eyes were looking for Meera. And he was following her with a sense of desperation. She was trapped in a glass maze and he was running after her.

Meera didn’t know where the exit was. But she couldn’t focus her mind. Every now and then, the man in the grey shirt would appear and Meera had to run to save herself. She couldn’t get the time to stop and analyse where she was. She soon realised that this wasn’t just a glass maze. The glass walls were projectors. They were portals to the days Meera had left behind. The glass walls were reflecting scenes from her past. She turned a corner and stopped abruptly. The wall was showing memories of her childhood. All her friends were waving and smiling at her as they enjoyed their ice creams. A tear rolled down her cheek. She didn’t have the time now to stop and smile back. She never had time for them once she left the old place. She ran past them, but on the next wall she came across her parents. They were waiting for her. A stream of tears rolled down. Meera began to weep. She touched the wall. A ripple formed where her mother’s face was and the pictures vanished. At the very moment, Meera spotted the grey shirt from the corner of her eye. She knew it was time to run again.

The pictures were playing a game with her mind. They appeared for a moment and vanished. Meera couldn’t concentrate. Her mind was slowly beginning to give away. She thought she had escaped the man’s grasps and slowed down. She was tired. She wanted to stop. She wanted this all to stop. She wanted to be out of this maze and be at peace. But the next images broke her down to pieces. The walls showed some painful memories. They were once moments she thought she would cherish. But Meera couldn’t stop crying as she saw her ex-boyfriend Ashutosh’s face unfolding on one of the walls. The pictures stopped at the scene from their last date when Meera had finally spoken about a probable break-up. She wanted to focus on her career and she knew she could never do it with Ashutosh in Pune. They had a huge fight and it had ended miserably. She regretted it later, but Ashu, as she fondly called him, was long gone by the time she realized her mistake.

The man in the grey shirt was catching up again and Meera had to run. She heard voices from beyond a wall. She thought maybe this would be the last turn. But the voices came from the innermost sanctum of the maze, the centre of the chaos, the nucleus of the mess. She turned and saw a clearing. As she entered the sanctum the wall behind her slid and closed shut. She was completely trapped now. ‘At least I got away from the masked man now!’ Meera thought to herself. It was a hexagonal space with mirrors on each wall. She didn’t know what to do. She thought maybe she would meet the master, the man behind the architecture of this vicious game. “Hello!” Meera shouted hoping to get a reply.

As soon as she uttered the word, all six glass walls lit up and all her long forgotten memories displayed one after the other. They were forming the most imperfect collage. Meera couldn’t understand any of it. She kept switching between images, trying to find a pattern. But she found none. On one wall were her parents worriedly looking out of the door, waiting for their daughter’s return. One other showed her roommates from college enjoying their movie in the hostel room. A blinding flash would divide the two pictures and Meera had to cover her eyes. She saw her childhood days growing up in the city of Pune. The canvas unfolded the story of her life at a speed she was living her life now. From Pune to Mumbai for education and then for work, Meera had lived her life in the maximum city at frantic pace. Living in the city that never sleeps can sometimes be a curse. Meera didn’t realise it. Frankly she never had the time to look back after she moved to Mumbai. Some people say that Mumbai doesn’t have a past. It only deals in Todays and Tomorrows. Meera fit herself in that equation and lived a life without a past.

But it all came back to haunt her. Of all the images that she was seeing now, one image was the most painful. It kept surfacing again and again. The image was of her diary; her way of isolating herself, her soulmate, her shoulder to cry on, her everything. When she moved to the hostel she decided to maintain a diary. She would write in it whenever she felt. It wasn’t just a memoir. There were stories, poems, short plays, her favourite monologues, everything which Meera had written during her college days. The diary was her bible. They were inseparable. Meera carried her diary wherever she went. One reason was that she didn’t want her diary to fall in the hands of her roommate. It was Meera’s dream to be a writer. But according to her father, a career in commercial art looked more promising. When she moved out of the hostel, she had kept the diary in one of her boxes, thinking she will continue to write as a hobby. But while unpacking at her new residence in Dadar, she never found it. Meera had cried the whole night for having lost the most valuable item in her life. But she had to leave it all behind. And now she saw the same diary, the old friend on one of the maze walls.

The pages fluttered and Meera saw her own handwriting. She hadn’t written a word since a long time. her plan to maintain a new diary had somehow failed. Because everything was online now. There was no need to write anything on paper anymore. The sight of her own handwriting made Meera nostalgic. She went near the glass wall and touched the letters she had once written. To her surprise, she got sucked into the mirror. She landed in what looked like her hostel room. Her diary was on the table. Meera sat on her chair and turned to the last page. The date was 14th October. The year was a bit hazy and Meera couldn’t clearly see it. But she knew the date very well. It was her birthday. She read the notes scribbled on that page and turned to a new one. She thought she would start writing again. She took out a pen and began. She noted the date and started writing. But as soon as she had finished writing the last word, the first word disappeared. It was like one of those magic tricks. Meera was surprised and began again. But every time she wrote a line it got wiped off in a matter of moments. Meera panicked and started writing with great speed; but all her efforts went in vain. She realised that whatever she did, she was never going to be able to rewrite her story. The story she had left unfinished, had decided to finish itself and Meera had no part to play in it anymore. Meera changed the pen, turned to new pages in the hopes of writing something down. But her story was already written. And she was not going to edit it.

It was then that the door of her room slammed open. Meera turned to see and to her shock she saw the guy in the grey shirt with a mask covering his face. His eyes were boiling with anger. His breath was heavy. Meera started screaming for help but he got hold of her hair and pulled her out of her room. Meera kicked him, punched him in the face, but she had no choice, no hopes for survival. She kept struggling as the man pulled her mercilessly through the corridors of the hostel. Having forced her three storeys down, her kidnapper threw her into the back of a big black van. There was only one window through which Meera could see. She looked up at the hostel balcony through the window to see if anyone was there to help her.

And she saw them standing in the balcony outside her hostel room. Everyone she had known, everyone she had loved and everyone she had left behind. All her friends, foes and relatives were there. Even her mom and dad were looking at her. But none of them was trying to help. Meera shouted through the window, but her voice didn’t reach them. She kept waving frantically hoping that someone would realise that she was being kidnapped. But instead of coming to her rescue, everyone smiled and waved her goodbye. Meera kept crying as the man in grey shirt drove away from the hostel.

That was the moment she woke up. She looked out of the window. Another nightmare, she thought. She dabbed the sweat with her T-shirt sleeve and got out of bed. Her rented 1BHK apartment in Dadar provided a spectacular view of the Bandra-Worli Sea Link. But Meera had no time to enjoy the view. She got ready at the speed of light and left for office. It was late, so she skipped breakfast. For the past five years Meera was working for a prestigious firm in Mumbai. She had worked to the fullest of her capacity but had somehow failed to make it big. She was earning pretty well, but the thrill and adventure which was promised to her when she had joined had been replaced by the monotony of the daily circus. The whole world was trying to escape the routine and Meera became just another one of them.

She took a Kali-peeli taxi. As soon as she rested her butt on the seat, she flipped open her Laptop and started checking her mails. It had become her usual habit to check her mails before she reached the office. This way, if there were any problems, Meera got some buffer time to think during her journey. As Meera was going through her mails, the taxi-wallah kept driving through the never ending mazes of Mumbai traffic. Every now and then he would catch a glimpse of the woman through the rear-view mirror. Meera would never notice it as her constant gaze was immersed in her laptop. She also didn’t notice the taxi wallah’s clothes. He too, was wearing a grey shirt and his face was covered with his white handkerchief. And the dark, deep pair of eyes were looking at Meera with the same sense of desperation that the guy in her nightmare had in his.

To be continued…

– Abhijeet Jog