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When I entered his cabin, I found him at his desk, busily typing away, perhaps one of those long emails he is well known for, on his laptop. He nodded without even looking at me, gesturing me to sit down and muttered, “Give me a minute; I am onto something important.” I sat across the table but couldn’t respond because I was dumbstruck by what I saw in front of me.
He was a peculiar-looking man. A head full of hair, lush, black and shiny even at his age. The hair, which seemed too youthful to be real, conjoined thick tufts of hair spurting out from his two big ears. Ears quite bigger than the average, much larger than life, almost as if those ears were two separate living beings in their own right. Picking up every conversation going around him and gossip, especially gossip. The ears thrived on gossip as the baby thrives on the mother’s milk. The characteristic that distinguished him the most was, however, his eyes and mouth because the nose was drab, lost amidst the camaraderie of the eyes and the mouth. Oh! Did I say the eyes and the mouth? No, the mouths and the eye. Yes, he had two mouths situated right where your eyes are and one eye exactly where your mouth sits. One big eye with a dark brown eyeball, massive eyelids, and two thin-lipped mouths, half parted, quivering at times, appearing to burst out with words any moment. The eye, however, did not blink as much as the lips moved. So far, I only heard tales that he saw too little, didn’t believe much in what he saw, heard more and talked even more based on what he heard.
This is not how he was born, though, nor was this a gradual evolution. After spending four decades of his life with regular features like you and me, he suddenly woke up like this one morning. This was inevitable since he believed in the things he heard mindlessly, never learnt from the things he saw, never took action to right the wrong and uttered ill of people always. He hurt honest, hard-working, good people, and due to this, he woke up with enlarged extras of what he used the most and less of what he used less.
Out of worry, Dina clutched her brown teddy bear tightly and, in utter shock and disbelief, mumbled, “Maa, I’ll sleep now”. Pooja pulled a blanket over her eight-year-old daughter and said, “So, the moral of the story is, you shouldn’t hurt people or lie and say ill of people. Believe in what you see, and don’t fall for what you hear blindly. Now sleep tight. Good night.”
Closing the door of Dina’s room, Pooja walked towards her bedroom, thinking about how she had to devise new stories to put Dina to sleep every night. But then her thoughts shifted, and she wondered about someone she knew who would wake up in a similar predicament if he didn’t change his ways.
Stories: That Woman with Cats.
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