Random Expressions

A Story By Deepak Jeswal
Episode Seven

I was a bit perplexed to hear the nurse announce Vineeta’s name. I was not mentally prepared to meet her, mainly because I had suspected her to be the enemy whereas she had proven to be an ally. Yet, there was a curiosity to know how she had managed it. And where had I gone wrong in my judgment?

She entered the room with a strong whiff of perfume. Perhaps, Chanel, I thought as she would have informed, had we been in college. But today, I found her very different from the air-headed fool that I believed her to be. For one, she wore a salvar suit. Having seen her mostly in low-waist jeans, this was a marked change but for the better. The suit made her look even more attractive, and it fit wonderfully on her tall and lissome frame.


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A Story By Deepak Jeswal
Episode Six

When I opened my eyes, the first thing I was conscious of was that my head felt heavy. It was as if I were carrying a huge load within my skull. I could make out it was daytime. At first I felt I was home and Mom had forgotten to wake me up. But as I looked at the ceiling, I found it unfamiliar the fan that hung in my room was missing. My hand itched, and I saw that there was a bandage with a plastic wire entering it an intravenous contraption, leading from a half-empty glucose bottle hung on a thin wire stand nearby.

I spanned the unfamiliar room while agonizingly trying to get up on my elbows.

“Please lie down,” an unknown but sweet voice said. Through my half-opened eyes I saw a young girl in a starched white dress. With a subtle but firm push, she forced me down to the bed.

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A Story By Deepak Jeswal
Episode Five

The next day, Vishal and I finished with classes and took the early U-special back. Smita was still absent, and I hadn t called her up either.Despite the early hour, the bus was overcrowded; we got into it with difficulty, stepping on someone’s shoe here and on another’s toe there. After a dozen apologies and a couple of abuses, we managed to reach a relatively safe corner and lodged ourselves till Pusa Road, from where the bus began to empty itself.

I looked around for familiar faces there were only a few that I recognized.

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A Story By Deepak Jeswal
Episode Four

When I reached the canteen, Vishal was sitting with Shilpa and Sugandha, quite an unlikely pair to sit together. But with Vineeta now firmly ensconced in Ashish’s arms and Saina probably busy with one of her umpteenth beauty parlor appointments, I guess Sugandha had to latch on to some other life force to survive her measly existence.

Shilpa Saxena’s breezy beauty made her a natural choice to play the leading lady in many dramas. Fortunately, she had talent as well. Last year, I had seen her play Desdemona in Shakespeare’s Othello during the Annual Dramatics Society Festival. She did the part with such consummate finesse that it came as no surprise when she won an award for it. A few months later, she made a brief appearance as Queen Helen of Troy in Christopher Marlowe’s morality play Faustus, and with her peaches-and-cream complexion, she looked so ravishingly beautiful that the line ‘a face that launched a thousand ships’ seemed to be written especially for her.

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A Story By Deepak Jeswal
Episode Three

I am sure I will need to take another birth to fully comprehend the pain that Smita underwent on that rainy July afternoon. I don’t clearly recall for how long we sat in that claustrophobic room trying in vain to comfort her. She didn’t speak much, but the tears didn’t stop either. Her pretty face was smudged with the kohl streaming along with the tears. It was a Herculean task making her move from the room to the bus stop. Stripped off her dignity and having lost her peer acceptance, she eyed every stranger with dread and fear, and wondered as to how many really knew about her condition.

She took the next few days off.

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A Story By Deepak Jeswal
Episode Two

I searched her tear-stained face for any sign of emotion that could link to my confession. But she had a far-away look in her eyes that stared at the red rose between us though I am sure she was not really seeing it.

“What an irony,” her whisper cut through the tense silence. “The one I thought loved me always told me that my friend was jealous of him but in reality it was the opposite. The man I cared for was jealous of the man who cared for me.”

Looking back, I have to admit her sentence hardly made sense to me at that time. I brushed it off with a quick wave and said, “Leave all this. Now just follow what I have to say.”

She looked up questioningly.


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A Story By Deepak Jeswal
Episode One

“I am pregnant.”

We were walking towards Patel Chest Institute, from where we were to board our bus to return home. I froze in my tracks, and gathered no import of her words, till she repeated them slowly and quietly this time. There have been many times in my life when I have been left grappling for words, but never has been the impact been as stunning as this; it took the wind out of my sails, and lungs and brain, and drowned me in a sea of sheer confusion.

“Err what how?” I stammered, struggling out desperately from my helplessness, only to be plunged into a bigger whirlpool of curiosity that had suddenly formed itself. “But who is the…”


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A Story By Deepak Jeswal

The serpentine road, with bumps and warts, wound its way through cornfields and stretched beyond the horizon. The car rode over the bumps and warts on the road that the government had forsaken as soon as it had built it. At places, it narrowed to a treacherous single lane, which was so constricted that in case two cars passed that stretch from opposing ends, a non-verbal tussle, fought with blinking dippers, ensued. Almost always the one who lost would let out his futile fury with a string of expletives, which in any case the opponent would not have heard, and even if he did, it hardly mattered.

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