Short Story 

THE VANISHED

 

Someone—memory’s fog won’t tell us who—once called us ‘the three strings of a violin’ . A strange image, maybe, but it fit. We were tuned to the same ache, pulled taut by the same world, vibrating whenever life plucked at us.

The coarsest string, the one that scraped hardest when bowed, was Aruna. You'd never guess it looking at her. Her face stayed lit, a sunflower that refused to wilt. Look close, though, and mischief danced in her eyes like light on water. From behind, her walk had the proud, rolling gait of a horse.

If Aruna was the horse, then Geetha was the princess astride it. A sharp Parsi nose like Indira Gandhi's, the same unyielding dignity in her face and voice. She planned with a surgeon's precision and acted with a soldier's nerve.

And me? 

And I was the third, the quick-footed girl who ran behind queens.  the shadow, the one who followed.

The three of us together made a racket that, if you pressed your ear to the college wall even now, you might still hear echoing inside the brick.

It was Mahakavi Subramania Bharati who first brought us together. Every year the college observed his Memorial Day with a poetry competition. Our institution was proudly co-educational, though on that day the boys behaved as if the territory were exclusively theirs. However noble the poem, however sacred the poet, a woman who dared mount the stage could expect the same reception: whistles, mock howls and jeer, the crude percussion of laughter. Paper arrows would sail into sari folds like insults made airborne.

Seniors knew better than to show up. I was new, first year, still carrying the small trophy from school like a talisman, still loving Bharati the way a daughter loves a father who never disappoints. Poetry felt like mine by blood right. I entered.

The jeering began before I reached the mic.  Unmindful I started :

If a voice rises for justice,

let the world learn to listen.

For silence is the warm shadow

where tyrants grow tall

And courage is nothing more, nothing less,

than one bright word stepping out into the dark.

 

The crowd didn't understand the cadence, or maybe they did and hated it. Perhaps understanding had never been the point. They roared "O!" like a beast woken too early. Before I could move to the second stanza, my throat closed. Tears came for no reason I could name. The sight of me crying only fed them. They clapped in rhythm, driving me like a spooked cow.

Then Geetha rose from the audience.  She walked toward the stage  with the slow, gathering force of a storm that had decided it was done being polite. That regal walk, that command. I handed her the poem without thinking. She took my papers, faced the mic, and let her voice, thick with something fierce and tender carry the poem forward.

For a breath, the hall stilled.  Then the chaos returned, hissing like snakes in a pit. Geetha pressed a finger to her lips and leaned into the microphone. “Hush,” she breathed. For a single, taut second, the crowd obeyed. Then, as if some invisible fuse had been lit, a hiss rippled from corner to corner, sharp, serpentine, contagious.

From the men’s corner, paper darts shot through the air in quick, stinging volleys. Excitement swelled there, rising like a tide, cresting toward a fevered pitch. And just as the frenzy reached its height, something unexpected broke its surface: a lone slipper arced out of the chaos and fell squarely among them.

It was a woman’s high‑heeled shoe!

The men’s corner, stunned by the first wave of the assault, froze in disbelief. But the moment they recognized the missile for what it was—a woman’s slipper—the shock curdled into fury. They were just gathering themselves to charge toward the girls when, with a sudden rustle and shuffle, the students cleared the space. And there, gazing down upon this small eruption of chaos—moustache curled, turban set with ceremonial pride—the portrait of Bharati seemed to watch the whole transgression unfold. Thus the festival came to its abrupt end.

We three slipped out of the dispersing crowd and began the walk back to the hostel. It was Geetha who noticed it first.

“Hey, did you come back barefoot?” she asked Aruna.

Aruna didn’t answer. She simply opened her handbag and held it out. Inside lay a single, solitary slipper—a high-heeled women’s shoe, abandoned, orphaned, absurd in its loneliness.

“Wait… does that mean—was that you…?”

Aruna nodded.

“Good heavens,” Geetha exclaimed. “What have brave you are!”

Aruna snorted softly. “Courage? No. That was cowardice.”

She nudged a pebble off the path. “Throwing something from the anonymity of a crowd—what valor is there in that? What you did was the real thing. You walked through their mockery, crushed it beneath your feet, and finished the poem despite their noise. That was  bravery. She paused for a moment

“But in that circus those monsters created, I couldn’t think of anything else. Had they never seen women before reading poetry? Did they imagine every girl who reads a poem is waiting to swoon into their arms? Or ready sleep with them?  Does poetry makes us easy prey?”

Her voice hardened.

“I was furious. My head went blank. So, I took off the only weapon I had—my shoe—and threw it.”

After that, we braided ourselves together so tightly that nothing—not exams, not families, not the world—could slip between us. 

We forged signatures to receive money -orders. Swapped answer sheets.  Exchanged petticoats.  Wrote poems in the back of Organic Chemistry while the lecturer droned on like a man reading bedtime stories to molecules.

Then love arrived. 

Not the grand, operatic kind.  The teenage, hormone‑sponsored, limited‑warranty kind.

Aruna fell first. 

Someone—some earnest, wounded Devdas—had published a poem in the college magazine, declaring that women were the root cause of every failed romance. Aruna could not stomach it. She wrote him a letter, swift and scorching, a letter steeped in acid.

What came back  as  a reply was another poem.  No argument, no reasoning, no attempt at intellectual defence,. But the poem like a rose, was fragrant with love, and disarmingly sure of itself. Aruna replied.

This time there was no acid. Only water. Clear, cool, unresisting water. And even that drew another rose in return. Aruna could not hold out. She melted.

Once love crossed that threshold where resistance dissolves, the quarrels began.   Word travelled  back to the village, and soon the entire clan descended Families erupted.  Brothers shouted.  Aunts hissed.  Fathers asked about caste like it was a medical emergency. Her mother, who had carried her into the world, looked at us as though we had betrayed the very bloodline she had guarded.

After that uproar crashed into her life, Aruna hardened. She became stone—unmoved by storm or rain, untouched by rage or pleading. But Devdas faltered. The sight of conflict unnerved him. He wavered, softened, collapsed inward,like an overripe banana giving way under the slightest pressure.

Seeing the pointless confusion unfold, Geetha felt a surge of anger. Without being asked, she took it upon herself to untangle the mess. She thought on Aruna’s behalf. She decided on Aruna’s behalf.

“Aruna’s choice is wrong. A woman with her innate authority and moral magnitude  deserved an Alexander; instead she ended up with a jester, Tenali Raman.  May be a small prank of destiny, but a fundamental mistake all the same. Still, there’s no use talking now. The more we argue, the more she’ll turn stubborn. She’ll only try to prove that what she did was right. From here on, reason has no work to do, only emotion does. Her happiness is what matters. Tell me, how much can you spare  now?”

When I said fifty rupees, she looked at me with a stare so intense as though her gaze alone might set me alight. With out uttering a word she removed my gold bangle and the chain she was wearing. She returned with money. 

Aruna married in a registrar’s office. 

No music.  No garlands. Just signatures and a quiet surrender to fate.

When our parents heard how Aruna’s wedding had unfolded, they grew sharply vigilant. Our parents panicked as if we were ticking bombs. The moment we finished our studies  and stepped beyond the campus, they moved quickly to fasten the reins.

Since childhood it had been agreed that I would marry my uncle’s son; they tied that knot without delay. Aruna did not come for the wedding. That absence stung me. She has sent a printed greeting card .She could at least written a few lines in her  own hand.

Geetha had written instead. She said she had found a job in a bank and was posted near Belgaum, distributing cattle loans. It was her training period, she said, and she couldn’t take leave. She added that I should bring my husband and come there for our honeymoon.

After that, there was silence for two full years. Then, one day, her wedding invitation arrived.

I didn’t attend the wedding. I might at least have sent her a poem. But it was the time my father‑in‑law had fractured his leg and lay in the hospital; in all that commotion, I didn’t even manage to send a telegram of congratulations.

Aruna, who once hurled a slipper into a brawling crowd to save my poem and Geetha, who pawned her gold chain to see Aruna’s  wedding through, we owe each other a lifetime of gratitude. Yet today, none of us knows where the others are, or how we are

It may sound strange.

 And yet, that is life.

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