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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