After about three hours of driving, the same feeling of restlessness re-emerged. The rain had stopped, and the crescent moon wasn’t the same… it had become pale and dim. I started to focus on the road ahead. But a familiar distorted voice kept reverberating at the back of my head… different sounds concocted into an undecipherable melee. Eventually I realized that everywhere the light from the headlight of the car fell, it formed the same old oddly familiar shadows… A child holding the finger of a man and walking… the child tightly clinging on to the man… promising deep inside that he would never let him go…
“No… These are nothing but figments of my imagination…” I told myself, “There is no logical explanation to all these”. But the human mind is fragile… It believes everything its subconscious induces it to believe.
I was still half an hour away. My pessimism had finally taken its toll. The engine spluttered and died down, and refused to start. Just my luck. I got out of the car and started walking in the direction of my destination. I turned back and looked for the last time at the goddamn car at the distance… fading away into the darkness. Just then, a patch of light appeared at the horizon. A motorist. Since my destination was only a few miles away and he was going in the same direction, he agreed to give me a lift.
The sound of sirens nauseated me. The farmhouse wasn’t the same- peaceful, tranquil. Ambulances and police vehicles painted the ambience in red and blue. A stretcher carrying someone was being lifted into an ambulance. Then I realized that my every superstition, however weird they seemed to be, weren’t without cause…
It was my father.
