Unravelled

– so let’s join hands together, to make our world a better place.

Twelfth of August, Twenty-Seventeen.

“Yeah! Let’s join hands – and the whole world will change.” I told that to myself during the seminar which never seemed to end. But, when they joined hands, it was over. We did clap our hands because they wanted to join their hands and force us to do the same, and also, to make this world a better place for us to live. In not more than a week, or precisely, after a week, we had to participate in a sketching event held by the hosts, The Hands.

Who are these people, and why are they here?

The Hands are an organisation of shrewd people, working together for a cause, to save the world and its species from extinction and to spread awareness about the perishing world and of course, about themselves as they were newborns who were trying hard to make eternal impressions on people and more. Oh, you wouldn’t find them anywhere on the internet. They’re spread offline, hand to hand!

That was all I knew about them. They had come to college, to host several events based on The Perishing Earth.

The Twentieth of August twenty-seventeen was a great day to win Encyclopedias, in exchange for great pencil-sketches. But, only three out of a thousand people get to keep the prize. That’s unfair!

I always knew that an HB cannot win pencil-sketching prizes. So, I had to meet a girl from my class to borrow drawing pencils so that I could lay my hands on those dreadful encyclopedias.

She always addressed annoying people by food products she hated the most! I had to be the most annoying person and the person she hated the most, only because I had spilled a good volume of strawberry milkshake on her favourite white T-shirt about a month ago.

“That wasn’t done on purpose!” I’d tell her all the time, but she never seemed to care.

“I don’t give my precious pencils to a Momo!”

I said “Oh, I suppose I shouldn’t borrow stuff from a Sour Candy!” and ran away from her and got myself registered to the competition and started sketching haphazardly among and around hundreds of people in a dim-lit classroom.

After a minute or two, the Sour Candy galloped into the room and sat on an empty chair which was placed next to the chair on which I was seated. She turned towards me, giving me a wry smile and tossed some of her pencils towards me. Before I could thank her for her generosity, she was already busy with her buddies – the plain paper and a bunch of drawing pencils.

I didn’t have much time to waste and fool around. So, I thought of something creative and started to work on it. But, it was already half-time – which conveyed that my plan could never be executed. So, I went on with my Plan B which seemed to meet my needs. After twenty minutes, I was out of the room, with lost hopes on the encyclopedia.

I would’ve explained if they’d asked me what it meant, for it had a deeper meaning – more than what they’d seen – just an unscientific, broken space helmet fooling around in the outer space, with the Earth spinning out of its axis behind it.

But, I could never understand how the pencil-sketches could make the world a better place. Perhaps, they’d use them to threaten people by displaying it everywhere, in the future.

Currently, I’m unable to remember the dates, but a fine day during the month of May, Twenty-nineteen was the day to bid good-bye to everyone. We parted. We waved hands to each other and moved away from each other, including the college.

First of June, Twenty-Nineteen.

I was moving out of the college again, after recovering my belongings which were lost in the classroom two weeks ago.

She was dumping all of her belongings into the trunk of her father’s sedan – all the way from her room – in which she stayed during her study in the college. She was about to leave, leave for her hometown, for this was not her place to stay anymore.

She caught me, who was busily staring at her from a decent distance. She smiled as she stepped in and sat in the car. Her window was drawn down. I ran towards the car and waved my hand towards her.

“Sour Candy! are you going to come back to Bangalore again?”

Her face went pale. Her car screeched even before her face could turn red. The pale-blue car zipped off and disappeared, out of the horizon, as the sun started to set in the West.

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The Unravelled is related to The Untouched. Click here!