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Story

As I walk past a narrow lane, something catches my attention. My mind says "you can't stop, you will go late!", but my heart, it pleads for a moment and my steps freeze for a second. I see a face, his eyes so hollow that you can almost read his mind. There in the blackened street wall, it reads MISSING beneath his name. I quickly scan his picture in my mind and become a crowd.

That day and for many more days, that face keeps surfacing in my memory. I search for it in crowded buses, in markets and also in the streets. I wonder what made me remember his face. I keep on asking myself, where could the person have disappeared to. Is it possible to someday disappear as such and not be found. How would it look like if I were to find my picture beside his poster having the same catch line MISSING.

 I again move to the place which held that stranger's poster, the poster has been removed. I see another poster with another face. A moment of revelation dawns. In this transient world, what remains constant is the search,the quest as we call it to find someone, something which we lost. We know we may not find them, we also known we can do good without them but we want to keep the quest rolling. The moment we stop searching for those long lost faces of our life, we realise we have learnt to retell our story. The characters keep coming and going but what remains constant is our story.

Stories don't limit themselves to this transient world. People take birth and find there roles as characters of a story which they claim to be their own and then they die but their story never dies. It is like we don't own stories, rather stories own us.

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