Sanshray Ghorawat
Stories (1/0)
GP-01
I let the wisp of smoke wash over me. It’s repugnant in smell but I don’t move an inch as it goes up my nostrils, into my lungs, stays there for a breath, and moves out again. I wait. Another hit. Repeat. Karan shuffles, moving from left-foot-over-right to right-over-left. He loves being comfortable while grabbing a smoke. I was scared by the vague comfort that we derived from smoking in a secluded balcony that nobody else was ‘allowed’ into; how easy it was for us to forget that any second someone could walk in on the pile of stubs that had gathered there over the years. The branches on the tree standing fifteen feet away from my balcony sway in the chilly Dehradun wind. It makes me think of the routineness of what we are doing here. I wonder if there ever was another like me. In the same balcony? Thinking the same things? Surely. Yes. There are seven billion people on the planet, a billion and a half in this country, and thousands who had been in this very balcony over the decades; there ought to be someone who wondered the same things I do now. The lights in Mussoorie twinkled an eternity away. We often joked about how the closest galaxy to us was not Andromeda but Mussoorie. On paper an hour’s drive away, but separated from us in actuality by twelve-lightyear high walls, school rules and academic schedules, and the melancholic laziness of teenage existence.
By Sanshray Ghorawat2 years ago in Psyche