The door closed on her face. She stood there for a moment. Should she open the door asking him to not put her in trouble. Should she go back and tell him to not punish and stuff over such silly matters. She was alarmed by the human need to feel important. We can kill, plunder, close our damn eyes just to feel important?

But she chose to leave. She knew psychiatric study could have muddled his head. Telling him anything beyond what he was thinking would not be solving the problem.

He was a cup full and not a cup empty which could see and learn again. All throughout her conversation she saw that he was deducing, concluding and thinking in his own ways, the way his mind worked. She knew she had all probability of serving as the shoulder on which the gun is kept in order to be fired.

Humans always look for strong shoulders, brave ones to be scape goats.

She had broad shoulders and a narrow waist and again a wide hip, a perfect hourglass, a symbol of time. What else is most hated in this world other than time, and so a perfect hourglass must be destroyed. Shrum was the next in queue.

She knew none, not even Durjoy John wanted to bear the outcome of a wrong judgement, neither was Nita nor Binky nor king ready to take it. No one likes to be punished by nature, by humans since punishments are based on proven karma and anyone can weave a proven karma given he or she was strong enough.

Shrum walked back to her system, she knew the story had unfolded. Being weak, every damn human would want her to take the impact. But she won’t, since they thought wrong. They did not know she was not weak and helpless.

After qr certification they gave her a laptop and another means to keep a tab on her.

Her room mate had come to know the password, she was a Telugu girl and she would creep at night, watch soft porn on her system. A tester by profession, she thought Shrum was too simple to know about history in google. She did not try the anonymous one. One day Shrum found out.

I told her to keep a watch for a few months to keep a tab. I asked her to watch those again in order to determine how harmful it was.

She confirmed it was not blue films but soft pornography and girls. Gowdas, Reddy and Rai all were one when it came to such movies. On other times they were different. They had made a duplicate key of Shrum’s half of the almirah.

Shrum left her PG and went in search of a house. She never took help more than required even from me. So even though I wanted to help her, she wanted to search on her own.

“I don’t get paid much di.”

“It’s Okay, I can share.”

“No, it’s not okay. I can’t take it. Not even from Rom.” She had just found work after a dark non forgiving five years. Rom was her cousin who had an MFA in fine arts from Singapore but then her parents died and she was lost in the crowns for long. She did some wrong stuff to sustain herself since her parent had spent entire money they had on her degree. Even the house they built was mortgaged. A lama healed her thought process and she was once her neighbour or we thought we had lost her.

I knew her when she came to IIT for a course. Intense ragging, she was in the hospital. She was molested and brutally wounded. She had not seen the faces but she fought, fought hard to not face rape, to live. Her parents invested a lot of money to bring her back. Then also the same lama healed her. She gifted Rom a mastiff puppy.

Rom decided to withdraw her seat, when she knew that the guy in queue fought for it with her. He was a localite. He had tried five years and now for just one girl before her he could not be a loser.

They had disease and simple ones were ignored leading to bigger ones. No money, lives came to an end.

For almost five years, Rom felt like a murderer. She could not forgive herself.

The year she came back home, her mother and within six months the father went off. She had no siblings of her own.

She could not even take them to a good doctor.

The future was not over but past was never forgiving.

She drew beautiful paintings, copies of originals to earn money. She never met me nor Shrum to keep us away from her darkness.

We let her live but then she left doing it listening to us. Now she sells originals, and wishes to join the lama one day. She has enough to be elusive and we have no desire to break into her reclusive life, we honour her struggle as a woman from the north east.

No one knows her pseudonym. Not even her sellers.