Wednesday 26 September 2012

THE STARCHED WOMAN (Part 5)

Part 5 of Lakshmi Raj Sharma's new short story set in India.
Blog on, Dudes!

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                                                                 THE STARCHED WOMAN (Part 5) 

I had to find out where she went in the evenings and what she did there. But it was no easy task to get her to speak. She could have been a piece of stone; she was entirely dead to everything around her. But I needed to know things about her and the desire to do that kept me from doing anything else.

Then, one evening I decided I would follow her. I kept at a safe dis
tance so that she would not know. But, surprisingly, she turned back and looked at me. She stood, probably wondering why someone should want to follow her. I was astonished to discover that a woman who never cared to bother about what went on around her could discover that I was trying to follow her, even though I was at such a distance. When she found that I had turned back to return, she resumed her journey. After a few minutes I was there again, trying to follow her in the direction that she had taken. But in spite of my best efforts to find where she was heading, I lost track of her and just could not find her. The next day was much the same story.
I began to feel that though she had severed links with the living world, her ability to detect people pursuing her was unusually high. She could gauge from a very great distance that someone was following her. There was something truly strange about Neela Ghosh. She was not like other living people. She was therefore all the more interesting for my purposes; she would make a great story for my column in the news papers. I always wrote about things that were not easy to come by.

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