DEATH OF A ROBIN

                                                           DEATH OF A ROBIN by Rajesh Dutta

Chapter 1 

Bonny Deut was the first one to die and the circumstances of his death are as follows.

The night Victoria, Ray and he were about to leave the City of Constantia for good, he suddenly felt an urge to relieve himself but as the house had been locked up, he went to the front courtyard. With diminishing thoughts, he unzipped his trousers but instead of the water slanting out of him, he began to tilt until he was level with the rose bush roots and lay there for quite some time. Ray came looking for him and pulled him free from the thorny fingers that had clutched his face, hands and torso.

‘What happened?’ he held him firmly with one hand, dusting his clothes with the other.

But he only looked at him with his face and hands bleeding from little cuts.

Ray helped him up into the back of the truck. Zella peeped with concern at him from a little gap in the furniture and Victoria wiped his face clean.

Ray sat in the driver’s cabin and the truck’s headlights pinched the nameless darkness of the compound and its wheels snagged out of the long grass and the bushes onto the Private Road.

The well-lighted City road began to twist into eventual obscurity and deep darkness became more devious and indivisible. From this sequestered deep, a beguiling disingenuousness emerged and overtook the truck and by midnight, the driver, a slot captain of sleep, began to doze off at the wheel.

The oncoming traffic was not a panoply of splendor, a dip and bleep spectacle of light and sound but a snip line of quick obliteration. Some of the remarkably monstrous big league vehicles of exalted brilliance missed the little truck by a hair’s breadth.

A devouring blackout vision of annihilating destruction began to loom before Ray in the driver’s cabin and it was decided that the driver would be allowed to set himself up on the stage tableau of sleep while the rest of them could either join him or become the spectacle of local scenery.

Gradually, however, the shroud of sleep fell equally on the whole heap and in that hour a mythical effulgence knocked on the door of the house in the Province of Ignorance and Aru came out and opened the door but there was no one there. She went back to bed.

The moon threw a curve at the rattling train of empty stars, jarring the quiet night and knocking the props out of sweet dreams.

By morning Bonny was experiencing a white out, and as he breathed his last, Zella came out of the furniture and clutched his chest with her paws.

Victoria reached the Province of Ignorance with Bonny’s body in her lap on the morning of her wedding anniversary.    

Constantia was the beginning of the end for Bonny.