Short Story: The Lost Souls of Malabar by Haritha T Chandran

Haritha T Chandran’s story is a riveting read as she takes us on an after-life journey showing the world beyond what we see now.

The black hard surface of the tar road was threatening to broil her body under the April sun, so much so that she could no longer lay asleep on the road. Sun prickled into her cornea as her eyelids slowly opened and her profusely sweating calciferous body of hers grew cognizant of her surrounding. She looked around. Everything around her is intact. Wasn’t it for the fact that the world was carpeted in a yellow hue? Must be the April sun playing tricks with her eyes! She had witnessed the silent quaking of earth that formed mirages in this summer air. Could the yellow encrusting the world around be the workings of the sun?

  She could memorize the moments just before they occurred. Her scooty, now in asphalt was entering a tar road, bustling with streams of automobiles. She waited for her chance to move till the drivers gave away in anticipation of her entry. She remembered the sudden violent tug on the back of her vehicle, being lifted off into the air. Suspended in the air, she felt the world slowing down. Her long strands of hair escaping the helmet had started floating around her face in graceful swoops. The shawl had begun its swirls too, and at some point had engulfed her face restricting her field of vision. After what felt like an eternity, she felt her body touch the ground, probably still on the tar road considering the coarseness of the ground underneath. Upon contact with the ground, a wave of distortion sprinted through her body. A sharp pain shoots up through her vertebrae. Within a nick of time, her mind contemplated how the sensation of pain experienced by the body will be dampened by a fraction of a second by the delay in the transition of signals in the brain. She must have studied it in school someday, almost a decade ago. She found it funny of her to think of a biology lesson when being hit by a bus. That split second of thoughts and pains ended the moment another bus speeding through the next lane hit her, head first. Her thread of memory was broken there.