The World In A Room.

They are dressing these moments up in red. A kind of tranquil, sublime red. Something like the scarlet sky blushing like a bride. Or maybe it was a nuder shade of vermilion. Like the ladies on doshomi, smearing red onto each other's faces - shindoor khela, they call it. Aaschhe bochhor aabaar hobe. And it is stark and almost ironic how they stain each other.
In the next room, they are playing a shindoor khela of sorts. Smearing each other with words. Playing with words. Stealing every word and stabbing it a million times. And I hear sobs. The words are unnecessary. The tears are unnecessary. Them playing such a pitiable game is absurd. I feel like stopping them, telling them what they are doing is wrong. They aren't only playing with words; they are playing with lives, with friendships that could have lasted forever; they are playing with the happiness that is a part of them. They are playing with love. They are smearing parts of themselves on pieces of broken glass and watching themselves drip like the shindoor-aalta words. Like blood. Knowing little that the wounds will show, the stains will remain.

There are pregnant pauses in between. And everytime the hiatus is broken, it is as if one of them has deliberately picked up the words said before hurled against the other. Each battle of words, each new round of shindoor khela creating a stronger barrier between them. It's disturbing. Even for someone from a completely different world. Someone who hardly cares to look into their world, their little biosphere which they are now tainting with a maddening shade of red. Someone who'd smear a nuder shade of scarlet in her eyes in the middle of the night sometimes, making sure noone is watching. I'm the detached one and yet, this game is too much for my detached sense of fun. I see others gathering outside the wooden door of their world, some giggling, others mocking at what words can do to even the "bestest of friends" or how they knew "he only used her". It's crazy how in the middle of the night a world is exploding at the force of words and people are actually picking up the pieces of each monologue trying to make sense of the weird but true jigsaw puzzle. They find it fun? Ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous.

What about her sitting and staring silently at the others, wondering, probably,whether she'd use still more fierce words or silence to calm this coup of words? All she can probably think of now is her world falling apart. Bit by bit. Her beloved world. Falling apart; being blown down. Only the debris at her feet. Only a silent murmur of the million words she's heard tonight in her head. A deep shade of scarlet-vermilion red in her eyes.

It's perturbing for me. The words throb at our walls. We have no world of our own. Yet, it penetrates into our make-believe walls too. And I can hear a feeble scream or two, sobs and a deafening silence instead of a glowing laughter that normally echoes in their world. It's more than shocking for a vagabond like me. I'm afraid of worlds. I fear being the part of a world for too long. So I transcend from one world to another. And I like this painful but painless process.

I look into the sky from the window at this hour. The darkened clouds give way to a reddish hue almost like the words they were painting each other with.