folded faces to the floor...

Yesterday the news came in a 40cc column - four rapes under four headlines. Everything else is toilet paper. The great tabloid in the sky promises quite a large roll of it too - more than 100 pages, as advertised.

Today, the front page carries sports. The last page carries 3 quarter-page advertisements.

The Vikram Poddar murder emerges as the new flavour of the season. Jessica Lal is so passe. Meanwhile, three brothers drown in Mandvi. I realise to my morbid amusement that three fingers more than adequately cover the entire article.

No news of the Kasliwal case today. Housewives turn back to their TV soaps in despair.

The Navi Mumbai curfew has been ceased.

Switch on the telly. Maybe you will catch a fresh rape or two. Or another murder, if you're lucky. Just a little bit of violence will do to keep the food going down the gullet. A spatter of blood. A battered woman. Anything.

***

I cocked my gun and waited for eventuality. But nobody came. I wouldn't have noticed if they did. Once you've laughed at your own monsters, everything else is Donald Duck.

I still waited for the feel of cool steel against my temples, for the earth to give way under me. I waited for the familiar smell of gunpowder and of battle. I waited for the fiends that lurk around the corner.

In the distance, someone died quite suddenly.

And I thought I had problems.

***

Yesterday the news came in a 40cc column - 4 rapes under 4 headlines. There might have been survivors but the newspaper saw to their burial in their innermost pages. Today they are forgotten.