Seven
The dreams Of E L Somu were as bizarre as his own persona and his writings, with sweat falling like bubble size tears onto the bed he awoke with fright. He did not dream of dragons, he dreamt of plagiarism.
His wife as was the usual slept in the next room on the mosaic floor, with unusual agility he reached her room and in a second later his common sense caught up with him, Somu decided not to wake up his wife. “Let the woman sleep, I don’t even remember the number of cups of coffee she had made since I began to write this thing”
Marriage was a luxury for a fifty seven year old like E L Somu, an extended lap of luxury you could say since his wife was two years more than half his age.
Resting his wet shirt back on the typical unpainted cement walls of the terrace E L Somu looked back on what was his dream.
Like most people suffering from post-dream trauma he felt better now, but that Is primarily because he had forgot the most alarming parts of the dream, but there was one thing that he could clearly remember: A court room.
It was something to do with the work he had been writing for the past two weeks, not one for his pulp weekly but something which he had not attempted before.He put down the smoking cigarette and crushed it under worn out rubber slippers.
‘I should call someone’ he thought to himself, it was a sort of therapy to tell out one’s innermost fears.
It would seem silly and most inappropriate, but he nevertheless called Maran’s mobile phone.
Elsewhere****
“The Boy Does not remember a thing sir” one of the constables at the house interjected.
“Not even their voices…” said another.
“They did not speak, they had no faces” Ramesh mangal, the boy who had been abducted sat in a corner and said simply.
“Not a word?” Maran sat on his haunches, trying to read something out from the boy’s face. The boy never looked up from the tennis ball he had been given by one well meaning lady family doctor to reduce any sort of stress.
The boy did not say anything, but made signs to say no.
“please, please I think you should leave my son alone . All things must come to rest, we have our son back hale and healthy and thanks to god we have him. I think you should leave” the father Mangal in his usual ‘I’m the man with connections around here’ tone said asking Maran to leave.
“But sir this is insane, we should know why your boy was taken away and sent back, you must understand that I am trying to do my job here”
But like most interesting cases, this one too was finished before things began to get interesting; orders from the very top wanted the case to rest. They did not care why such an event had happened and why suddenly the boy had come home.
Maran was back on his sofa watching a late night edition from a tamil news channel covering the celebrations of the Mangal family, the channel offered no explanation about the case, but the chirpy girl reporter seemed as happy if not more than the family. But there was the hauting image of the boy Ramesh, staring by widening his small eyes into the camera, refusing to smile when the reporter asks him to. The rest of his face was like how it was when Maran had left him the previous day. It was as if he had seen something he shouldn’t have.
At that opportune moment, his phone rang and without saying the usual hello an impatient voice blurted out.
“Dei…I told you about the book I was writing didn’t I? The one where a boy is kidnapped by aliens and he loses his ability to differentiate between aliens and humans? Some moments back I dreamt of that being copied!”
“Maran…no reaction?…are you there?”
The Lowly Laureate 