"Till Death Did Us Together"-my entry to the GetPublished contest

The story is about the narrator's implied love and its final expression.

It had been a year since Maya’s death and as with every pain known to man, the intensity had subsided. But the emptiness sustained in Subhranshu’s life.

Maya was the only redemption he had ever sought. He remembered her in every form that he had loved her - as the little girl with the deepest loving eyes, as a teenager with glimpses of the beautiful woman she was growing to be and then as the woman he knew he should never desire.

“Maya was too magical for me who had a less than ordinary existence, until last week. She had an angelic presence in my life since her family moved into the apartment right below ours. The differences between joy, fear, anxiety, hysteria, love and relief had started blurring along with my vision."

"I had spent hours in the balcony of my room just to listen to her speaking with her family. I did grow over those antics but never dared to think beyond a distant admiration. How I wish my thoughts and my life out of it was simpler.”

Peepu, narrator’s sister, after her marriage, had moved to the US. She was quite the opposite to her brother and was his only companion. Even as a child she knew the life she wanted to live and even tried her best to tag her brother along. Subhranshu sometimes wondered how she could deliberately be indifferent to the circumstances that she, along with him, was born into.

“It was Peepu who had created and maintained my Facebook account. She even had some of my terrible photographs posted on it. It was mostly her friends that were on my list but I surly can’t blame her for that;I didn't have many that she could have added.While she was home with me, Peepu would logg in and show me some of it but social networking somehow never interested me."

Peepu frequently mailed her brother with her updates and that was something the Subhranshu eagerly awaited. On reading those he would be overwhelmed with joy for his little sister.When they could get online together, they spent hours chatting.

It was quite late in the night when Subhranshu received a message from Peepu, asking him to get online. It had been quite some time since Peepu had mailed or since they had a chat.

“Subbu, you remember the fb account I created for you? I had not checked it since I left home and today when I logged in there was something that made me text you this late ”

“Peepu! Is this what you want to discuss? I have a real better thing to do and that is go sleep”

“You never had anything better Subbu, idiot! You have to check your account. There is something for you brother”

Indeed he never had anything better than what he was going to unravel.


"This is my entry for the HarperCollins–IndiBlogger Get Published contest, which is run with inputs from Yashodhara Lal and HarperCollins India."