There was a commotion in front of a massive medical store. He, who walked towards the store from some random direction, noticed the chaos and felt a pang of fear. Looking at the crowd there, he thought to himself, “Seems like the whole world has come to a standstill today”. Until now, the store had not witnessed such a huge crowd and commotion. Every person in the crowd clutched a chit in their hands, shouting, “Mine is first! Mine is first!”. The shop employees, visibly frantic, hurriedly handed out medicines and sent people away.
Glancing at the chit in his hand, he thought, “I should collect all the chits from these people so I can calculate the amount of pain in the world,”, and stood still amidst the chaos. Suddenly, someone gripped his shoulder and shook him. It was his mother, who came in from the crowd. She exclaimed, “Go quickly son, the medicines might run out”, and walked away in hurry in some other direction, away from the crowd. He stepped in, into the bustling crowd and called out to one of the shop boys. The boy approached, took the chit from his hand, examined the chit and erupted into a hoarse laugh. Another shop boy joined in, took the chit, read it, and started laughing.
The chit was passed around the crowd, and each person who read it burst into laughter. He could not get back his chit at all. Everyone laughed hard. It seemed as if that laughter would bring the entire medical shop crashing down. He wondered, what is written in the chit? Why are they laughing like this? Did I show them a different note? No right? That was the only chit in my pocket. What happened? Their laughter transformed into cries and his head reeled… Pressing both the hands tightly over his ears, he shut his eyes.
He opened his eyes and found a green firefly sleeping beside him. An uncontrollable anger seeped in. He tried to kill it by squeezing. But his hands found his mobile phone instead. He opened the phone lock. The Airtel people had sent a message about an offer. He saw the time. One forty-three. He turned on the data. WhatsApp messages plip-plopped. He realized it had been less than three hours since he’d fallen asleep. He turned off the data, locked the phone and buried himself in the blanket. He did not get any sleep. He replayed his dream. Arreyy, what was there in that chit? The dream should have continued a little longer till I found out what was written in the chit. Let the dream continue now… he thought.
He thought about talking to those people about the firefly, but then he told himself that what he was seeing could be his illusion. If they heard him, they might think he was a mad fellow, so he chose not to speak up.
Squeezing his eyes tightly, he tried really hard to fall asleep. Instead, the firefly appeared and its guiii…guii… sound filled his head. He jolted awake. Sat up. Unlocked his phone again. He did not know what to do further. Locked his phone. Opened it. Locked it… Dabbled with the icons on the phone screen aimlessly. Locked it again. Opened it. He did not feel comforted. “Pain… why do you love me this much?”, he updated his WhatsApp status.
He removed his WhatsApp display photo. Plugged in his earphones and blasted music at full volume. “Did you with the corner of your eyes… Weave a ladder to the blue, blue skies…” closed his eyes and sat motionless. He felt as though he were sitting in a river. He felt as if a river was frozen in his heart, the weight of a mountain in his chest. Eyelids, like lost wanderers, seemed to be running somewhere. Head full of the firefly. Heart grew unbearably heavy.
Battling for so long, he was successful in finally letting the tears roll down his face. He felt relieved. The frozen river in his heart melted, his heart felt light. He opened WhatsApp, saw a joke on his high-school friends’ group. He laughed at it. He had been meaning to call Sharan, the one who had sent that joke, for some time now but could not bring himself to dial. Somehow, he did not want to talk to anybody. Now, he uploaded a smiling photo of his as the display photo. Removed his previous status and updated it with a smiling emoji.
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He felt the urge to change the status again. No, not the smiling smiley. He felt the urge to update it with a crying emoji. He did it. His thoughts wandered and he eventually removed both the display picture and the status, leaving them empty. Locking his phone, he set it aside. Ammaa… he sighed, lying back down. And when he shut his eyes, “What was there in that chit?” the same question posed itself again. “Thooo… My fate”, he gnashed. He woke up and walked towards the toilet.
The firefly’s annoyance was not new. He used to see it occasionally, putting him in a distressing condition. But lately, it had been following him everywhere. Whenever he found himself alone, guiii… guii… it would show up. From appearing as a small green mustard sized light, now it had grown into a huge demon, eating away his life. Whenever this happened, how hard life was! While commuting to the office and back home, he had noticed these fireflies around the heads of some people on the metro. People with fireflies around their heads occasionally appeared to him in this city.
He thought about talking to those people about the firefly, but then he told himself that what he was seeing could be his illusion. If they heard him, they might think he was a mad fellow, so he chose not to speak up. Whenever he spoke to people, he saw the fireflies disappearing from both of their heads. But this comfort was short lived. Recently, he had found himself a solution to the firefly problem. Whenever he felt like the firefly was about to appear, he opened his phone and typed, “jshadahadahakalakala” randomly. By the time he finished, the firefly would have gradually reduced its size and then vanished.
A couple of weeks ago, during a metro ride, he decided to share this newly found solution with a person who had a firefly around his head. At the risk of being late to the office, he followed the man. The man stopped at a hole-in-the-wall tea shop, lit up a cigarette, with a tea, puffed his cigarette and stood. He too, bought a tea, smiled at the other man and said, “It’s too cold today, isn’t it?”, laying a prelude to the conversation. He chatted with the man about random topics, making sure to get him talking. He thought to himself that he would share his solution with the man before he finished his cigarette.
Slowly, he whispered to the other man, “You also suffer from the minuku hula problem, no?”. The other man replied, “Haan?… Minerva circle-ah?”. He asked, “minuku hula rii… firefly… it was circling around your head in the metro, right? That one”. The other man fell silent for some reason. He seemed to be invested in some deep thought. After paying the bill and as he was about to leave, he spoke as though revealing a secret, “That’s not minuku hula rii… it’s a gini mari (a parrot chick).” He was shocked to hear it.
He asked, “Does it come everyday and annoy you?”. The other man answered, “Yes rii… it bugs me every day. Whenever it appears, I start smoking and it vanishes” and then laughed. He felt the other man was weirder than him. The man said, “Don’t tell this to anyone. Please… even my wife doesn’t know about this parrot chick thing”. He assured him saying, “No. No”.
The other man, took an auto and left, without saying thanks or even a goodbye. He could not remember his face either. Everything happened so quickly that he couldn’t tell if what happened now was real. He thought it might just be his hallucinations. Ayyoo… I did not tell him my newly found solution. He looked in the direction the parrot-chick man had gone.
He was at his office. He had not much work to do. He finished the few tasks which he had and was unoccupied. When unoccupied by work, a fear crept inside him- the fear of the firefly appearing. A glimmer of the firefly sparked, but before it grew bigger, he rushed to the canteen. He started sipping his tea.
Even while he was invested in drinking tea, the firefly did not leave him alone. It circled around his tea cup, as if it was ready to dive into it. He felt like smashing his tea cup into his face. He clenched his teeth. Then rested the tea cup on the table, stood up and went to join his colleagues in the canteen, forcing a smile as he started talking to them. He rambled on absurdly. After a while, the firefly slowly vanished. When he returned to his workstation, the firefly appeared and began to gnaw at his head. He opened his phone and started typing, “jshadahadahakalakala”. He typed until his fingers hurt. By now, the firefly had flown away. Relieved and happy, he devoured a biryani and lay down to rest. He had a good sleep too.
He woke up, impatient, with sweat on his face. The green firefly was sleeping beside him. In deep indignation, he thought, he should kill it today and end it once and for all. Tappp… he smashed it with his hand. Tried to stomp on it. But it did not die. Instead, it started to glow and grow bigger. He knew he had to kill it before it grew into a monster and swallowed him.
He grabbed it and threw it against the wall. The phone broke into three pieces. The firefly kept growing, getting bigger and bigger. He rushed to the kitchen and took out a knife. It didn’t feel sharp enough. He rubbed the knife against the wall. On the other side, the firefly grew bigger and bigger. Grown into a monster by now. Just as he thought it would swallow him, he plunged the knife into the firefly. The firefly stood there getting stabbed.
As the dawn broke, blood flowed from the bedroom, soaking into the floor mat. It flowed beyond the door sill, touched the puppy that was sleeping in front of the door, waking it up. The puppy licked the blood, quenching its hunger from the previous night. Just after a couple of blood droplets had wet the innards of its stomach, the puppy’s ears were filled with the guii… guii… sounds. The puppy’s head reeled.
As the firefly hovered near the puppy’s eyes,; the puppy reeled further. The frantic puppy then, began to run, as if its legs were on fire. It ran without stopping. Running in a frenzy; its legs having gained momentum. The puppy ran faster than the city’s busses, metros, cars and motors. As much as it ran, it gained further momentum, an endless spiraling acceleration.
ManjuNayak Challuru, is a Bengaluru based author hailing from Challuru of Koppala district in Karnataka. After earning a B.Sc degree, he pursued a Master’s degree in journalism and had a brief stint as a journalist. He currently works for Colours Kannada TV channel. His debut work is a short story collection called “ಫೂ ಮತ್ತು ಇತರ ಕತೆಗಳು”-Phoo and Other Stories. He has received the Toto Award for Creative Writing in Kannada and Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar.
Image Courtesy: Flickr, Istock
Firefly
Chandan NV
Chandan N V works as a freelance translator. He translates between the Kannada and the English languages. He has a Diploma in Literary Translation from Ahmedabad University. His work has been published in Antonym Translation Quarterly.
