When Mukesh Shastri settled the grocery bill at Bawarchi General, his assistant Debu came running, his overweight breasts jiggling under his sweat-soaked t-shirt, gushing,
“The sack…the sack…the lentil sack is moving, a sound…it came from...”
Heart-racing, Shastri cut him short. “What’s moving? What sound?”
Debu mimicked a deep moan that rattled Shastri further.
“You mean the sound came from the lentil sack?”
Shastri asked again and Debu nodded like a temple bull. Lentils could moan? “Why not? Arey. When parrots, penguins, even plants can talk, why can’t lentils moan?” Bawarchi who overheard Shastri’s quandary and of course his mind voice jangled Shastri’s nerves more.
“But could it be a raccoon?”
“A Raccoon? Do they moan?” Bawarchi pushed, smirking-winking at Debu and Shastri caught it just in time.
Everyone in the village was jealous of Shastri’s business success, especially after someone reviewed his Seva Service on the Internet. Was this a deliberate attempt to trip him?
He killed the Chetak exactly at the mouth of his abode, marched straight to the double-door almirah in his dingy kitchen.
The two lentil sacks were in the corner, away from the rice and rest of the puja stuff, tie loosened, their mouths open haphazardly. Shastri was still under the impression that it was only the handiwork of the man-sized-nocturnal-wanderers aka raccoons, until he heard it- not exactly a moan but a low hum. It sounded like the fading tone of the temple bell; eyes-closed, it made him feel underwater, back in his mother’s womb. On a whim, Shastri put his hand into the sack and a low-frequency, ebbing vibration pulsed through.
As he sat rubbing his hand contemplating what to do with this in-the-face-bizarreness, the neighbours filed in- courtesy of Debu, the number more than when Shastri’s wife Lakshmi passed five years back.
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