Black Sun.

A Short Story.

It was a fairly normal day. I guess it was normal for me, not for a lot of people around but that’s beside the point. I’d started the day like any other, getting out for a smoke while pretending to go on a ‘walk’. Usually my mother would simply ignore this, something of a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ situation. Officially speaking my parents did not know I smoked, it wasn’t a conversation we ever had. I’d see their noses curl every now and then when the smell from the smoke had lingered a bit too long on my shirt, but we never broached the topic.

That day before I could put on my chappals and step out my mom stopped me at the door. She had a towel wrapped around her head, and an agarbatti, or incense stick in her hand that was bellowing gray smoke that filled the room with tones of jasmine. Her forehead had, a daub of ash on it which meant she’d just finished the morning’s Puja. Every morning she went through the same rituals, without change and that’s when I usually slipped out. Today she looked at me with a slight concern, and spoke while waving the incense around.

“Aaj Grahan aahe, dupaari baaher nako jau.”

She said, a stern warning.

There’s a solar eclipse today, don’t step out in the afternoon.

I took out my phone from my pockets and stared at the lockscreen. It said 9:30 AM. I had some work to do in the afternoon, around 12. Right in the middle of the so-called eclipse. It wasn’t particularly work, more just meeting my friends at the Adda. But I couldn’t tell my mom that.

“I have some work in the afternoon, I have to go.”

I told her flatly.

“No you can not. It’s inauspicious..”

She said widening her eyes. I rolled mine at this new nonsense.

“What does that mean?”

“During an eclipse, there are negative energies and bad spirits in the air. You have to stay indoors or you’ll get exposed to them. It will ruin your life!”

She said with the melodrama typical of an Indian middle-class parent.

“Where did you find out about this?”

I said with a groan. Every week there was some new thing I was supposed to be wary of, some new prayer I should make.

“On Whatsapp. I got a forward from Reema Aunty. It’s based on the shastras, scriptures. Trust me.”

She spoke with an extreme authority. Inwardly I slapped my forehead. Whatsapp University. The New Age of Superstition. Every week my mom and dad both found some or the other new Whatsapp forward that revealed a new truth that the scientists or engineers had somehow failed to discover through all these years. Last week it was that India apparently had nuclear weapons during the Vedic period, this week eclipses let evil spirits out into the air. It was a heady mix of everything from Islamophobic propaganda, pseudo-science, and angry foreign policy posts about China and Pakistan.

“Asa kahi nasta.”

I told her.

It’s all fake.

I said patently. I’d had this conversation a million times with both my parents. They always felt they had to convince me of whatever new thing they’d discovered as if it was a fact of life. I was fed up of it. I know it comes from a place of good heart, they just want to help. But they’re severely misinformed.

“Don’t believe anything on Whatsapp.”

I told my mom and dashed out before she could say anything else. The irony of it, me having to lecture my parents on apps being bad for you. A couple of years ago it was the other way round. I suppose if it was my elder brother saying this, they’d have listened. He’s smart and hard-working, while I am more or less just a wastrel in their eyes. But he lives in Mumbai for his job, so here I am stuck.

Anyways I went and grabbed a smoke before coming home. The morning passed uneventfully, as they all did, with me doing nothing in particular. I’d been scrolling through reels on my phone, the screen became a carousel of flashing lights as each little video just morphed into the next one, till in my mind it was just a continuous flash of color and light. The sounds mashed into one, barely distinct from each other, and I could comprehend just a bit every time, just enough to keep me interested. I glanced at the time in my phone’s notification bar and it was 12 in the afternoon. Somehow two hours had passed right there on my living room’s old purple sofa.

Shit. It was time to go out. I’d told my friends I’d be there by 12:15. For some reason my friends had gotten the opinion I was always late, maybe they’re not wrong. But honestly being late isn’t so bad, it’s worse when you’re early and everyone else is late. Humiliating.

Anyhow, I reached our usual Sutta spot and as if by karma I was early and the others were still late. Probably kept my lateness in mind, and delayed their own arrival in response. These were friends I’d known for years at this point. I could make this story longer by going into detail about them, but I will avoid doing so. They don’t really feature in it, besides letting me arrive earlier than expected, so I won’t waste time talking about them.

Our Sutta spot, or Adda, or the multitude of different names we called it was closest to my house. It wasn’t a particular place but a small tapri, or box shop operated by a migrant man who sold cigarettes and other sundries. There was nothing special about it beyond the fact that it was a place at manageable distance for all of us. There was little risk of bumping into someone we knew, who’d end up tattling home about how ‘their son was spoiled’. Don’t need that kind of headache in my life, so this was good.

I walked up to the shop, and the owner had my cigarette out and offered before I had to even ask. I was there every day, usually the same time, multiple times. This cigarette man was as much a part of my life as my parents or friends. Maybe he knew me better in some ways. Sitting in his corrugated metal box, surrounded by different cigarette boxes made up of a medley of colors and shades. There was a yellow plastic lighter dangling on a torn rope hanging from the top, half broken and half used. I pulled the lighter, and pushed it’s lit flame to the mouth of the cigarette. I took a drag, and let it out in the same go, greedily taking another one.

As I stood smoking there in the sunlight, my gaze drifted towards the street in front of me. Darkness started falling around me, and I looked up to realize that the sun was collapsing,

Right, the eclipse.

I shrugged, and kept smoking. As the eclipse happened around me, darkness covering every inch of the street, a man staggered into the middle of the road. As if he was an actor in a play, who rushed to the middle of the stage for his monologue. He stood in the middle, illuminated by the half baked light of a sun being eaten by a moon, and sank to his knees.

What the hell happened here?

I stared at the man, who sunk down to the ground, slumped in defeat and staring up into the sky in what could only be anger or fear. There were tears flowing down his face, his throat racked with heavy sobs that threatened to choke the life out of him. He was frail and wrinkled, covered with white hair that glistened with sweat. I turned around to the cigarette man, and asked.

“What’s happening to him? Is he okay?”

“Kuch nahi. He’s just a crazy man.”

The cigarette man replied in Hindi.

“But why is he doing that?”

I asked, still confused.

“Arre you know how superstitions are. He thinks he’ll die because of the Grahaan. So he’s trying to kill himself by standing in front of the sun.”

The cigarette man said with a laugh that was more like a bark.

“Hmm.”

I spoke, speechless.

What makes a man do that?

He seemed to inhabit that strange area between life and death, with his body alive, but his soul dead. I saw his eyes, and in those eyes there was something strange. He had brown eyes, but when I saw them they were a golden amber, and in those eyes the eclipse lay reflected. A Black Sun, shining at it’s edges.

Maybe it was a hallucination, but I saw it.

As the eclipse culminated to it’s full capacity, the man crashed down to the ground, sobbing even more. I stood there, cemented in place, watching perversely as this old man, someone’s grandfather collapsed to the ground in grief.

I finished my cigarette and stubbed it underneath. The man was laying down on the ground now, still and lifeless. A passerby went in and dragged him to the side, checking to see if he was breathing. The man, clearly alive grabbed his head and kept sobbing awkwardly on the side of the road, his head caked with dust.

The Black Sun faded away, leaving sunlight back as it was. The eclipse felt like a little break in time, limbo where I saw this man’s life unravel before my eyes. Again that question came up to my mind.

What would make a man do this?