Team Name: Writers' Den
Chapter 1: Mens Rea by Mahesh Sowani
Chapter 2: A Morning Star by Rohini Varun
Chapter 3: The Cursed One by Shreesha Divakaran
Chapter 4: The Vanquished by Aurindam Mukherjee
The story continues...
The young girls played hopscotch outside the veranda as
their grandparents watched over from their arm chairs. They would caution them occasionally
due to the fear that the children might hurt themselves. Come summer holidays,
both Roohi and Sophia were the responsibility of their grandparents. Shekhar
would enjoy the company of both his daughters while Tara couldn’t afford to
spend time with the children. The couple could never agree with one another
when it came to looking after the children during their vacation. Both the
girls loved travelling to their ancestral village where grandpa would bring
home chocolates daily from his evening walk and grandma would put them to sleep
with a new story each day. They would insist on visiting Grandpa and Grandma.
Both of them looked exactly similar to each other and played pranks on the other
village kids when they played hide and seek. It would in fact take a lot of
effort for their grandparents to identify who is who. Summer holidays were what
they looked forward to in the entire year, not even their birthdays excited
them so much.
People would ask all kinds of questions to them about their working
parents. They always replied- “We have the best mom and dad in the world”. It was
the line their grandparents taught them meticulously. Both the girls had
literally been together since their birth and had grown to be each other’s best
friends rather than just twin sisters. This June after the summer holidays got
over, Roohi was sent back to Mumbai alone.
She had cried- “But grandpa, you promised me that I would be
the one staying here longer. I don’t want to go to school so early without
Sophia.” She was told Sophia was ill and needed to see the doctor. Her grandpa
had shown her pictures of syringes and how Sophia would get to bear all the
pain and had managed to convince her that school was a much better option. She had cried louder at the horrifying sight of
syringes, imagining Sophia’s pain when she would get those injections done.
“Dear God, please don’t hurt Sophia while she gets the
injections done”, she had prayed.
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JJ sat facing her computer screen in the dimly lit room of her make shift office she had built for herself. She stared at the pictures on the screen although her
thoughts wandered in the infinite realm of mystery. Who could have done this,
she kept wondering?
“That scoundrel must be hanged!” she banged her desk with a
loud sigh. She knew it would take some more time for her DJI Phantom drone to
transmit all the pictures to her computer so that she could make a complete
sense of it. It was an uneasy wait. She had never been this impatient with
anything. Right now, all she could think of was- “When is this damned file
transfer going to complete?”
*********************************************************************************
Cyrus Daruwalla had waited for a breakthrough all his life.
Although he had no particular inclination towards law, he enjoyed deciphering
criminal cases. He wanted to break away and make his own mark, write his own
destiny. His dad, he convinced himself would one day be proud of him. Cyrus scratched his chin beard as he puffed the cigarette in
his hand leaving his spectacles foggy. He tried to clear the smoke around him
fervently to check if his phone had a received message alert.
None.
“JJ, c’mon you can’t keep me waiting for this long!” He
muttered under his breath even as he kept looking for the ash tray on his
table. The cigarette ash spilled on the floor adding to the mess which his
living room had already become. The last time Jennifer had called, she had promised him the entire picture series that her drone camera had captured. Her passion propelled him to come out of the shackles and own this case as a lawyer. That
would be his ammunition which would give him his primary evidence. Will it open
a newer can of worms? His mind was boggling over the infinite possibilities of
crime.
“I’m taking this case up”, he resolved to himself. He had
forgotten to keep count of the number of times he had uttered this line in the
last few days. The photographs of the
innocent child had disturbed him and made him ask the most fundamental of
questions- “If a lawyer cannot deliver justice to the victim, what is he worth for?"
“JJ, c’mon you can’t keep me waiting for this long!
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