fear (microfiction)

16.11.2025

S: You are asking me if I feel fear?

A: Yes.

S: Never in a fight.

A: Which means that you do feel fear. When you are not in a fight.

S: The conscious mind you can control. Not the unconscious.

A: What do you mean?

S: The nightmares. The fears that your conscious mind cannot acknowledge.

A: And? Anything else?

S: There is one fear that everyone has. You cannot escape it.

A: And what is that?

S: That the ones you love will die. That they will leave you all alone in this world. You will have to look upon the ugliness of their corpses. Naked death dancing through the world in all of her obscenity.

A: Why obscenity? Death is natural. Some think death is peace. Liberation from this unliveable world that the living have made within it. Accept death.

S: In the film ‘Sholay’, Thakkur comes back to his home. There is silence outside the station. Along the floor, there are bodies strewn about, covered in white sheets. Nobody says anything. He walks and lifts the covered sheets from the bodies. He looks death in the face. It is the entirety of his family. The last one, it is the body of his beloved grandson. The death of the innocent. The children…

A: Why are you talking about this scene?

S: Because the face of Thakkur when he sees the body of his grandson haunts me. It is full of grief. But more so than grief, with rage.

A: Why are you haunted?

S: Because this is what we look at as Indians. This is what we look at in this generation. They are killing our Indian children. The villain that kills Thakkur’s family is Gabbar, who stands for arrogance, (which is what his name means), selfishness and greed. They are killing us and ours with Gabbar’s qualities. I am watching six thousand years of Indian civilisation being ended in just one generation with greed, selfishness and arrogance. I am staring at death with rage, like Thakkur. The family is what makes us us. I am looking at the death of the family.

A: They live.

S: They are corpses that have motion. And to look upon them is to grieve India. Thakkur’s grief is the story of ‘Sholay’ and us all. Because Thakkur has seen what we all fear.