It was 3 am. Her bleary eyes were hooked on to the monitor. On screen the message read, ‘This game would take you beyond time into another dimension and nothing will be same again. To proceed, press Enter’. She thought for a second and pressed the key.
A message scrolled along with eerie music. Nimisha clicked on the tiny speaker icon at the bottom to stop the music, but it continued. Nimisha read the message, ‘The images of three people whom you hate will be displayed. They will be eliminated from your life. If you want them to live, you will have to press the ‘esc’ button within thirty seconds.’
Nimisha wondered if it was some kind of a prank, but a blurred image came up on the screen. The pixels congregated to give an image a short while after. A handsome man was smiling at her. It took only a fraction of a second to recognise the man, her boss, who had feigned undying love for her, backed out on the promise of marriage, forced her to have an abortion and fired her. She had not noticed the countdown timer ticking beside the image that seemed so real in 3-D, but as soon as it reached ‘0:00’, it flashed in red. The smiling face sulked and then the flesh peeled off and there remained on the screen a skull with a set of uneven teeth so very familiar to her.
Nimisha, sat trembling as her mobile phone started ringing with the same eerie tone, but she remembered that she had only changed her ring-tone that morning with a soothing jingle. Reluctantly, she picked it up. A gruff voice from the other end spoke,
‘This is sergeant Purokait. I got your number from the mobile phone of the man who has just died in a car accident at Chingrihata. We have managed to extract the body from the car, but the road is splattered with blood…’
Next on the screen was her politician uncle who had molested her during childhood. The same ethereal process was repeated on the screen. Nimisha was numb stuck as a short while later, the breaking news of a bomb blast in the house of the MLA that ripped his body appeared on the live TV feed on the top right corner of the screen.
Nimisha shivered wondering who was to be the next on the screen. It seemed to be eternity when the next form appeared on the screen. It was the picture of a young woman and Nimisha did not have to wait till the haze lift to recognise who she was. It was the face she saw everyday in the mirror. Almost in a trance, she frantically searched for the ‘esc’ button, but could not locate it. She froze in panic. The countdown timer ticked, 20-19-18….
By Shubha Ranjan Saha, Times Of India Kolkata