He is on his knees; his shoulders are pulled back at an awkward angle. She wonders if it’s rope that binds his hands, or something else. Despite the poor lighting she can see the heavy bruises eating his face; there’s a dark patch over his left eye and a lighter one puffing up the other side of his face. His eyes are lost in the violence.
“Why risk it, Ravi? Why? We are doing okay. We don’t need the money, so why go there?”
Watching him on screen, a broken shadow, she repeats the question softly, “Why, Ravi, why?” Only, it’s not a question anymore. The statement now covers the vast distance spooling between them; she’s afraid that this one phrase will soon be all that’s left of their entire relationship. “Nothing will happen,” he had assured her after weeks of fighting. He bit down his frustration with her paranoia; she couldn’t hold off her exhaustion with his short-sightedness. When she repeated her plea, he only offered, “Nothing will happen.”
The two men flanking him are tall, broad-shouldered. Their faces are covered with chequered scarves, wrapped so that only the eyes are visible, dark and turbulent. The man on the left clutches her husband by the shoulder, forcing him into place; in his other hand is a gun that´s aimed at Ravi’s head. The second man speaks into the camera. His voice is angry; his words come out spitting and growling. He too has a gun. Both men appear to be at ease in front of the camera.
In the moment when it all went wrong, his words rang out again — nothing will happen, swelling into an all consuming, claustrophobic nightmare. She couldn’t keep her hands still, her head hurt, and her eyes felt dry even as tears poured out. There was noise all around her but she heard only a muffled din. People came by – strangers, friends and family, they spoke to her, tried to offer hope and comfort, solutions, and just as he had promised, nothing happened. Through the blur she asked, “Why, Ravi, why?”
Now that she has collected herself she begins to notice details. Like the rumbling sound in the background, and the men and their frayed scarves; each tear sits like specks of blood that can’t be washed away. The man who holds Ravi down seems younger. His frame looks young. The anger in his eyes looks raw. Through the clip he keeps shifting his weight slightly, from one leg to the other. Before each shift his hand forces down on Ravi’s shoulder, using the broken man as a crutch. His grip on the gun never relaxes, not even once.
The second man, the one who speaks, is in trouble too. His hands are prone to slight tremors, involuntary shakes that betray him ever so often. Maybe that’s the reason he doesn’t hold Ravi down, preferring to grab the cold, hard gun instead. She already knows that this man, a loyal foot soldier, hates himself as much as she hates him. She can see it in his eyes, in that slight dip his tremor causes mid speech, and the bursting hatred that comes forth thereafter. She doesn’t understand the words but she knows what they mean. They are promising to execute the Indian within the week.
Their wedding photo hangs on the wall over the TV — she wears a deep red sari, he is in a sharp black suit; both wear heavy garlands around their necks. Their smiles are young and full of promise. “Nothing will happen,” he had said. He was right in a way. She hits the red button on the remote; his grainy face disappears, the screen goes blank. It has been 45 days since the last update.
Neha Puntambekar grew up in a pile of books and for the most part preferred fiction to reality. She still does.
GD Star Rating
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17 Responses to “THE GRAINY VIDEO • by Neha Puntambekar”
Comments
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November 16th, 2011 at 6:00 am
This one worked for me. I thought the plot was dramatic and the prose was suspenseful and smooth. The ending and the plot arc weren’t completely satisfactory, but they did feel real, like they could really happen, which is just as good. I gave it four stars.
November 16th, 2011 at 6:14 am
All kinds of problems with this story. A genre piece that fails due to poor execution at just about every point. Too bad, too, since this had an interesting premise.
November 16th, 2011 at 6:45 am
Having lived in parts of the world where this kind of thing happens, this piece resonated with me.
November 16th, 2011 at 6:53 am
Well written as far as it goes but there is not enough story in itself to be considered a complete work. It reads like a chapter in a longer work.
November 16th, 2011 at 7:58 am
I didn’t find this story poorly excuted at all. I had some troub;e following it though. The tense change, whether it was intentional or not, mad eit hard to follow. After another read through though,I was able to grasp what was happening. Certinaly an important story to tell.
November 16th, 2011 at 8:16 am
This didn’t work for me.
A woman watches a forty-five day old video of her new husband, who has been captured and filmed by terrorists. She asks herself why he put himself in such a predicament. Okay, but I don’t get what the story is suppose to be. His response was “Nothing will happen”, and from there we go to where? To something did happen? There isn’t any kind of arc, and the why’s and wherefore’s are all unsaid, so it left me kind of shaking my head.
Maybe others will get it. I didn’t. Sorry. You can’t please everyone. One star.
November 16th, 2011 at 11:49 am
I found the writing to be exceptional, and I thoroughly enjoyed the rich detail. Maybe there wasn’t a complete story, but some real-life stories don’t have an ending. I can picture this woman waiting, wondering, fearing, and maybe not ever knowing what happened to her husband. Very sad indeed.
November 16th, 2011 at 3:12 pm
Exciting story-telling — I do think the piece can benefit from a longer version.
November 16th, 2011 at 3:20 pm
To me this read like the final act of a tragedy, but because I couldn’t read the previous five acts and thus didn’t have any real sense of who the characters were and how they’d gotten here, it lacked emotional weight.
I’m with with fish (#2) and Jim (#6) on this one.
November 16th, 2011 at 3:29 pm
Normally one of the wonderful things about flash fiction is the way the author hints at what isn’t said, creating a larger story by what the reader surmises between the lines. But, alas, like several others, I felt this piece could have benefited from a more realized story arc.
November 16th, 2011 at 7:08 pm
I wanted to like this story, I wanted to be engrossed and swept away, and I kept waiting for that to happen. Unfortunately, the story left me with no clue who the players are/were, ergo their story was barely a ripple on the pond of my interest.
November 16th, 2011 at 10:19 pm
A story is more satisfying when the readers (or to me at least) can see a change or growth in he MC. While the story is successful in capturing the desperation of the MC waiting for her husband, she is stuck in the same emotional state from the beginning to the end, and hence nothing really did quite happen to carry the readers along a story arc.
November 16th, 2011 at 10:33 pm
If the focus is placed not on describing the conditions of the husband or the marriage relationship, but instead on the changes in the MC’s perceptions of the two gunmen after she repeatedly watch the video, then the gaining of new insight could have made up a worthwhile story arc.
November 17th, 2011 at 7:17 am
I did think that this was a complete story, but it would have been more satisfying if just a little bit more would have been said about how the husband got himself into this fix. Just a little bit. The story does work. I think it is two sentences from being a four star story. I gave it three stars.
November 17th, 2011 at 12:09 pm
A very intense situation. I was engaged by this story.
November 18th, 2011 at 4:39 am
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November 21st, 2011 at 6:05 am
a dramatic real situation