My Funeral

 [A narrative by Irina Smith (character), written by Krisha Shastri (writer)]

16-year-old Irina Smith has died, sadly, in an event unknown to any of those who know her, she didn’t even know it herself. However, her family has organized, with so much pain as to the financial loss of the money spent on her education, that they are still not sure if they’d be able to manage the event. The couple’s relatives show tears of sorrow, as a result of unexpressed gladness. Irina was a single child. Her parents haven't made their will yet.

“We are so sad to lose our only daughter. What do we do know? Is there any hope?”

“Could you tell us about Irina?”

“Of course. She was such a talented child – talents everywhere – from mathematics to wrecking peace – she’d mastered them all. We don’t know what she did in her room, though, for it was always closed. Her eyes mapped the screen of her laptop as a guard eyeing a jail cell – both failed to do their job. Well, we really don’t know what she kept writing in MS Word. My husband thinks it was a plot to overthrow us and rule our kingdom. Sadly, she didn’t know what a tough task that was. Always kept her confidence outsmarting ours.”

“Was she smart?”

“Oh yes, she was very smart. Only – she didn’t know how to put that to practice.”

“Oh.”

“But that’s another thing, anyway. We squandered so much time asking her to study – to memorize every single word in her textbook, that she ultimately fed the book to a cow. How we bought another book God knows. It was a remorseful moment, we yelled at her, but she didn’t listen. We’d to walk seventy feet to the bookstore! Heaven forbid the store was within a 100 feet radius, otherwise the traffic would’ve killed us!”

“Do you live in a populated area?”

“Oh yes. Wait, you visited our house yesterday. Didn’t’ you?”

“Well, no.”

“Then who came to our house that day?”

“I think it might have been Mr. Buffed.”

“Who?”

“He’s a wanted thief who’s, well… wanted.”

“Well, if you mention that, I might’ve lost my diamond bracelet, I thought Irina took it with her to the Grim Reaper… but well, there’s still a chance to get it back now, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I guess, in a couple of years you’ll get it back.”

“Oh forget about that. Irina is, or was, more important.”

“Yes. So, tell me, what would you have done on her education had she lived?”

(Snuffed noise in the bushes)

“Well, we planned to send her to Caltech, she was talking about this thing called astrophysics for quite a long time… and I think it’s a good career option, isn’t it?”

“Yes!”

“Only – she kept telling me she’d to learn some language – Python… as I recollect. I really think she’s misnaming the idea – Python isn’t a language, is it?”

“Well, I think it is… maybe originating from a place with lots of snakes.”

“Yeah.”

“So, where do you work?”

“I am a software engineer.”

“Wow. You must be earning quite a sum!”

“Why do you ask?”

“Oh! Just saying… you know… anyway, you really could afford to send her to a private college?”

“Of course.”

“Yay!”

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing.” (coughs)

(Muffled giggles near the bush)

“The thing is, these days, the government isn’t giving any insurance money for underage citizens. I think we should file a petition.”

“Yes, of course you should.”

“If I did, by any chance, would you sign it?”

“No.”

“Well, I wouldn’t as well. Lawyers are very expensive too. I mean, they would suck the insurance money in the name of fees anyway. There wouldn’t be any gain.”

“Yeah… you could, however, start a business which would grant insurance money for underage deaths.”

“Would you really want me to?”

(thinks), “No, you’d lose the money.”

“Why do you care I lose money or not?”

“No, you surely misinterpreted my statement, miss.”

“But money lost is not the point. Had Irina been alive and in business, the two futures would have been very similar.”

“I highly doubt that.”

“My daughter was such an innocent little cat. She couldn’t even make any friends! Of course I chose whom she should be friends with and whom not – that’s another thing, but she didn’t end up making any.”

“How many did you choose?”

“Well, to start with, I had chosen a nice girl, but then she moved to Finland… and the rest were too spoilt for her.”

“Was she a sincere kid?”

“I would say all our parenting efforts went in vain. I mean, what had she done in life! An A+ in all subjects in school? A personal blog? Some literature pieces here and there! She’d practically done nothing! I guess Elon Musk’s mother would’ve brought up her son like I did, but her son is such a success!”

(Smothered snorts from the bushes)

“I don’t think Irina was a failure in life.”

“Well, where is she now?”

Irina’s mother bursts out weeping, and her dad comes over and says, “She reacts the same way when Irina says, ‘I am a radical thinker’. She weeps after every one of her failures.”

“Oh” the relative giggles and ends with a conversational conclusion, “So you plan to do anything with your money now?”

“We might donate it.”

“Oh.” The disappointed puppet walks on, and out, of the funeral grounds. She doesn’t like to waste any time – a pin-point decision maker and a firm believer in compassion and moral code.

 

 

At their home.

Mrs. Smith and her husband are sitting idly in their living room, with a movie on their television. One of the eyes is sorrowful, the other frustrated.

“Why did we invite all these people to our daughter’s funeral?” the mother speaks.

“I don’t know.” His eyes are full of misery – the eyes of a person who’s really lost someone they loved. Someone like their daughter.

A relative enters, in a manner to offer pretentious reassurances that things would be okay.

“So, James has been to France this vacation. Where are you going this summer?” the stout relative asks.

“Why do we need to go anywhere?”

“Because – because what would you tell them? What would you do with all this excess money? You don’t want to give it!”

“We won't. We'll donate it voluntarily.”

“Can’t you have a nice idea for once?”

“We are."

Upon the firm answer that the relative's expectations are not to be wasted time for, the relative exists the house in a manner to suggest that the conversation was a part of the reason why the couple's daughter died.

Mrs. Smith sighs, and humps on the sofa. A second later, she gets up with a noise on the sofa seat, picks up some chips and a chocolate bar, and starts munch on – a feeling of post-independence times..

(sound of someone’s feet – a knock – then two knocks – and eternal silence.)

Mr. Smith opens the door, to find the air standing before him. He does not greet it, but takes into accordance its presence. He closes the door.

The couple leaves to visit one of their relatives and the house is empty. The air does not guard it well. For, a thief enters the area, and looks for family photos. She spots a photo of a teenage girl and her parents, picks it up, and laughs like a lunatic. Her face is covered with a thick hood, and on her hand is a diamond bracelet. Her neck isn’t ornamented – she doesn’t believe in ornaments. She looks at the house with dark nostalgia. It is her ghost – in effect – that possesses the house.

She saunters to a room, jerks open a random cupboard, and looks for ready cash. On hunting down a $100 note, she accepts her visit to the spiritually hollow apartment as a success. But her ambitions are far too dramatic to accept a hundred-dollar lottery as a garment of luck. After half an hour of consistent sleuthing, the thief leaves the house for good, but with five hundred dollars – all in cash.

Within a span of three hours of their late arrival, Mrs. Smith notices that the drawer has been touched, and within three minutes of the epiphany, she realizes her house’s been entered into, by none other than – Mr. Buffed.

She is highly unsuperstitious, but let’s say, in certain situations, you yourself would doubt your own efficacy to produce a rational judgement.

“Thief! Thief! Look, God is trying to say something!” The lady cries and points to the partially open cupboard drawer left partially open by the thief’s sheer clumsiness. Her husband, for a change, believes her.

The lady calls the police and with the police even more confused with the theft than the parents, says, “We’ll take a month to investigate. My team will arrive here on June 31^st, that is, in about a week.”

“You mean June 30^th?”

“No, the day after that.”

“July 1^st?”

“Okay you win. I’ll bring my team over here tomorrow.”

The highest point of achievement covered by that particular police team was catching a runaway thief who, as per their claim, snatched away an antacid from a medical store without paying. I really doubt that. Thieves don’t prefer spicy food – and if they do, they can always steal some milk to neutralize the acid – they don’t go around picking antacids from medical shops. I reckon that the police must have needed someone to play the thief so that their boss keeps them.

Mrs. Smith thinks so too.

Mr. Smith doesn’t really care. He just wants the money back – period.

The police map out a few finger-prints here and there – all belonging to the family – they confirm that the thief had had hands wrapped in gloves. But Mr. Buffed doesn’t have gloves.

The next few days go on as normal – normal in the sense that nothing unusual happens – except the few spurts of misery every quarter of the day or so. Mrs. Smith aches for a tool to blast her stress on – but she doesn’t find any. Her only tool had been lost by the need itself.

A week passes by, and Mrs. Smith loses self-control every few minutes. She seems to be more agitated than the usual exceedingly bonkers amount. The veins on her forehead bulge out to present a clear-cut map of the road of London. Her eyes enlarge to a degree wherein a bumblebee shall find homage. The woman’s obedient relatives adjust the degrees of obedience such that other allies receive more obedience but with their (relatives’) effective obedience remaining static.

Should there be an earthquake, Mrs. Smith would thrive unaffected. She shudders with a frequency of a hundred times a second. She also winces a lot – at the sight of an ant – at the sight of a mosquito – at the sight of a honey bee – at the sight of a lizard, well at the sight of a lizard she screams, jumps six feet above sea level and lands with a pressure of more than 70 Pascals. Thus, we conclude, she hasn’t lost all her emotions after her daughter’s death.

Two weeks pass, and unusuality thinks of hosting a party. Mr. and Mrs. Smith are invited. They attend. They return, sleep and sleep without dreams. Meanwhile, Mr. Buffed creeps to their house at midnight, riding a white sports bicycle, unrecognized, into the family’s house. Giggling uncontrollably, she places a diamond bracelet at the bedside-table, precisely five inches from Mrs. Smith’s snores.

“Five squared is equal to three squared plus four squared. Let’s see how you square this distance without a heart-attack.” Mr. Buffed sneers. She exits the house, after watching News on their Television.

The succeeding day, Mrs. Smith greets the world with a note of serendipity. She feels her bracelet has been returned to her with a token of gratitude for the act of bearing undeserved agony. Her pleasure is the hardest thing to obtain in this universe – and once the quest has been carried out, the voyager experiences utmost pride in herself/himself.

She motions to her husband the unsolicited arrival of a friendly ornament – the friendship instigated by the mere kindle of worth. Fear – they say – is common. Yet when people are actually afraid of something, they afraid to admit it openly. Mr. Smith’s face conceals a similar type of phenomenon.

On the one hand, he can see his wife glad that the bracelet had been returned, but on the other, he can’t as well grasp the reason as to why the ornament had been deposited on the bedside table in the first place. The only object of insecurity daunting Mr. Smith’s brain is the fact that their door no longer remained in its job. Perhaps the salary paid to it was lower than that it wished for.

“That’s nice.” he said.

“I think I must have kept it here the whole time, but failed to notice it. So Irina didn’t take it after all."

Mr. Smith had never failed to doubt the futility of his wife’s beliefs. But now that she says it with such certainty, he doesn’t have an option but to accept that a thief wouldn’t waste his time breaking into a book-worm’s house.

A few days pass, and the couple grasps subtle hints given to it by Mr. Buffed. For example, the occasional breaking into the house, or the frequent disappearance of donuts from the kitchen, or the chalk inscriptions of ‘Happy, Brutus?’ on the house walls.

Now, you could get the hint Mr. Buffed was trying to give, but if you were in my place, you would highly doubt the affinity to Caesar that the thief claims to have.

The parents are afraid to call the police, thinking that after this outburst, they might never help them again. And their conjecture is valid  - because the police, as they are trained to be, are highly practical and only think ahead for a short length of a few days. Not more.

Thus, they double-lock their door every night, and open it every morning, only to let the air in for a few minutes, before closing it at noon. Mr. Buffed, however, seems to get it through the door with an ease of an artist. She has the door key, after all.

One day, typically, Mr. and Mrs. Smith are dawned upon, that the ghost of their daughter had been haunting them. Little do they know, that had their daughter actually died, her ghost wouldn’t have been there at all.

They visit her daughter’s tombstone – and weeping over the fact that their daughter is just a few meters beneath their feet, wish her to be nearer. Alas, the fact that nearness to one doesn’t at all concern physical distance – and that the latter too doesn’t concern the former – cannot be grasped by many of those around us – but only by those not, that is, the experienced.

During the nightfall, the parents are awake, knives in their hands, armed to beat up any ghost other than their daughter’s, alive (or dead). With the flick of a key, a teenage girl enters the house, with her face masked, but eyes too bare to betray her identity.

“Irina!” Her mother screams, “Are you her ghost? Or are you my daughter!”

“Damn it! I shall only say if you kneel over your filthy feet and apologize for the pain you’d given me for the past few months! Oh great that I had lost five marks out of hundred in Science! Great that I had squandered my time in writing satires! GREAT that I had been hanging out with some guy – which, incidentally – is just your brain’s imagination and nothing more! Oh fine! I am not a ‘good girl’ as per rules – but are the rules good? Absoluteness isn’t a definition of virtue – it is, in fact, the sin that good people cannot be liberated from the webbed jars of conventions! You say – I cant do this. I cant do that. Can I vote? No – if I don’t support your political party, can I? You are nothing but a brainwashed puppet they made you be! Of course, you wouldn’t realize it, for you yourself are a projection of their thoughts! There isn’t any point changing you – but I have come here to address the fact that if you can’t haul yourself higher, than do not torment those who have!”

The woman, bewildered in enlightenment of reality, wishes she had not understood what she ought to have long before. The type of expression doesn’t arise due to understanding – but, as spoken about by philosophers, it comes due to the refusal to understand.

Mr. Smith applauds and claps his hands – as in to say, “This is my daughter!”. Things after that go on normally – people appear happy that Irina is alive, yet sad for the missed opportunity of a few Singapore trips.

Mrs. Smith hasn’t yet recovered from the shock – and, well, Mr. Smith cant be prouder of his daughter, who, apparently, had spent the $500 dollars residing in a 5-star hotel.

I am extremely gleeful to say that the rooms smelled fresh and that I had given the service a good rating.

But I just cant process one thing. If my body had been with me the whole time, then what the hell lied inside the coffin that claimed to have been mine? They cant just keep an empty coffin. There can’t be anything ghastly in there, can it?

-         -    Irina

(story written by Krisha Shastri)