The man In all Dresses.

Reh got out of bed. Her eyes are bloodshot. Even the usual street light seems an intruder for a peaceful night. Looking through the open windows, She could see the man in his all-dresses wandering in the street. His eyes are glittering in the yellow light. The night is so hot but he is still wearing three shirts and two pants. He is talking to the moon, embracing the moonlight like his most wished visitants. For the first time in her life, she waved at him but he looked at her with cold eyes. He resumed talking. Only he can hear him, nobody else.

This time summer arrived without delay. When summer knocked on the door, there were no special arrangements amma made like she used to do when Reh was in school. Otherwise, there were crispy salty murukku and crunchy sweet achappams, and subtle plane tapioca chips to add taste to her school vacations. This year for no reason nobody cared about summer. Even the mango tree in her home is going to celebrate this summer with only two mangoes so why them?

When Reh was a kid, the places around her looked so different. The land (their playground) opposite side of her house was not home to these many weeds, they never allowed it. They ran, ran, and ran that no weed survived under their feet. It also had a huge cashew tree on the top of which Reh and her friends spend most of their vacations, and when the rain arrived with all its might, that crossroads over the right side of this unattended land get filled with drainage water. They sneak off and play in the water.

The man in all dresses always crosses their playground. Sometimes he sits under their cashew giant. They usually run away when he approaches their neck of woods. They all hated him. He was not like their neighbourhood grandpas. He wears all his dresses at the same time. He talks to himself. He is deranged. He is bad. In their schema, insane people hurt everyone. At noon he sits under their tree. The tree is theirs, though the legitimate owner is unacknowledged about their proprietorship.

Reh and her friends believed they were special children. In childhood, they were always waiting for that last member “kuttichathan”(the gifted magical child in malayalam movies) to join their group to make vacations more colorful. Their playground had some mystical forces. Everybody knows.Everybody talks. That’s why their parents want children to get inside home before sunset. The psychic vagabonds can make anybody deranged for the rest of their life. Like they did to the man in all dresses.

Reh was always interested in his story. She used to hear it from the granny who knows all the haunted stories in their locality. She changes her stories about him over her mood. In some , he was brave , others he was arrogant, sometimes evil, sometimes smart but at the end he becomes mad. Reh hated the old lady for she never gets to know the details. As a child Reh never used to walk through the areas he was sitting. She and her friends used to pick up all the rotten mangoes and keep it in small boxes all along the way he walked . They wanted to see him getting fooled.He never cared them, never noticed their boxes ,never talked to them or smiled at them. He was in his world, created for himself , for eternal peace.

One morning her mother mentioned in one of their casual calls that the man got hit by a car and died on the spot. She was not shocked. I don’t know why? But today Reh lives in a different era. The people around her are talking about mental health. Destitution, consumerism, social media, the internet, and even relationships pushing people into emptiness, insanity, and darkness. The way she looked at the life of a dead man change. It’s not empathy but the realization of darkness lurking in us, that kept her blind towards a man of insane.

Years after, walking through a line that he once walked, she felt different. She knows the mystical vagabonds no longer wander in the land but her head in the silence. Reh doesn’t want children to run away from her. She doesn’t want anybody to keep boxes of rotten food on her way like she did to him.

These days she waves at him at night, the man in all dresses never fails to smile back.