A short story
The sealed coffin containing my father's mutilated body lay in the middle of our drawing room. By the side of the coffin, where his head should have ordinarily lain in full view, two large oil lamps threw an eerie glow on my mother's swollen tear-streaked face resting at the other end where my father's feet should have been duly encased in new white socks; she gave a watcher the wrong impression that she was quite at peace with herself. No one would quite know the fire of sorrow that must've been burning within her; my parents had been extremely close to one another, in spite of, or perhaps because of, being married to each other for 26 years. The whine of the table fan, running constantly to keep the flies away from the sealed coffin, took up the grieving from where my mother left off, exhausted.
My sister, having no more tears, sits two feet away from the coffin that is supposed to contain her father's mortal remains, staring into thin air, as if trying to comprehend what really happened, while her husband, his arm around her, fights hard to fend off the sleep, heavy on his eyelids. In all, my father's funeral did not lack anything from the point of view of a traditional funeral rightly due to his generation, except in the manner in which he died and the unusual way his coffin was sealed.
Unable to bear the gloom within any longer, I walked outside to see whether I could keep myself occupied. The depths of despair into which my happy family had plunged, suddenly became too much for me and I felt a couple of tears streaking down my cheeks on the way out. Outside, the scene was entirely different. People were playing cards and caroms to while away the time, while others were busy preparing the obligatory decorations for the road to the cemetery. I noted immediately a couple of persons, quite drunk, pretending valiantly to be sober when they saw me. Someone pressed a cup of coffee into my hands and I suddenly realised that it was 5.00 am: my father will go out of our lives forever. I decided to walk to the nearby junction to see the morning newspapers to check the death notice.