Page 32 - GINGER

Chaos.

The chaos was alive.

Alive inside her, and now alive in front of her, as she ran now with her friends.

The friends who had soon become integral to her life, and her life’s jigsaw pieces. Friends
who shielded her without asking, held her before she would fall, and loved her like a
childhood possession. The friends now seemed to have dispersed in the run, leading
Ginger to run alone in a clearance with long dry grasses, where she bumped to a moss
covered yellow-green wall.

It was another first.The moist and grassy touch, the rough edges, the damp fragrance.
She had always read and seen pictures of a water-well, and wondered who put the water
so deep down in them, and if they had to pull it back, why did they put it there in the first
place?

This was no water-well though. And not an ordinary one either.

She looked behind and around, to find no one and nothing, just the faint threatening
roars, making bend over her waist on the edge to look down. ‘Would it have purple
water too?’, she thought subconsciously.

‘Come here…and you will have everything you have ever wanted…’

Multiple voices answered her unspoken question and ropy creepers reached out from
within the deep moss crawling out of the mouth of that well. The air seemed to have
changed coming out of that well to a thicker and darker one making her delusional, and
before she could see a clearer picture she was grinning in trance like someone had set an
musical opera in her head and she jumped. The jump was less an accident and more a fall.

A thud!

It took her more than a few minutes to gain her consciousness back, before which her
hands drowsily gained senses and felt everything around like a blind. They felt anything
but water or liquid. It was solid, familiar, crevical and patterned. It smelt familiar to her
too. When she opened her eyes, she did that alongwith crinkling and sniffing her nose
like a dog.

‘I love this smell, always.’

She looked around to see and feel her spine against spines of books. Millions of them
stacked together to make a tight uncomfortable bed of them. So tight it was impossible
to pull one out, and crawled over intermittently by creepers, green ones, yellow ones,
over them and through them.

It seemed to her that she had dropped in to a little unexplored and unbelievable hidden
library. She inhaled a deep breath but could not swallow. They were laid down like fields