The leaked diaries or how a tiger became a cat!

Bystander was furious and as the one who shows his anger in full glare of the public, he was ready to explode like a thunderclap. His internal processing unit started working at terra flops speed to identify targets and the verbiage. He believed that the message should go down the throats of the prime mover and the secondary injection systems. It is his experience that a team work is always behind any inconvenience caused to him. However, he carefully left out the almighty for a future occasion!

As this turmoil was going on, his family members sensed a storm brewing in their midst and got ready to brave the fury. The pity was they had no clue as to the how or when or where? Because Bystander had this habit of traversing his gun through 360⁰, in ever increasing circles, to fire his anger at his clan, relatives and friends. It is rumoured that once he even contemplated to dispatch his verbal missiles over all the continents.

Bystander’s fury was on the selective leak of information from his diaries and the person responsible for it. He had taken so much care to keep them in safe custody, all these years, and yet somehow the security has been breached. Someone in the family had been smarter than him to get at those diaries.

He cursed himself for the habit of filling a diary with honest opinions, for the past 35 years. Since he started writing a diary at the age of 25, the bygone years, from childhood onward, were accommodated as a part of the new diary he began every year. He worshiped logic when not in anger!

It was an exercise to keep alive his interest in writing, hoping to become an author one day. Simply his jottings were a nursery of ideas and incidents for replanting in paragraphs and pages of fictions he planned to finish. Based on this plan, he had taken certain liberties in describing the actual persons finding a place in his narration of events. This proved to be his undoing and the reason for his blinding anger.

His wife had collected the photographs of each of the family member, from childhood to the present age, and got them fixed in a large frame. Another frame kept pictures of animals on display, below the family photos. One day as Bystander was within earshot she nonchalantly commented, “I have aged as the others in the family have done. If I look like a bear now, others can search among the other animals to identify a look alike for themselves”. 

“Wow! These diaries contain so much information and now that we know his secrets, we can easily tackle him, word for word or deed for deed! ” his son and daughter, who have come down for a visit, continued their assessment on the worth of the information on hand. Out of respect, they held this discussion as an aside but Bystander could not help hearing it.

“Had he taken to his studies seriously, he might have earned a doctorate degree, who knows?” his grandson told his friends as he was passing by. “The one who had escaped lectures to the cooler ambience of a theater is now objecting to someone watching TV!”. He heard his granddaughter telling her grandma, ignoring the grandpa sitting nearby.

A close cousin visits them twice or thrice in a week and the arrival always coincided with the lunch time in the house. Bystander’s son and daughter, when they were growing up, and now the grandchildren bonded well with him. During the previous visit, Bystander heard him say, at the dining table, “It is not that all the crows get fed from a plate; only the special ones! Even then, it is not the crow that begs for food but the giver begs the crow to take it, if you understand what I mean”. The gathering nodded in silence leaving him fuming.

A bosom friend became so close that he started to call the shots in the matters of children’s education, career and marriage – the last two not necessarily in the same order. Secretly Bystander started getting annoyed with this free run his friend had in the house but went along with the drift. In a direct speech that friend said,” “Mountaineering guides do not shout at the climbers from the hill tops; they lead by pitching their tents alongside theirs”

These increasing incidents of family members using odd tangential references and whispered asides were the indications that his future fiction works have been proof read, that too in secret. His belief that these secrets remained within the family received a high Voltage shock when a cousin, who was close to the family, and a bosom friend threw their veiled remarks at him.

Every one of the speakers has done a verbatim hijack to fix him for good. He regretted those descriptions and sentences finding a place in the diaries. He himself felt like a caged tiger and a tongue-scalded pussy shying away from a bowl of milk. The tiger will remain caged always but the pussy might be allowed to roam freely in the house. He decided to gladly exchange his ambition of becoming a writer of fiction with that pussy! Unbidden, his eyes came to a rest at the framed picture of a cat slurping milk, contently!

 He was troubled by the nagging questions, “How, Who and When?” He was not going to rest till the answers are found. But in his mind the transition from the wild to a caged tiger and then becoming a cat did not make much of a difference at all; all belonging to the same family of felines!