Burning Souls

Prologue

Sheena lay on the bed, drunk and naked. Her clothes and innerwear were scattered piece wise on the floor of the room. The curtains filtered the light into whitish tone coming from the evening sun from the window on the left side of the bed. The time was around 6 pm, it was hot outside. Sheena was continuously looking up at the ceiling, thinking something. Joseph left earlier after bidding her goodbye. Sheena didn't want to do this, but he still overcame her control, and they both did it. Sheena was in despair, she was thinking herself as some prostitute, someone who was being punished for hurting a good hearted man, and this punishment was delivered by fate, Karma. She wanted Love, but she was getting something else. She hated herself very much. Joseph was her 4th boyfriend. She was now thinking if she could have understood feelings of Chris, her life would have been different, happy. She hated her attitude, her proudness in those high school years, and her becoming slave of her ego, to hurt a loving soul. A boy who didn't know the things done by 'Typical boys' to lure girls, but he wasn't a fool or a looser or an arrogant being. He was just a simple laughing and good hearted boy, who was good at studies and also dressed well, according to latest fashions. But now Chris was one of those ‘Typical boys’, he was more good hearted and satisfied seeing Sheena begging for Love.

Chris was working for his night shift at a MNC in Silicon Valley. The company made electronics products and routers. Some years ago his company also started hosting websites for companies and managing them. Chris was the network engineer, whose work was to manage all the servers, to check if they are running smoothly, loading up java queries on the websites of their clients. Servers had to be running all the time, so night shift was necessary. There were 4 network engineers in INTERNET DATA CENTRE. In a night shift there is one network engineer and two assistants, who made reports, monitor the antenna sites, speed of transmission etc. Except these three guys the whole 5 storey building was a ghost town. There were also two guards at night shift. Chris was backing up the server data of BMW 5 series, his company’s biggest client. In a night shift there isn’t a large load of work, except the backing up process which took 2 hours at average, then some commands for the generation of reports as the servers are less used at nights by their clients, then night shift is over in a sense, except for one or two calls by one of their clients if they are experiencing difficulties fetching there data from his companies servers. But he has to sit there for 7 hours till 6 in the morning. So the engineers after doing their work would watch a movie or download porn etc. Because of the ultra speed internet, they would spend time on Facebook and youtube mostly. It was around 2 in the morning, Chris was checking his friend list on Facebook, he was trying to remember the friends as he was scrolling through his friend list, whom he hasn’t met in years, but at some point either him or one of them found him on Facebook, then they become friend again on Facebook, after initial 10-15 messages they were again long gone, just adding up to his friend list, He also did this, everyone did this. We only hook up with a friend whom we meet personally not on Facebook. He was seeing names of his high school friends, his secondary school friends, his real friends, who were with him and some other foreign girls, who looked pretty, atleast their profile photo was. 

Chris came across a name in the ‘Friend Suggestions’ column on the right hand side of Facebook. Now, this column of Facebook is very helpful. It suggests the name of the people who are not in your friend list, but are one of the friend of friends in your list. It’s useful, when you forget someone’s names and suddenly it shows up in this column and you say, ‘wow, I almost forgot his guy”. 

But this time the name which CHRIS was reading was churning his stomach, his mind fetched some long gone memories in a split second and Chris was full with shame, full with feeling of low self esteem, full with rage and anger. Chris minimized the Facebook window and switched to the reports window, but his mind was out of his control now, it was wandering to that twilight scene. He couldn’t concentrate. He gave up and was now remembering that scene from where it all began...