by Shikhandin
Today he found one in front of a hospital. In this part of the city only the rich come to die or get renewed, which is pretty much the same thing. But the sandal had belonged to a humble woman. Its glittery straps carried the indelible marks of long and careful use. He turned it around with his right big toe, lanced it with his pike and tossed it into a burlap Santa sack of a bag slung over his shoulders.
There’s hardly any patch of India that he hasn’t visited. He avoids airports though. They are the last places for footless footwear. There are no stories in the hurried and gusty-windy corridors of airports. He travels by road or train; takes the occasional boat with the oarsman singing to the river spirits. Occasionally shares a simple meal of rice and salted fish and gifts a mismatched pair to the boatman.
The Shoe Millionaire doesn’t remember his name. His parents’ names. The name of his village. His clan. The date of his birth. The woman he once loved. The day his right toe nail curled up, became a yellow horn-shaped thing. He has no memory of the night when the first nightmare shared his bed. Thoughts, dreams, demons, angels come and go, leaving little or no debris. The top part of his mind is pristine, like white paper waiting for a graphic artist. Beneath it are pages that he fills with his travels through the dusty-dry, muddy-watery, jungle-concrete, or glades of undulating green of this heavy bosomed country pointing a tippy toe to little Sri Lanka. The Shoe Millionaire picks his way unhurriedly, nose twitching, pike impaling; his eyes scrunching up when he finds something.
Over the years, he has learnt to tell which shoe, slipper or sandal has the best story. He knows that the most worn ones don’t necessarily tell the longest tales; just as the most mended ones don’t always tell the best. He’s learnt to recognise the signs, invisible to unskilled eyes.
Stories dribble out from slippers, sandals, shoes and boots, but sometimes they come from the imprints of feet. The Shoe Millionaire doesn’t collect footprints though; that is a skill he hasn’t yet mastered. He merely listens to their stories, and at times mutters a prayer before moving on again.
Once he found the imprint of a pair of lotus feet on the surface of a lake’s algae-marbled waters. He gazed upon the miracle for days. Then he cried out to the people living there, like an excited child who has seen his first rainbow. But the people took him to be a mad man. And the Shoe Millionaire remained alone in his vigil until it merged into the scum of the water.
If anybody cared to ask the Shoe Millionaire why he does what he does, he wouldn’t know what to say. He just does what he does, filling his sack with stories, and that’s all there is to it as far as he is concerned. But some day he’s going to die. And his sack full of stories is going to come out. Right there, on the long, dusty road, they’ll crawl out to haunt the world aimlessly. For the Shoe Millionaire won’t be there to guide them anymore.
Erstwhile ad person, Shikhandin has been widely published in all five continents. In 2012 she won the first prize for her flash fiction in the Anam Cara Writer’s Retreat Short Story Contest. Lifi Publications India is publishing her novel “Culling Mynahs and Crows” and a book of her short stories “The Vanishing man and Other Imperfect men” in 2013. Her poem “Cleavage” was in the long list of the Bridport Poetry Competition 2006 and also a finalist in the 2010 Aesthetica Creative Arts Contest. Her poem in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal was nominated for a Pushcart (2011) and also for the Best of Net Anthology. One of her stories – “Ahalya’s Valhalla”- was among the notable stories of 2007 in Story South’s Million Writers’ Award (USA). She has been featured in an exclusive anthology edited by Jayanta Mahapatra.
[…] The Shoe Millionaire is a piece of very short fiction or flash. It is one of those stories that tend to germinate and sprout when I’m caught in an askance mood. That is a strange term I know. But I can’t think of calling it anything else now. The poems and stories that arise from these moods are a form of spontaneous out pouring; I rarely control them, can’t. And even during the saner moments of editing they seem to have a creative will of their own. I like to think of these creative exercises as things I found from the spaces between air molecules, the void between sounds, glow from the etheric we fail to see. You can call them obscure. And I will probably have written a bag-full by the time I kick the bucket! Okay, without further ado over a tiny story, here it is in the July issue of Spark: The Shoe Millionaire […]