Fear of a Windmill

‘Monstrous tripods’. That’s what H G Wells called them in his story The War of the Worlds. Only these, along NH 50, near Bijapur, had just one leg. Unipods. Diabolical contraptions. Eerie, white and massive. And they caught us in the middle of nowhere.

A battalion appeared on the horizon with no warning, defiling the lush, green toor dal fields. Each had a propeller with three blades fixed to the front of its cuboid face. They sliced the air with deliberate, slow, grinding force. And as they drew closer, the churning in my gut grew more violent. The feeling pushed itself upwards to my heart which pumped ever so furiously that my temples throbbed and I felt fear overcoming me. I belched.

The oncoming traffic — cars and trucks — was relentless. Their occupants were driving like maniacs. It was clear that they were pushing their vehicles to the limit to escape the unipods. But for us, turning around was not an option.

I was waiting for the unipods to issue that deafening, mechanical gurgling-growl from that cavity of a cuboid. But then, the driver of the car in which I was traveling showed no signs of fear. He had a smile plastered across his face. It was baffling.

He pushed the accelerator with the tip of his boot and the car’s tiny engine conjured all the power that it could and sped across the freshly laid highway. It was as if he wanted to ram the vehicle into the unipod expecting it to implode. He only glanced at them. One the right, there were as many as eight. And on the left, were nine. At least that is what the eye could discern. Who knew how many were hiding behind the horizon?

But the unipods continued to come closer. The idea was to outrun them while driving toward them. It was an unfair race.

I rolled down the window and belched again. A thick yellow viscous fluid went spraying into the air. It left streaks along the rear window and door. I looked up. It was right there. Its sole leg was larger than the bark of any tree I had seen. The girth gradually tapered at the top where on its cuboid face was written, not in an alien tongue but in English: Greenko. And before its blade could lop off my head, my vision began to blur and before I sunk into darkness, I could hear Noel Harrison singing:

‘Like a circle in a spiral

Like a wheel within a wheel

Never ending or beginning

On an ever spinning reel

As the images unwind

Like the circles that you find

In the windmills of your mind’

In the windmills of my mind… In the windmills of my fucking mind.

And when I woke, a sign read, ‘Welcome to Telangana’.