I is for Ignored [#AtoZChallenge]

Estimated time to read: 3 minutes

"Whoaaaaaaa", he yelled, a sound only he could hear. One second he saw the clear blue skies and in the very next, an expansive patch of brown mud and this pattern repeated as he rose into an arc and his ascent slowed to a halt and then he descended in the same topsy-turvy fashion with increasing velocity before crashing onto a rough surface that was immediately engulfed in darkness. He blinked. He could see nothing for what seemed like ages, but heard muffled voices in a tongue he'd come to understand in bits and pieces - some words more familiar than others. He'd learnt a lot of things over the years. He knew his name was what his handlers called "fifty paisa" , but he was always spoken about carelessly, it seemed, with lesser reverence than others of his kind.

"Heads", he heard someone call out. And he knew his outing for the day was almost done. A brief glimmer of sunlight when one of the voices would whoop and the other would groan (he'd come to distinguish these sounds over time as well). And back into the recesses of a velcro covered, stifling enclosure he'd go with the rest of his species for company - who didn't say much but sometimes brushed against him involuntarily. 

He closed his eyes and waited for the familiar scrape of velcros indicating his nap-time. But it never came. Instead, today, he found himself being slipped in a crevice of sorts lined with material he was unfamiliar with. He fell and waited for a landing but he kept slipping further down, grazing a surface, rolling slightly and falling through another hole of sorts for a duration only slightly lesser than the time it had taken him to down the arc moments earlier. "Thump", he fell face down on something hard and dusty. He whimpered. Again, no one heard him. He waited for some agent to retrieve and return him to his familiar surroundings. No one came. He kept waiting even as dust settled on his side that faced the skies. Once in a while he felt enormous pressure on his backside, but it was always a hurried application that was immediately lifted. Initially he mistook those events to be rescue missions. But they weren't and he stayed where he was.

After a while, he felt something he hadn't felt in a long time. He felt akin to what we would describle as ...moist. "Patter". "Patter". "Patter". The sound accompanying the object that caused the wetness kept hitting him and eventually he felt himself rising slowly. From his vantage point, all he could see was the surface he had been lying on but from a slight height through a medium he could not explain, but it wasn't clear. Now this surface seemed to be moving and him along with itself. He felt himself being rocked gently initially - back and forth - and then the surface began pushing him. He kept moving for a while and then fell sharply. Another thump. This time he'd fallen face-up so he could see the new gap he'd fallen from - one among a series of adjacent gaps. By now, the skies had cleared up so he could see the skies but the view was punctuated uniformly by the surface above.

He sighed in resignation. As he felt the moisture slowly abandoning him, so did hopes of his being rescued this time.

Not that it mattered to anyone.