The Cottage.

The monk lived in a small cottage by the sea. It would be an exaggeration to call it a cottage though; it was a small room with slanting tiled roof. But it was the monk’s home and people in the village called it the monk’s cottage. A small green grassy slope from the cottage door led the path to a cliff not too sharp.And below was the Mediterranean sea. Beyond the bend of the sea stood the picturesque village.

Tourists from Monte Carlo sometimes rented a house in the village for its quiet charm. But the monk’s cottage was slightly uphill and the twists and turns of the hill hid the cottage well. This gave the cottage and it’s owner a sense of privacy. The man was not really a monk . He always wore a black flowing cloak type of a dress with a warm cap to cover his head. He grew his beard long. The monk himself had forgotten why and when people of the village had started calling him the monk. He was a private person, nobody knew where he had come from, neither did he share. The old villagers too swore that they had seen the monk live in his cottage since they could remember.

The monk chose solitude over company.He was a man of wisdom. His soft soothing voice had a calming effect on people. The villagers would often walk up to his cottage when they had things on their mind. Sitting on an old log on the green slope in front of his cottage the monk would hear the people talk. He would hear them in patience, burying all their secrets in his heart. A few gentle words from him and the troubled folks would return home feeling more at peace with themselves than when they had arrived. Only the green grass, where they sat, remained a witness to these meetings.

No-one had ever seen the monk’s cottage from its inside. Curious children in groups at times climbed the hill just to take a peep inside the cottage. But they couldn’t see much, through the hazy window panes, they could only get a glimpse of a table covered with books . Once or twice the monk had come up on the peeping children from nowhere, and it had made them run down the slope in fear of the unknown. Yet the monk was not a loud or rude person, it was his silence that the children feared. Every Thursday morning the monk would go down to the market place in the village. He would enter the post office and drop a letter in the box without fail and then he would buy his supplies like any ordinary man. How he managed his money was a mystery like many other mysteries in his life.

One Thursday morning the villagers woke up to the smell of smoke. They came out of their houses and were aghast to see rising flames from the top of the hill where the monk lived. The raging flames and the dark smoke rising from it formed round big black rings of smoke above the deep blue Mediterranean.Word spread like wild fire, ‘the monk’s cottage was on fire’. People started running uphill towards the cottage. The cottage was burning. Someone in the village had dialled the fire department. One fire truck siren could be heard approaching. It took a few hours for the fire to be completely doused. The cottage had burnt to ashes.

The secret indoors of the cottage now lay open for all to see ; though there was not much left to see . One blackened iron bed stood alone , some metal pans and bowls lay on the ground, covered in soot. A few burnt pages of books and fabric were flying in the wind. A long search was made for the monk, even down the cliff where it met the sea. But there was no sight of the monk or his burnt body anywhere inside or near the cottage.

The mystery of the burned cottage and the vanishing monk still remain in the mind of the villagers. A village not so far away from the beautiful city of Monte Carlo will forever remain hidden behind the hills, hiding the blazing fires which burned up a cottage, the monk’s cottage. No one would ever know the address of the Thursday’s letters. No one would ever know the little secrets of the villagers that the monk hid in his heart. Years passed by , but the green patch in front of the cottage leading to the edge of the cliff remained barren. People slowly stopped climbing upto this once beautiful and serene spot, it now held an eerie silence in the air around it. The barren patch stayed barren, the grass had burned to ashes as if in mourning the death of a cottage, the monk’s cottage.