Writer's Tale

The roads of my village, filled with rustic mysteries, the bustling complicated lives of the big cities I lived in, the pool of faces that drift aimlessly in this island country, all seek to be written.

I write to conceal a part of these stories, the ones you and I cannot share, like the essence of my experience that escapes you even when you read my tales.

I wander within my characters, empty of any originality, but then-is there any such thing as the quintessential individual? I am all my characters put together, maybe they are parts of me that I put together in seeking to understand me.

Ever wondered about the writer’s tale, about the torments of choosing between stories, the pleasures of living many lives, the discontent of every insufficient word? I sit by the window now trapped by the pale violet of an unknown bloom on the tree outside.

A solemn song in the backdrop is competing with the gaiety of many birds and the sluggish cars and buses revving up their engines to go uphill on the road next door. I am writing here in the moment what I have lived in parts, but never thought, now these stories are finding words, yet they get skewed by the definitive forms of words, fighting for abstraction even as they get immortalized and trapped.

There is a knock on the door, and I tentatively close the window, embarrassed at the incomplete script that solitude and I had together created. The lock on the dorm pantry has been replaced; I am reminded of the pantry regulations and informed of a new security guard who will be making rounds peering into lives, sneaking glimpses, just like me. I smile, and fidget with the doorknob, barely hiding my urge to relegate all voices outside the wooden door and return to my written world. The informer has moved on to the next door, and I am left with a morning craving for a frothy coffee, Indian style.

With the strong essence of coffee filling the limited confines of my room, I sit down to write. The world melts away, and I leave the aroma of coffee behind me as I drift into the mind of Sulekha, the little girl in a small town....