FF: Will-O'-the-Wisp - On hold indefinitely

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Ratna

@--Ratna--

Sparkler

+ 3

Posted: 13 years ago

#91

Do we all think alike or what 😆...coming to the update Nanhi already took the clothes down 😲...i so wanted a terrace scene between Dhruv and Leher when he goes to get them😍...maybe later on in the story...

Edited by --Ratna-- - 13 years ago

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749230

Suspended

Posted: 13 years ago

#92

I think you forget about this part...

"You don't bathe?..." The words sprung to her lips just as suddenly and she felt her reserve break as she gazed into his eyes - this giant man, who didn't know that he had liquid brown eyes, eyes like the teddy bear she'd once hugged at nights and slept. "Mom says reporters think that its cool to look the way you do...but really..." She found herself nodding wildly, "its not cool at all..."

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Ratna

@--Ratna--

Sparkler

+ 3

Posted: 13 years ago

#93

Hasini...do u mean this part...

"Oye...What's your name?" He asked and she tilted her head back to take in his towering form. Her index finger gently pushed on her glasses that hung low on the bridge of her nose, while she thought about all the times she'd wished to be of such height. To reach the jar of cookies that hermom kept high on the shelves without a chair and without having to precariously jump on the cushion that sunk low even under her frail body.

"Naina..." She heard herself sound brusque, with an edge of contempt, "And you can't come inside...Mom says, I can't let any strangers inside our house"

"Accha, this is our Chacha's house, " He said mockingly and with a shake of the head that made her itch to want to stick out her tongue at him, "and you are only renting this portion. I used to stay here before you came along...Is your Mom home?"

She watched him look around the house, as if he was sizing up on the room's particulars to loot them in the night.

"What are you searching for? There is nothing in the house to steal..."

He hunkered to his heels, his brows furrowed and she saw that the tiny hairs on his face, stuck out on all directions. Gross, she thought and a slight grimace laced her features.

"You don't bathe?..." The words sprung to her lips just as suddenly and she felt her reserve break as she gazed into his eyes - this giant man, who didn't know that he had liquid brown eyes, eyes like the teddy bear she'd once hugged at nights and slept. "Mom says reporters think that its cool to look the way you do...but really..." She found herself nodding wildly, "its not cool at all..."

"Naina..." Her mom came in, her face stuck half-way through rapidly building horror and an amusement that seemed uncharacteristic of her nowadays.

A small doubt...this scene happens when Nanhi comes down...or when he goes up...me confused...blame it on the late hour and lack of sleep 😳...one request...could u plz add the scenes perviously posted in the updates when u think they fit the story...just a suggestion 😊

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jenny

@ajenn

Rocker

Posted: 13 years ago

#94

Boxers scene was really good. That would be so not nice to see these every time. 😆
Chahaji called his Calvin Klein boxers as langotiya!!!!🤣

I really love the your Lucknow description. And those pictures provided gives a good imagination.

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kaamchorni

@kaamchorni

Voyager

+ 2

Posted: 13 years ago

#95

Hasini! I can't believe I haven't seen this till now!

My contribution so far has been absolutely tiny but thank you for putting me on the plot members list all the same. I am going to race to catch up with the story so far and hopefully by tomorrow, I'll be aaall over this :)

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640638

Suspended

Posted: 13 years ago

#96

Originally posted by: 6th.Element
My Dearies...

Its been a while since I commented to make contributions to the story...

We need a swipe file...All of your idas are sitting in posts here and there. I will create the swipe file post soon so that we all know what has been added so far.

I picked Lucknow because of the picture below...

Its a pretty dry picture and you will perhaps ask me what I see here, in the battered red steps and in the dirty water lurking below...

This is a Bowli (Step well) in Bara Imambara, one of Lucknow's major tourist attraction to-date famous for its Bhool Bhulaiya (Labryinth).

And I was drawn to this more than the Labryinth itself. Somehow this places sings to me...a strange hum in the air...shows me a man chasing a woman down the stairs and of them running up again, her sari's pallu billowing in the air while she sways hither and tither, their giggles in the air while they go in endless circles and lose the last of their sanity in the name of the bhaang they have drunk in the gardens where Holi is being hosted...

This scene made me pick Lucknow and one thing fell after another...😊

@Avi: 😆 I try girl...

@ Jyoti: You make sense...we will just to have wait to see if it does to him too...

@ Ratna: Ah! That is some picture...Thank you for posting it here...

I do love these step wells. The water ends up looking green in most of the pictures. There was a scene of such a place in SRK's Paheli, not the type u have here but it made me remember that from this picture. Fighting carpal tunnel so short msgs. Post some more small scenes H, it does the imagination good. I love the bhang influence too.

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749230

Suspended

Posted: 13 years ago

#97

Part 4 The Ghosts of his writing past

In the five days, ever since his arrival in Lucknow, he could only manage to eat and sleep. During the day, the walked over to his Chacha's eatery and sometimes sat at the counter, mindlessly taking charge to tender change for receipts and cash brought to him by the boys who served the customers. Sitting just past the entryway to the joint had taken care of spreading the news of his presence back home, far and wide, through the infinitely twisted and reliable network of gossip. In the afternoons he aimlessly took long walks, absently crossing over the noisy part of the town, only to be lost in the drone of silence as he walked to Bara Imambara. Once there, he would sit in the beam of light that carefully lowered into the bowli through its oval opening unto the sky, his favorite hide out in the old city and there he practiced a detached meditation from everything that chased him all day long. Well, at least he tried, but then his past was just as intimate and binding as his shadow was. And so they remained silent and ignored at times; starkly drawn out as chalk lines on a blackboard at others.

He still couldn't tell what'd driven him to take Journalism and the three years had happened in a blink of the eye. Before he could have a full realization of his spur of the moment choices, he was already working at Prabhat Leher under Pratik Ghosh, who as years passed, however unacknowledged, had also turned out to be his mentor. While rolling pan in-between his palms, with thick, bejeweled gold rim glasses and a cloth satchel lending him the unmistakable identity of a senior reporter, Pratik raised the bar for him. That same arcane style of writing of Pratik's, Dhruv inherited and made his own, layering them with nondescript pun and ridicule for the political satires he began writing under a pseudonym. He still hadn't grown a full beard by the turn of the first year, but he already had two headline articles and five other stories he was working on - ones that had full potential to turn into unprecedented exposes.

When he wasn't writing, he went in search of the bottom feeders of the Mumbai crime scenes. The ones who usually turned a new leaf over a near death incident or loss of a loved one and sought out vengeance on their own gangs. Now, finding them weren't a problem, although earning their allegiance was. He was new and his youth gave him a semblance of someone who veered in his motivation if the men who permanently lived in the shadows were to be unrelenting. It took him all of two years to break two men down from the gazillion gangs that were always hungry for a share of the city.

That night when he'd come back to Pratik's desk with the news of his new informers, he'd laughed. "You thought they were testing you for two years?"

"Of course...What else? They needed me to be trusting, not give away their identities in case I'm caught working their stories in their territory"

Pratik snickered and leaned forward, crossing his arms at his wrist on the desk, he said, "Well, I could bet it was you who was testing them...with your half-blanched college kid looks until last month, you think they will trust you with their stories, when all they wanted was a reporter who looks half as serious and perseverant as you do now to bring their stories to light...I say, don't lose the beard and the long hair..."

Ever since Pratik's insightful retort, his face never again had the pleasure of having the steel edges of a razor be drawn over it, lending him that serious dark aura his job demanded. Then the stories flooded and his writing shifted and jumped around restless from one behemoth of Mumbai to another. It was a wonder he wasn't dead for the number of times he was bashed to a pulp and sent to board up a hospital for months. The goons didn't know that when they bagged him in a sack and beat him until blood darkened the brown jute, they were bleeding him for stories already told to a beguiling city. That it was only meant to make him come back that much more renewed and severe, justified in his impenitent prejudices he carried against them.

His work usually took his mind away from any or all worldly obligations for 18 hr stretches at times. This tight rope schedule he could manage. But what was left of the day, in the prickly silence of his 22nd floor studio apartment seemed untenable. He hardly slept there, waiting for any speck of light to show up at the horizon as an excuse to get off bed.

"Silence I could take..." He once told Pratik in a bar, after four rounds of scotch and a basket of fries, "but then in that silence, there is an eerie disquiet...something ominously hollow about it...I don't know what will make that fade, sir" Pratik had been at a loss for words and simply patted him then, compelled to order another round of drinks to service all traces of awareness they were left with.

Shortly after that night, he'd found his answer in another bedroom, four blocks away from his own studio apartment. Rashmi happened to him, in the short span from when the elevators doors closed at his office floor to until it jauntily let them out again at the ground floor. While the elevator had been at its steady descent, the duo had exchanged all of three glances and one measured genial smile. But that was all it had taken for her to stop by the glass doors at the entry way and turn around to face him.

"There is a Thai place down the street that serves couples night on Tuesdays" She said, her eyes gleaming with a thrill.

Running a finger over his satchel that ran across his chest, he said "But its Thursday today", seemingly delighted at the abrupt conversation.

"Yes..." She said, shrugging lightly, "I thought we could still make up for not having met each other on Tuesday.."

He smiled then, looking away momentarily while he gathered the moment in its details, suddenly wrapped in an air of self-importance, preoccupied and eager. Certainly women of his age had found him attractive before and he had in turn entertained them with drinks or dinner, parting even without so much as contact numbers once they were out on the road. But the lady in-front of him was something else, older and managed to sound tactfully needing without a hint of being needy, her cadence careful in its echo of her purr.

"Pardon me..." He walked forward, stopping close to her, "I was being obtuse in not figuring out which Tuesday we were going to make up for", he said and ran his hand through his hair that was shooting past his neck, while his stubborn beard, from not having kept up with his grooming routine, had thickened from a slight stubble to a savage black. He precisely saw then what was inviting about him, which needed much less reinforcing when his otherwise unkempt looks was also fetching him stories from the underworld without him having to lift a finger.

After dinner, he found himself walking up the cloistered stairway to her apartment. Rashmi was gloriously in her primes, unbidden and glamorous she smiled, holding a cigarette between her fingers, while one strap of her negligee slid down her shoulder. In bed, he was secretly glad in the economy of words they needed going about each other, she being arduous and demanding, while he was equally unforgiving, their bodies fatigued and yet enlivened from the thrill of pleasure.

"You sure you didn't use voodoo or black magic into making me do this..." He asked, jumping into bed with her once he returned from the bathroom.

"Like you needed any...And tell me Dhruv, how does it matter anymore?" She threw a pillow at him before she rolled on top of him for another sinful kiss, dragging her nails playfully over the mound of his chest. Much later, he watched her sleep for a while; she was small and distant in her sleeping form, the intones of her breathing finally filling the dread of the silence he so fought to catch a wink. That night, he slept with no quiet to keep him awake.

When Rashmi moved on, off to marry a textile mill owner in the heart of Gujarat, there were others, whom he sought only if it was nothing more than a mutual convenience, a way to fix the stillness that came with the night. His chase for his stories and the women kept him floating in a thin fog of unreality, practically necessitated by the carnage and realism he worked with. Another four years passed, until the day when Pratik sir, in a casual passing mentioned his leaving Prabhat Leher owing to his wife's frailties.

"I'm of course recommending you for my position...but I'm also duty bound to tell you this..."
Pratik, handed him a cigarette and lighted his own.

"Each time a story comes our way, there is something it takes and something that it gives back...It's all only rewarding until there is no imbalance in that give and take. There will be times you will be asked to give more of yourself...more than what you could afford. Do you think you will be ready then?"

"Are you kidding, sir? Its such an honor...really" He'd rushed to tell Pratik then, even as Pratik realized his urgency, keenly noting his enthusiasm that had altogether missed the wistfulness of his tone.

His vigor increased ten fold in his new position and that only took away what was remaining of his emotional quotient. Ruthless and scouring he was in his searching and perhaps deserving in some ways, the phone call that came to end all that he believed in, making him reflect much later on Pratik's last piece of advise, that was in every sense, really a warning in after thought.

The brother had been the one to ring him, possibly the first person he was dialing even before an ambulance or the police was summoned to the site.

"Do you know that she wanted to have a baby girl someday?" In the loud uproar of the brother's cries, little made sense, but soon the context and the inevitable news bore him down making his knees and limbs weak with a drowsy exhaustion. He awkwardly fell onto the edge of the bed and his body failed all efforts to move in any degree or direction.

"How do you know..." The brother gasped and struggled for coherence in his utterance, "How do you know she wasn't doing it for love...that she was sleeping with those low-life' to keep someone else alive?"

He'd known about it too, but that - in his opinion - would have made his expose weak, nearly turning it into a tragedy of sorts. There had been gang wars too as an after math of his articles. However, never had it been a case such as this; with the gore and haunting that surrounded a willful taking of one's life.

There was a stark silence in the line and yet he could sense the mute anguish of the brother, the scalding misery that struggled to rise up his throat and the suffocation there. After what seemed like an eternity of silence, he heard the sobs, the screeching in the rasping there, the accusations that didn't leave his tongue...and then the phone line died...just like something else inside him too had, fading into an inescapable oblivion...

~~*~~*~~*~~*~~

Right then, he woke up, his head hitting hard against something smooth and small and hard, his heart vanishing into a thousand beats against his chest, when he heard a small exclamation of pain.

Looking down, he saw her raised on a scratched elbow, while the other hand rubbed her temple, looking rather surly and threatening, her small pout capturing him even as he felt assaulted by the haze of the dream. He wanted to run from the prick of heaviness that descended into his chest, although his feet wouldn't move and he stayed half stretched over the bed.

His head fell back and he gasped for a full pocket of air, when he saw her walk into his sight, her eyes inquiring and assuring. She walked to the cot without a word. Moments later, he felt a small hand rest against his forehead, her palms comforting him as that of a cold compress.

In those seconds as she looked on, he saw a strange understanding there, the tiny nubs of her fingers unwaveringly soaking up the sweat on his forehead.

She pressed a little on his then and in response he closed his eyes, her thumb stoking his skin as if it was her lullaby, and he slept on...falling into a dreamless sleep for the first time since that day the call had come in.

Edited by 6th.Element - 13 years ago