01 Her Story

She looked like any other thirteen year old. But there were those tiny nothings inside her that made her the female lead of our story. If ever she differed from the crowd, she would try her best to hide the differences. She was afraid she would stand out. She was invisible. Yeah, indeed a part of the walls...May be this could have something to do with her childhood. Let's flash back!

She spent most of her time as a kid, in an obscure village, where she had never seen these vehicles whiz past. And this is why, the smoke in the city made her nauseous. She had lived under a canopy of perennial green. She had no friends of her age, and her parents liked her caged in their ancestral home. “What have we not given you at home? That you would need friends?” they would say. So she played with the flowers. They had a garden, a huge one, in her village. She missed it here in the city, life was a little too crammed up in the tiny two bed-room apartment. As a child, she talked to imaginary characters.

She feared the dead, she feared darkness, she feared venturing out alone, she feared god. She was afraid of loosing the things she had…things she couldn’t even value—like her mother…

And then life moved on, they moved out into the city, in search of better opportunities. And it was this sudden alteration of cultures that left a scar on her. And scars meted out in childhood are a tough thing to heal. She felt out of place, in her class, in the locality in which she stayed. The only place where she found solace was inside her self. In quest peace, she sank deeper into herself. She continued talking to those imaginary characters.

She had parents who always wanted her to make it big. So they put her in a good school. Under their constant coaxing, she began to muck up her books, copies, more books and more copies. Her life was all about it now. She studied, a lot, and didn’t know where to stop. Her ambition should have been to get home truck loads of money.

But in the midst of all this, she wrote at times. Often, torn old diaries would comfort her. She filled them up with her ink pen stains, (she was threatened to use one in school by her teacher, another creature she feared like death).

And one rainy day, she found herself her first novel, an age old one, with its edges torn…its yellowed pages would live afresh in her mind till she grows old. It was then that her immortal love affair with the written word began…..