Hidden Voices

Based on real incidents

It was well past midnight. I was seated at the corner of our small apartment. The only company that I had at that weak hour was the small IKEA lamp that showered consistent light onto my weak fingers which were planning to attempt an attack on the 22nd Chapter of my work, a Novel. I checked my posture on the rocking chair, an antique imitation piece we bought cheaply from a high end store. My poor back wasn’t in the best of health these days, thanks to the rigorous late night laptop hammering I was involved in.

The times had changed. Recession had ravaged the desert and money had vanished overnight. There was panic everywhere and an eerie silence even in busy shopping malls. Women had decided to forego expensive purchases, resorting to cheaper alternatives. Even the restaurants seem to have slashed their prices. Yes, there was a huge correction happening all around. It was chaos of a defeated kind, replacing the chaos of resplendence barely a year ago, where the arrogance of the desert dollars were being built all over the place as pillars rose over pillars. More than half of the cranes in the world were brought in along with another half of India’s construction workers to create the skyscraping monsters. Everyday newspapers were carrying full pages of luxury being rolled out by real estate players who drove fancy Ferraris and dined at the most expensive eateries the city offered. Women dressed to seduce in the good times but now they dressed to kill literally.

The desert was failing in many ways. The experiment threatened to fall anytime.

The paper weight fell off my writing board and as I was about to take it back, my eyes got stuck at my own handwriting. On a bad day, my handwriting on a paper put a doctor’s prescription to shame. With great difficulty, I managed to retrieve what I had jotted down a few weeks ago.

The whole family vanished. She was so pretty – so was her mother. The father was a nervous wreck after a series of losses in his businesses and didn’t have much of a say in the household. The younger daughter seems to have vanished after the tragedy hit.

I had just put in my papers, ending a disastrous relationship with my employers. I wouldn’t want to join another enterprise where I have to explain the meaning of If and but to the people around. I wanted to do something on my own and turned to my laptop for solace. During one of the lonely evenings, when the girls were away, I started pouring out my thoughts in a desperate pace onto the keyboard which, I am sure if it had a life and a mouth to talk, would have mouthed the choicest of insults at me for the random, often abusive speed with which my fingers rode on the keys.

Before I could realize what I was doing, the torturous ordeal my Laptop was suffering under my fingertips was turning out into a lengthy fiction, surprising me. Barring the love notes I helped my college mates with, which they used to seduce their then girlfriends and current wives, and the desperately romantic poems I occasionally produced for my online companions, I hadn’t done anything much to believe that I could write fiction, if not even imagine one. Come to think of the wives of my friends, I could see the seething hidden anger in many of them.

I was sure they cursed me for their current plight. I was the one who wrote those letters for their husbands who very conveniently submitted them to the girls, after writing down in their own pathetic handwriting. I believe some of them didn’t even bother to re-write it but decided my handwriting skills also would come in play when the unravished, young girl reads it with stars in her eyes. There were even stories that some too photocopies of a note I wrote and gave it to some four girls – believing one of them will fall in love.

Fall in love they did, but it was with the words. I didn’t know I had that in me until a while ago.

Hidden Voice | 3 Jul 2017 | Chapter 2

When I began the murder of the keys, I had no clue that I was about to launch onto fiction, and that too of this kind. I always thought I had a bit of Mills and Boons in me. Somerset Maugham, Ernest Hemingway, Ken Follet, John Grisham, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Kahlil Gibran, Gunter Grass, Italo Calvino and a host of authors that I read over 35 years would twist and turn in their grave on their inability to strangle me for being so pathetically low in literary creativity.

What more can they expect from a person who was born in a village where Electricity came into the household when he was 10 years old? They should thank me for having read them instead of getting totally hung over reading only the celebrated Malayalam authors and their works. Oh I forgot to mention my Anglo-Indian School upbringing which ensured that my taste for English was far more intense than my penchant for the vernacular, though the works of our authors are immaculate, if not more romantic.

It is just that I, despite my village routes, found myself in tune with the fashion of the times, English! Today, our daughter calls us Acha and Amma while I address my folks, Dad and Mom. I was a product of the neo-classy set of educated parents who decided their sons should be convent educated to make them proud. I am not too sure whether I made them proud, but one thing I know for sure is that, I didn't let myself down - always done what I thought would fit my own self. But yes, I would rather aspire to become a Ken Follet rather than a Thakazhi, not because I find the former superior, but because I find the latter too sublime for my weak intelligence.

I looked at the paper in my hands. The words kept on hammering in my mind.

I didn’t know her yet I seem to know her better than she did herself. I could see her wallow into a room in her ethereal grace as her equally beautiful mother followed her. A few behind was her father who looked defeated, the strain on his face of being a second rate citizen in his own household. His left arm was tugged by another arm – a serenely simple young girl whose presence didn’t matter much in the family; a life as inconsequential can be.

I never believed in ghosts because I haven’t seen one, and I never watched a horror movie in my life. Anything that upsets my balance just didn’t seem right to me, precisely why I just can’t swim or skate or even play basket ball! Even the drives and cuts I played as a Cricketer was initiated by delicate touches, not hammered like a Yuvraj Singh or Dhoni, knowing well my lean frame can only do little to a cricket ball, with strength.

As I come back to my rocking chair, the antique imitation, I find myself sitting there, staring at the screen where I have punched in 22 chapters of words I have little clue about. I just couldn’t believe I could write, sorry produce so much.

I had this nagging feeling that perhaps I am stealing all this from some other work I have read or merely reproducing some story I would have read somewhere. I would, no way let my mind believe that I, the village brought up – English educated country bumpkin, was behind the flourish of letters that had begun to look like a Novel.

I continued to berate myself till Sonal Rawal, a friend gifted me a book – How to write a novel. I had written mine half way and there was very little I could do to go back to where I began and restructure the content that I unwittingly created in my loneliness. But the very first chapter in that book made me realize one important thing. Every first time author goes through these tumultuous moments of poor self belief when they sit to write their first attempt. I guess that kinda made me feel a shade better, though the clouding guilt that floated over me remained where it was.

What If am doing exactly what a Samir Thahir did with his film, Chappa Kurishu – a frame by frame copy of the Korean movie, Hand Phone!

I had to find a way to believe myself.

Hidden Voice | 14 Jul 2017 | Chapter 3

I have no love or respect for thieves, regardless for what they steal, be it a precious possession or a concept or a word; and hence I lost respect for this wonderfully talented Cinematographer friend Samir who shared a lot of his experiences shooting his film, during our short sojourn in Capetown, South Africa. “I am sure my film would continued to be talked about for a number of years”, he claimed. Yes, it sure is, but not for its originality, but for the blatant crime of copying it from a foreign film.

I, for sure, will never allow myself to do that. Even if I do not do anything that can be called creative ever. Having assured myself that I am no thief, I set out on the second leg of my voyage - complete the Novel. The characters had by then attained full blown status and each one had begun to stand up on their own and talk through the sentences my poor keys seem to produce at my labour during the night.

She was unforgivably beautiful. her charm had an ethereal sensuality to it and like an untouched flower, it bloomed all through her curves. From lecherous teenagers to the Parish priest, she turned a lot of heads towards her. Her mother blamed her for wearing those clothes which amplified her oomph.

That’s when his eyes fell upon her.

It took him only a few months to get them to invite him for a cup of tea at their middle class home and a few weeks more for them to receive his fabulous hospitality at his lavish residence, built by the blocks of surreptitious dealings he was famous for. He would buy anything that catches his fancy.

She was too irresistible for him, but the mother was quite a hindrance. She blocked his view of her un-ravished young daughter. So he relaunched his plan, aiming his attention on the voluptuous mother instead. The cougar was ready for him

This was almost the time when I started feeling it. It started as a whisper in the beginning. It would wait till I finished writing and hit the bed. Then it started flowing in on the right side of my head. I was suffering from sleeping disorders for some time. This could be one of those issues that comes with it, I thought. But no, it started a bit more louder but incoherent. The whispers had started becoming murmurs. It sounded as if an old man is trying to murmur something in my ears.

I froze one night when it was accompanied by a gasping sound. I got up sweating profusely and looked at my watch. It was 2.30 am and the entire room was pitch dark. I could see only the blinking charger on the other end of the room. My wife and daughter were fast asleep, immersed in their own dreams and quite far away from my bewildered state of mind.

My wife has been complaining that I have never written anything about her - so a few words on her. She is a very nice human being who has been a patient recipient of my whims and fancies for almost 2 decades and the mother of our naughty lass.

I am sure my women readers will never understand the pressure that a wife’s request to be added on the pages, adds to a husband, the writer. Actually apart from being my wife, she has a life and character of her own and a better sense of the word than me. She has her own way of arriving at a certain sentence, using all the dramatics possible- so I carefully hide behind my spectacles and thick skin as I avoid presenting or discussing my creative efforts with her, especially this one!!

As I sat there looking at the two beings snore to glory as I sat there trembling and clothed in sweat and fear, I tried to recall the Murmurs.

It was time I needed some help.

Hidden Voice | 14 Jul 2017 | Chapter 4

Life is a cheating bitch at times. It entices you to do everything possible and when the time to celebrate cometh, this meteor will fly in zooming in from nowhere, landing right in the center of all the action, virtually dismissing all possibilities of a comeback.

I had then devised this strategy to remain aloof, resilient to both happiness and sorrow when previously I was kinda sent on a whirlwind ride of emotions when they both came hand in hand. Though I miss the euphoria of the celebrations, I am happy that I am able to deal with pain, setbacks, backlashes, cheating, betrayals without getting hurt.

I have realized this is just a journey.

Meanwhile another journey had begun to disturb me. Sitting there staring into the darkness and sweating at what had just happened, I asked myself whether I am doing the right thing by continuing to write this story. Something told me, this could be some cross link to the unfinished, unfulfilled journey of a soul who is trying to reach out to me, making me a medium of sorts, to tell the world or seek help for something. I had read about dimensions and that there are times when the barriers of these dimensions break due to intense emotional frequencies.

I decided to find out.

Next morning I spoke to Priya Dillipkumar, my soothsayer, confidante, friend, guide who is a trained guide to many with such subliminal conflicts. She asked me to listen carefully, to concentrate, focus to decipher what the incoherent uttering, that I kept hearing in the dark of night, was trying to say.

And I did try. The whispers returned as I sat there. Worlds plundered out of my agony as I resumed the battle with the keys with renewed vigor.

There she was. I could see her now. But by her side, I could also see another being. In sharp contrast to her pristine helplessness, I saw him. He was a murky shadow, a disdainful sight that immediately put me off. She was the prey and he was the Predator and a shade behind them was the Enabler, the mother - a wily smile on her face.

It was time.

I decided to ignore the whispers but was aware of its continuing presence as I completed the chapters, one after the other. It took me 4 months for the second draft to be completed and another one year later, I completed the Synopsis which several friends promised to write but successfully failed to deliver.

A publishing house will need a Synopsis, Chapter outline, 3 chapters, Introduction on the Author to be sent to them for consideration. One can send the same to multiple Publishing houses and wait.

I wait for my turn. I have long back named it Two Rings Later.

Sujil Chandra Bose.