Who’s Story?

“The wheels of a car, when it speeds eighty kilometres per hour, the whirring of the fan at setting five, the swirl of the washing machine in rapid circles, the perfectly sharpened pencil and the doll’s skirt imagined out of the skimmed flakes, the mechanic tick-tock of the wall clock, a pattern too pure to remain, a paper finely made, an ink meant to linger, a pen dearly treasured, a letter never written – that is you – everything. Everything, and nothing.”

Sunandini was reading through pages off her own diary, possibly maintained at teenage at an attempt to keep a track of her expenses, now layered with the glow of dust. She fingered on it, a big bold ‘S’ and laughed at how meticulous she was taught to be and what had become of her. These days, she read and corrected what others wrote. Today was a Sunday and she took upon her the cleaning of closets untouched in years. The diary ignited an exhausted flame in her. She knew she would lose, nevertheless she was willing to try. Having had her lunch, she opened her laptop. She typed and deleted, typed and rephrased, typed some more and deleted further. She was happy of her self-assessment that she could not write. From a dark corner at the end of her head though she was in utter distress at being unable to do so. She called up Shekhar and had a mindless conversation, all along channel surfing and thinking about her dead skills. 

Couldn’t the dead come alive? Don’t ghosts exist? Is this how ghost-writers feel?

It was 3 am. Karan Mallik woke up. The mail notification on his phone was set at a high ringtone. He was waiting for this blurb desperately. It was from Utsarinee Mathur, the most sought-after ghost writer in Mumbai. He did not understand a word, and that impressed him. His publisher was after his life for failing the deadline. This time they needed a ‘poetic-fiction-never-before-tried bestseller’. Utsarinee had written a fine novel on something which he couldn’t quite understand, like the blurb, but he knew the hefty amount he paid for would reap insane royalties.

It was 3am. Utsarinee Mathur hit the send button and shut down her laptop. She wondered why she had deliberately delayed and kept Mr Mallik waiting. The money had come. All they wanted was the blurb content. She went to sleep. This was the easiest assignment of her life – she wrote down the life of a ghost-writer – tactile, but untraceable.