Contributor: Rohini Gupta

- -
I know it’s there in the world of dreams – the hell of failed writers. It’s a dark, furtive, endless cave which reeks of stagnant despair and overripe frustration.

It’s heavily populated. Until you look at that crowd standing there in the shadows, you don’t realize how many people wanted to write. Young and old, every race and sex and color and style, the highly educated and the dropouts, the wealthy and the starving. They are all there, shoulder to shoulder bound by the same darkness.

They mill around angrily, snapping at each other, furious at being here, but yes, ashamed too. They know it is their own doing.

The only bright thing about the place is the woman who sits at the lighted desk. She is bright and shining, sparkling and gracious in white. She has a large register in front of her and she checks each name in it.

One by one the writers go before her, looking away, not daring to meet her eyes, bracing themselves to take the weight of her smile.

“So,” she says not even finishing the question.

And they mumble and stammer before her.

“Ah,” she says, “That excuse has been used 455678893 times – I did not have enough time. And this one – I will write when life gets better – 378946357 times."

She gives them a neat note, a slip of clean paper with a number on it. “Go and contemplate your sin,” she says.

They shuffle away, weary beyond belief and they mingle in small groups speaking in hushed tones.

“I really believed I would ……”

“I thought one day …..”

“I waited till I retired but ….”

And they look at each other with the sudden shock of revelation.

They dive for pens and keyboards and write furiously, their fingers moving faster than the speed of light.

Then they wake, having forgotten the dream, but with a great sense of urgency. They skip breakfast, let the phone ring itself into exhaustion, and head for the work table. Fingers burn with the friction.

The words flow.

At last they sit back, warm, fulfilled, satisfied.

I believe it really exists, the writer's hell, in dreams somewhere, in those unmapped spaces beyond this world. Too many excuses take you there.

I’ve been there. I know. I stood before that shining desk. I made my excuses, my voice sounding hollow as a gong. I felt that chill hopelessness but when I woke it was with renewed energy and a clear sense of what to do.

I must make sure I never enter that grey blankness again. Keep the keyboard so busy that dust has no time to settle.

May smoke ascend from the thunder of the keys forever.


- - -
I am a writer of poetry and non fiction and am working on longer stories, but flash fiction is its own delight. On a good day a flash fiction story almost writes itself and that is why I keep coming back to it.

Read more »

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

1 comment

Author: Rohini Gupta

Contributor: Rohini Gupta

- -
The voice is a child’s voice, high and shrill, asking a question. She shifts restlessly in her dream, knowing she has dreamed this many times before but unable to hear the question.

In the morning she always wakes up confused and frustrated. She knows it is important. The urgency is growing. She must answer and she must do it soon. But how? She is so distracted that she spills milk and scatters grains of sugar.

Her husband does not notice. They are not talking these days. They barely look at each other. They live in separate worlds.

She is resigned to the silence, it is simpler than the loud arguments and that brutal word, divorce, bandied between them like a tennis ball, first in her mouth, then in his, then back again. But there is an invisible line that both are afraid to cross, and the argument ends as usual, in stony silence. They brush pass each other in the small rooms, and sleep back to back.

When the weight of the silence is too great they make love at night, but in the morning, they pretend they are alone. Sometimes she weeps silently wondering what went wrong. She cannot find a reason. She has no idea where the feeling has gone.

For a whole year life was perfect. Full of laughter and flowers, long walks hand in hand by the seashore, sharing a paper cup of street food, spicy on the tongue, and laughing at nothing, like two giggling teenagers. Dinners in small affordable restaurants, and a movie late at night, sitting close.

They set up house, a modest two rooms, but they furnished them together, every rug, bookcase and coffee table. He was always home early and she was home before him and always at the window waiting. A marriage made in heaven, her friends said enviously.

Now she has stopped taking their calls.

Now her dreams are full of anger and unheard questions.

--

When she goes into the bedroom her husband is sitting on the bed, in his underwear, looking at her. “Hasn’t this gone on long enough? We have nothing in common anymore. Shall we end it?”

The chill of that hits her. His eyes are cold and he means it. She is not ready yet to end it, so she does not reply. She lies down with her back to him.

“We never talk without arguing,” he says, “What is the point of this?”

She closes her eyes and he sighs, but does not speak again.

Sleep does not come. She thinks of the emptiness of her life. How could it become so terrible? She feels hollow, as if all the passion has been scooped out of her and she does not know how to fill up the great void at her heart. She tosses and then she falls asleep.

At once the child’s voice is there, calling.

She is not paying attention to the child. She is lost in the darkness of her dreams. She sees herself sitting on cold, bare tiles, weeping. She holds her head to keep out the harsh words, but she hears them over and over, louder each time. The door slams, hard, and keeps slamming. The sound resounds and fills her whole dream. A plate falls, white and blue, smashing on the floor, and she smashes with it, flying into a thousand scattered pieces. Bits of her hit the walls and smash on the floors and keep breaking smaller and smaller and smaller.

"No,” she murmurs, only wanting it to stop, "Please no, no, no."

The child’s voice sounds sad, “Shall I go away, then? Shall I go?”

Suddenly she hears the words and everything comes to an abrupt, crashing stop.

“Please listen to me,” the child is saying, “Please.”

“I hear you,” she says in wonder.

The child’s voice is very soft but very clear. “Do you want me?” the child is asking wistfully, “Shall I come?”

She hears the question and it shoots through her like a physical pain.

She can see the child now - a thin girl, in a white dress, looking at her with large, dark, beautiful eyes. There are tears in those eyes to match the tears drying on her cheeks.

“Do you want me?” the girl is asking and every word rings through her like a bell, echoing in the hollows within.

She puts out a hand to touch the child’s soft smooth hair, but there is nothing there.

“Please don’t go,” she whispers, “Please, we will work things out, I don’t know how, but we will. Somehow we will make it work. I want you. I really want you. You must come. I want you.”

The sound of her own voice wakes her. She is whispering the words softly.

The dream fades. She can no longer see the girl but she feels light at heart. The question has been heard and answered. It will no longer haunt her dreams.

The room is dark and quiet. Her husband is fast asleep on the other side of the bed. She can hear his soft snoring. She wants to put her arms around him and whisper to him. No, she will not. They have waited so long. He will not believe it. It’s only wishful thinking, he will say.

Yes, it is.

She gets up, barefoot, and walks into the silent sitting room. She does not put on the lights. The glow of the street lamps from the wide windows is enough to see. She opens the window and leans out, putting her face into the cool, sea wind. Above the city, the night is extravagant with stars.

She already knows what tomorrow's pregnancy test will say. He will believe it then.

"I want you," she whispers to the stars, "We really want you."

And, for the first time in months, she smiles.


- - -
Rohini Gupta has been a writer for a long time and has published books, non-fiction and poetry. She is now writing short fiction and working on longer fiction.

Read more »

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

3 Comments

Author: Rohini Gupta

Contributor: Rohini Gupta

- -
He is late at the supermarket and almost all the fruit is gone. Many trays are empty, leaving only out-of-season mangoes and a few sad pears. At the end are apples: the small, orange ones, and the green, imported ones. In the last tray he finds what he seeks. On the dark red paper are six golden apples, round, shiny and polished, reflecting the ceiling lights.

A big woman is bearing down on them, followed by a small boy. She is heading for the last tray, but he is ahead of her and scoops them quickly up.

“Surely you don’t have to take them all,” she says.

“They are mine,” he snaps at her so fiercely that she steps back. She looks at his face and leaves hurriedly, dragging the child by the arm. Other people turn to look at him, but he ignores them all and makes off down the aisle with his prize. He will not give up his apples for any price – why can’t they just understand that?

There is a line at the counter but they let him go past, stepping nervously out of his way. He lays the six apples on the cashier’s counter and adds a banana. He has no other shopping.

“You must really like apples,” says the cashier who has seen him before, and always seen them in his basket.

“My wife loves them,” he says. Then he avoids any more questions by insisting she pack them carefully, separately, so that their waxed perfection will not be bruised. It’s a slow procedure and the people in the line behind him are shifting their feet and murmuring but they do not protest.

--

He leaves the supermarket carrying his groceries.

He has been doing all the shopping for quite a while, ever since his wife, Sita, became too weak to get out of bed. He always buys her apples. Even when she cannot eat, when only the tubes feed her, even then she craves the golden apples. She grew up among them, in her family orchard high up in Manali, under the Himalayan snows.

“My favourite tree,” she always told him, “Every year it grew the sweetest apples.” Her face is gaunt from her long illness, but her eyes are still bright when she remembers those happy years.

“There is no misery in the orchard,” she says.

The orchard is long gone. Her father gambled and drank it all away. After he died her mother was forced to sell more and more of the land, but she kept the apple trees. Every year she put the first fruit in her daughter’s hands, “A special apple for my golden girl,” she said with a special smile.

In the end it was Sita who had to sell the orchard. The debts had to be paid, and she did what she had to, but she has never forgotten. The orchard is still home and sometimes, when the pain is a dark shadow in her eyes, she forgets “Take me home,” she whispers, “Take me to the apple trees.”

He opens her hand and puts a golden apple into it. She smiles. Her fingers close, her breathing eases and she sleeps. He had plans once of taking her back to the hills but she is too weak to travel. So all he can do is sit by her bedside and remember.

He remembers how they met, at a party. He was new to Mumbai. No job, no money for food, but he had friends so he attended their parties and lingered by the food tables. She was there for the food too, a starving actress. He saw her joyous smile from across the room and then there was no looking back.

They married and found a house. He got a job, she got a part. They both worked hard and met late in the evenings eagerly, as if for the first time. They had three happy years together until that terrible day at the doctor’s office.

Malignant, the doctor said, and growing.

After that, it had become a nightmare. He hardly sleeps or eats.

He lives from day to day, moment to moment.

No one eats the apples. She cannot, and he will not.

--


He walks home with the bag of apples and one banana.

The house is in darkness as he puts his key in the door. He sits in the dark sitting room and eats the banana.

He looks out at the streets outside, at all the passing people and he wonders where they are going and why they are so cheerful, what they can possibly have to laugh about. Laughter is extinct in his world, for more than a month now, since that terrible day when he lit her funeral pyre.

The black moods, which she had dispelled for him, claim him again. He feels like a straw in the ocean, lost in a tidal wave of darkness. His heart begins a painful thumping, his throat tightens and he suffocates.

But, from somewhere deep, resolve comes. No, he thinks firmly. He has promised her that he will never go to that black place again. He intends to keep his promise.

He holds a golden apple in each hand, clutching them desperately, as if they could save his life. Holding them he feels her close. Is she walking in her bright leaved summer orchards again? Is she laughing under the fruit laden trees? He likes to think that, from wherever she is, she is looking down at him sitting here, and she is smiling.

The suffocation eases and he relaxes a little. For tonight he has won the battle. He will fight it again, but for now, he can sleep sitting in the dark, holding the fruit.

He has nothing else, nothing but that one thing which is left to him now, and for that he will always buy the golden apples.

For her smile.


- - -
I am a writer from Mumbai, India. I have published non fiction and poetry books. Writing flash fiction is keeping me happy while I work on longer stories. My story Dream Keeper was published in Yesteryear fiction in November 2012.

Read more »

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

3 Comments

Author: Rohini Gupta