It’s been a strange evening. Maybe it’s the first time in a long time that I’ve left office really early, without a definite plan. My evening has followed approximately this kind of a pattern – nostalgia, delirium, nostalgia again, sadness (because Anand lost), yet another bout of delirum followed by yet another bout of nostalgia; then the inevitable full-blown NED, followed by declaration of NED, and then a long storytelling session.
I don’t write much fiction. In fact, I think I’ve written not more than two short stories in my entire adult writing career. There have been a number of other projects that I’ve started, but most have been stillborn. When I write fiction, my method of choice is what can be called in Digital Signal Processing (DSP) terminology as “sampling and interpolation”.
My memory is organized in a way that it mostly remembers snapshots. Usually in pictorial form. When I try to remember a certain incident, I remember it as something like a slide show. A series of images flash in my head. They are usually enough to tell the story, but not enough for the story to sound complete to a second person. Hence, I will need to supplement these pictuers with commentary. It’s like drawing a line through a set of points. Interpolation. It’s late in the night and I don’t want to get technical, but I suppose you perfectly understand what I’m talking about if you know DSP.
I revisited one of the two short stories a week back, and was horrified as to how badly it was written. This was written some four years back, within the first year of my writing career. And when I had written it, I had thought I had written a masterpiece. Now it seems all so juvenile, and cliched, and definitely not something I would be proud of.
After the storytelling session an hour back, I found reason to revisit the other short story that I’ve written. I’m not perfectly happy with it – I still think it needs a lot of polishing, but I like the basic construct. I like the way I’ve structured this story. Maybe two years down the line I’ll find this to be crappy too, but right now I still like it. I want to re-run it here for the benefit of readers who have started reading my blog in the last two years. As for the rest of you, I still think it’s woth it if you would read this story again. It’s fairly good, trust me.
I begin: (story behind the fold)