I dunno if it's already been done, but this is something that I have always wanted to try. Simply because Open Source code projects are so much more robust and better than proprietary stuff in many ways.
This is going to go like this :
1) For obvious reasons, including my laziness, this thing will be working entirely in the comments section.
2) I'll start off with an opening line and then as and when people drop by they add a line or a paragraph to the story.
3) If you feel you are nearing the end of a plot/sub-plot/idea, feel free to start a new chapter. This comes with the little problem of someone wanting to contribute to a chapter and then not being able to since it is already closed. We'll get to that when we have to cross that bridge.
4) Feel free to add characters, names for characters, places and so on. But, don't do it just for the heck of it. Let there be a reason. (I'll start another post, that could be used a discussion board of sorts. Feel free to bounce ideas around there.)
5) Please please please keep it clean. I am not enabling moderation on this, since that would be like code review before a checkin and can get quite messy. But, if something is totally in bad taste I shall remove it. Sorry, but let's try to keep it nice. At least for the time being.
Why am I doing this in the first place?
First off, I had tried this a long time ago over SMS and though we did not get very far, there was some really nice stuff that came along. Sadly, all those messages got lost when I changed my phone. It actually felt good. The other two contributors of that effort visit this blog - Ra and CJ. CJ had one excellent line in that - "The cold draught of air passed by him like a stoned angel".
And secondly, I think it is going to be good fun.
To make life easier, I'll post links to this post and the discussion thread on the sidebar so that you can reach stuff easily enough. Or you could bookmark those links on your browser as well. Whatever grabs you.
Let's see where it goes. Maybe, if it hit the right notes we could make a book out of it all.
After all that here goes the first line :
"He stubbed his cigarette out and called for a coffee. The coffee was, of course, lousy and it was by far the safest of all the bistro had to offer. The rain hadn't let up yet; the reflections of yellow street lights danced merrily on the puddles outside."
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He stubbed his cigarette out and called for a coffee. The coffee was, of course, lousy and it was by far the safest of all the bistro had to offer. The rain hadn't let up yet; the reflections of yellow street lights danced merrily on the puddles outside.
The monochromatic neon lights in the distance gleamed silently and eyed him warily. It had been two days since he had been fired from the Tsubaki Corp. A dog lay on the street waiting to die, its front, metallic paws making a scratching sound every time it tried to get up but couldn't.
"Dumb fucker!", he thought as he saw the helpless dog. And as he was crossing the street, rage boiled inside him and he kicked the dog with all his strength. The yelping ceased. So did the scratching."There, I helped ease its suffering", he thought to himself as a wicked, asymmetrical grin distorted his otherwise beautiful model IV face.
He reached the other side of the street. For a moment, the light from a street lamp caught his face. There was something very strange about that face - you couldn't say what, but there was something missing - something inherently evil about it.
He pulled the brim of his hat lower to cover his face. Perhaps, he feared that someone was watching him. He quickly ducked into an old alley - the darkness swallowed him up easily.
As his eyes got used to the blinding darkness, for a moment, just for a brief moment, he felt eerie, the kind that comes in late night horror movies with spooky music to accompany.
The world was dystopic, he decided. It was just the way he liked it. He wouldn't have it any other way, not that he had a choice.
A dark deserted alley wasn't reassuring enough, he decided to walk through to the next street. He was wet from the rain and had not eaten much but these were the least of his worries. He decided to play it safe and take a cab back home. The recent turn of events had brought upon him an uneasiness he could not explain.
He wasn't sure when he met K. But it did not matter now. He was without a job and a man on the run. Darkness was his ally and daylight...a treacherous lover. He decided to remain in the cold embrace of the shadows. He grinned mirthlessly when he ruminated about it. He had never known a life outside the shadows.
The black car appeared out of the darkness like a silent wraith.
"You'd like to believe we lost track of you....Remember this-we lose track of nobody".
The face was remarkably hideous. Deep down, an appreciation for such deformity filled his soul. Although one could get a primitively beautiful face for a mere 50 rupees, this streak of wild independence in his enemy held his fascination, as always.
As the thug got into the car, he, with the look of a man resigned to his fate, he realised that things were anything but well. So it had come down to this at last. Too bad he had been fired from the Tsubaki Corp. Atleast employment there would have guaranteed him a bargaining chip. He wished someone would put him out of his misery like the dog he had helped on the street. The tail lights of the fast receding car was the only colour in that grey alley.
The night was quiet again - almost. Another dog yelped somewhere in the distance. The dogs in Calcutta never seemed to sleep.
Chapter 2.
K hated alarms. Those annoying bastards. He had decided a long back that when he finally found the people behind those hiding alarms, he would beat them with something blunt and heavy, just to take a long time doing it.
The alarms were useless anyway. The honking of the BEST buses was the only thing that could wake him up. The move from Calcutta, he decided, was a good one. Living on the edge of the Cuffe Parade slum, the last remaining large anonymous shanty town after the "redevelopment" of Dharavi, He felt atlast the security felt from anonymity.
He uttered an expletive and then slowly got out of his bed, cursing. Six in the morning was an unearthly hour, but then he had a job to do - a promise to keep. A promise that was two years old, almost to the day.
He quickly washed his face in the clunky basin. The cracked mirror on the wall distorted his face. It wasn't a bad face but the years of hardship were begining to show. The lines on his forehead ran deep giving him a brooding look - almost melancholic as if there was some pain deep inside that refused to go.
He rested groggily at the edge of the bed. Although the events of last night were as fresh in his mind as the cigarette burns on his palm, he simply couldn't remember the sequence. Of course, there was her face. There was the machete, the dance and the blood. But what came first was a mystery. The Valium wasn't helping either.
As he looked into the eyes staring back at him in the mirror, there was a fleeting desire to get one of those fancy new face transplants. Like those his former employer, the Tsubaki Corp, made. The term employer was used lightly here. His work description fitted more closely to that of a hired gun than a formal employee. The Tsubaki corp, when they set up base in Calcutta, in a partnership with 1200Mics Nanotech, was hailed as the next Maruthi Suzuki or the next Hero Honda. The greatest of Indo-Japanese collaborations. Unfortunately for all, but fortunately for him, the rosy picture turned out to have more thorns than petals. A year later, the Indian arm sold its stake and moved on carrying with it the techonology that had single-handedly revolutionised the plastic surgery industry. It took the Tsubaki Corp ten years and many conveniently hidden shady deals to finally catch-up. It was his job to keep them hidden. It was just too bad that he had royally fucked up.
But just as the desire had risen, it fell out. He couldn't change his face. It was like burning your diary. The record of your life. But he sincerly hoped he could erase the memories of last night, whatever remained of them. He decided to make his way to the Statue of the Stoned Angel. It wasn't officially called that. But the name stuck in tribute to one decadent night, the single largest inebriated party started only via mass messages. The promise waited for him there.
The room was dark except for the small lights that flickered on the giant screen. K could not see the face of the men seated around the table. The lone puddle of light from the ceiling fell on him like a cage. The twinkling lights and looming shadows of the six men made him feel hazy. Yet he was strangely awake. His hands moved surreptitiously and rested on the comfortable bulge of his Derringer. He knew he wouldn't be needing it. This was business.
The Derringer was old and had seen many a battle. It was almost an heirloom. There were better pieces out there, but K preffered this one. There were memories associated with it. And for a brief moment, he thought about the past - so far back in time yet so clear - the first time he had picked up the Derringer in Calcutta. A friend has given it to him as a parting gift. There were tears in the friend's eyes that he furiously fought to hold back. They had parted under that single dim yellow bulb. That was two years ago - almost to the day.
The sound of chairs scraping against the rough cemented floor jolted him out back into reality. The empty chair at the head of the table was not empty anymore. The owner of the joint sat there. The Statue of the Stoned Angel was just one of the many places he owned.
The Statue of the Stoned Angel was a timeless place, in the sense that no one really remembered when it actually opend its doors for the first time. It was a pub and everything in between. People came in for a drink, people came into look for buyers and sellers for various contraband. Many a deal was made on the tables. Countless sums of money had been exchanged under the tables. Hookers hung around with their pimps looking for prospective clients. It was a bazaar for the illegal. If you couldn't find it here, chances were you couldn't find it elsewhere in the city.
The figure spoke. He had a smooth gravelly voice. K had heard it before. A chill ran up his spine. It was indeed a bad day when a man like him forgot a voice.
"We have met before" said the voice.
"Yes" said K quietly.
"But you are unable to place me" the voice seemed amused.
"No" he lied
The silhouette came closer to the light. And K gasped! He felt the cold hard metal of the Derringer on his temple. The Stoned Angel had not lost his touch!
"So what do you plan to do now?"
"Think," said K in a whisper.
"Then think you shall!"
Then world went dark.
End of Chapter 2
Chapter 3
The bell rung shrilly. That was that that was needed - pandemonium broke out. Paper rockets started flying around and bits of chalk began to find their targets.
But young K had other things on his mind. He never really belonged to the maddening crowd. His eyes were fixed on Sana's fingers as they rolled through her hair. She was pure. She was clean. It was as if this revolting hideousness all around him would never touch her.
She stopped to turn around and he looked away. She was a dream.
Sana, Good Job Mr God he thought. There was some humor in him, which till date he had not lost.
'I think that K ain't that intense as he comes out, whadya think' Sana whispered to one of her girlfriends.
'He looks weird though' replied back meghna.
Sana, though the most popular among guys, couldn't understand why she was so gravitated towards K
It was the same revolting hideousness which would leak into his face in his youth and then consume him as an adult. But now, innocent children whizzed past him, with faces twisted by innocence into smooth blobs. K's nose twitched as he smelt the sick odor of incompetence trailing the whizzing faces of his classmates. Sana was his, he had no doubt that she was going to be his. The rest of the world was too ugly and grim for someone so virginal and pure as Sana.
His classmates' faces slowed and stalled into a drift as the bell stopped ringing. Their screams reduced to murmurs. The murmur sounded like nails on a blackboard. An ugly hum of decadence, a discordant, incongruous melody for Sana's beautiful exit from the stage. The dream of Sana tapered into reality. She left the school building, the last student and the last peon left too. Young K never followed her out. He always left after her and everyone else, waiting for the school to empty, so that he could savor the day's sighting of Sana in the absence of the world. In loneliness and silence.
Satyavrat]
It was the eighties. It was cool to be a rebel, it was cool to be different and Shillong was the home of the stolen generation. There couldn't have been a better place.
It was always the same cafe - Green Garden. The name was little lame, but the food was good and cheap. He parked himself on his regular table at the far end and ordered a black coffee. AC/DC played somewhere in the background about getting to the top. He lit a cigarrette and waited for his friend. S was late as usual.
[Arvind Krishna]
As the burning embers fell from his cigarette, he pondered about things. Random, inchoate thoughts floated in his mind, like a turbulent fluctuations in a wake. K. He had named himself this, to remind himself of Kafka's hero. The one who was charged for a crime he didn't even know he had committed. He could still remember how he had not been able to put down this book and had read it enough number of times so that the pages started falling apart, just like his social status and his sanity.
His face was a testament to his open rebellion against everybody. The world could go fuck itself for all he cared. And then he tried imagining how the world would go about doing this. A smile found his way through his, by now, parched lips that had once known love. Or so he had thought.
Sana was late. She ran towards home. Her step father wouldn't like it if she came late. She was afraid of the repercussion on her mom and baby brother. Perhaps he is hitting them right now as she dawdled on the road, she thought. Or maybe he... she brushed aside the fearful thoughts from her mind as she ran with all her might.
K followed her at a distance. It wasnt too difficult to keep pace with her. At last she reached the house. He saw her running into the house and then heard the shriek, followed by deathly silence.
Freezing Story for the rest of the Day
please hold your comments and writing.
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