One Sided Love Can Be Fatal!
The list of murders is long enough to raise alarm bells – Rinku Patil (Mumbai), Jyoti Kumari (Pune), Mahalaxmi (Bangalore), Shraddha Walkar (Mumbai), Soumya (Ernakulum), Swathi (Chennai), Sayeeda Khan (Kolkata), Shivani Bhatnagar (Delhi), Moumita Debnath (Kolkata), Jyoti Singh aka Nirbhaya (Delhi) and many, many more…
I don’t want anyone else on this list.
I haven’t researched about such happenings in other countries – yet, I bumped into a video called ‘Finding Mini’ – which means such kind of murders happen in other countries as well…
Girls – After reading this story – I want you to decide who you would like to be… Priti? … or … Alisha?
Another thing I would like to implore – If at any time, your instincts tell you that you are being followed, watched or stalked – please be sure to inform your parents, family and friends to avoid any mishaps with your life… Now, you also have police help apps and helpline numbers to call for help…
One advise to girls – if you feel threatened or stalked – please tell it to your parents, family and close friends, don’t sit dumb and think it’s a passing infatuation – they might be able to protect you… you never know the stalker may be a psycho…
As usual, the statutory warning…
This work is fiction where I had planned to provide a poetic justice to a girl who was brutally murdered by ‘inhuman’ out of one sided love affair… Any resemblance to anyone you know, any place is purely coincidental – or – maybe, your wild imagination…
This story was written towards the end of 1990s when simple keypad phones were available and media was not that advanced… Private NEWS channels were yet to be introduced… Few people had internet and platforms like Facebook were yet to be introduced…
I would like to start with a True Incident giving you the background and inspiration for this fiction… Somewhere outskirts of Mumbai …
‘The exams for the board were scheduled and students were busy in studies. The last exam paper for the year was being attended by students at an examination centre and the classroom was tense awaiting the start of the time for that paper…
Suddenly, few goons entered a classroom brandishing swords, knives and a pistol and a chaos followed… They ordered everyone to get out of the classroom except a girl… What followed was horrible… One of them poured a Can of petrol on her and lit her up – her screams could be heard for a long distance, but nobody dared to come to her aid… the girl perished in those flames and the goons made away to safety brandishing their weapons…’
Next day – this incident prominently made the headlines of all major and not so popular newspapers. (Yes – this was the time when people depended on newspapers for news – 24 hour private main stream media was yet to happen in India – owning a mobile phone was a dream for many and the only NEWS on TV was by Doordarshan aired at specific times for 15 minutes each session and it was controlled by government…)
The photograph of the classroom in one of the newspapers was horrible to look at and one could imagine the agony of that girl who was burnt alive – this murder was a result of frustrated One Sided Love Affair.
Everyone followed the newspapers seeking justice for the girl and the newspapers were providing with the proceedings of investigation… It was a time when the entire system seemed corrupt including the police machinery and people had little faith… People were scared of police not because they were strict with law enforcement – but you never knew what kind of bribe would be asked… You can only try to understand those times…
Anyways, coming back to the follow up of the incident – It seems two of the goons were arrested while others never made to news that they were arrested. The main accused seemed to have committed a suicide by jumping in front of a train which again was doubtful and people had questions in their mind of the truth about the investigation and the suicide by the prime accused… the prime accused seemed to be from a rich family associated with political family.
I was young at that time and I had a feeling reading the news items and analysing my own young way of imagination that the investigation seemed to be eyewash and I have every reason to believe (even today) that the prime accused is at large, hidden or out the country and is living a normal life… So I decided to write a fictitious story to give the girl a poetic justice…
At that time I wasn’t an author and I used to write short essays – I tried to put forth my views by sending few write ups to various newspapers telling what my doubts are – the write ups never saw the light of the day – probably ended up in dustbins – people had doubts that even the newspapers were biased and reported the news the way they were paid for… it seems even today they function the same way – that’s what most of people and I believe…
So I decided to write what I thought and publish it – however I got into the writer’s block of not being able to write enough to convert my thoughts into a book…
Further, when I wrote the thoughts and showed it to my friends, they thought the details were boring and people wouldn’t read such boring analysis – they suggested me to use my imagination and form an entertaining story which people would be interested to read with romance, suspense and action… I kept thinking – I had an outline for this story but the writer’s block prevented me from doing so…
I tried writing the outline of the story in my mind in different ways, trying to imagine what or how could a particular actor fit in the main role for I thought I would do so by writing a script for a Bollywood movie. I could write maximum up to 15-20 sheets of a notebook but no further. I used to get stuck. Then many years later, I had a chance to get some business deals with various production houses of Bollywood and I came to conclusion that the industry doesn’t work the way I thought and I dropped the idea to write for Bollywood. I told myself that whenever possible I will write this story sometime later and get it published. I shelved the whole idea at that time…
It was about end of 1990s and few people exposed scams using a hidden camera. That was new method at that time and it caught my imagination. I started following the exposes by these so called hidden camera journalists… Then again, newer topics took over. The gulf war also engulfed the entire world.
Somewhere deep inside in me, two stories started to come together – the poor girl who was murdered (for which I had the outline) and another of a fictitious girl who was bold as well as brave with a hidden camera and other happenings around (I had titled it as Adventures of Alisha Fire) – finally, a story developed combining & integrating these, fitting the pieces together. Main thought behind was that, I wanted the girls to lose their timid attitude and be bold and strong enough to fight such situations off… I felt confident of writing 100 pages at least – what I didn’t realize that when I started writing the story – other things would affect me…
The first block I encountered was – which language should I write the story? I am good with 3 languages and I have written poems in all the 3 languages…
I decided that I would write the story in English (Easy to type since we are used to the keypad) but, again, which English should I use – The British? The American? The Indian English?
I checked some facts and found that more people in India spoke the language than most of the world put together… at least 150 million…
And many more use it as second language to communicate through written format though they use one of the local languages to speak. This cleared my doubts – Indian English is the most spoken English all over the world and I decided to write the book in this language – for that matter all my books have this language as a base. This also gave me an option to dip into Indian culture once in a while in few of instances in the books I wrote. Also, I didn’t know how and where to publish…
I decided to make a final effort… It had taken me a whopping almost a decade to complete the story – no don’t get into awe – it was because this was the first story to be written in long format – it was so long and that it delved into scenes I wrote deeply – to almost 700+ foolscap papers. I don’t know how many pages would be needed to get these converted into normal pocket book size of 5×8 inches.
This is something that new authors would agree with and maybe new wannabe writers would learn from – I kept on writing. Sometimes I couldn’t put the protagonist or his love in danger. Sometimes, spirit of love and romance took over deviating from the main theme of the story. In fact, I was in love with my characters of Priti and Alisha (normal girls didn’t attract me…)
I edited some of those scenes yet the story is in about 500+ plus foolscap pages. Still that’s huge. If you convert that into the normal book size of 5×8 – they would calculate about almost about 700 pages… The calculation normally works out to 1.6 times normal A4 sheet typed with font size 12…
I am going to publish this story as I have written it – no additions, no deletions and definitely no editing – all in its raw form. The reason is I want to keep the story as it was written (I may correct few grammatical and spelling mistakes, but that’s okay) and let the new wannabe writers understand what happens when you have no one to guide you when writing your first story. How and where you can deviate from the main theme delving deep into one scene or the other and how you have to pull the story by its ears to get it back into the line you want to develop…
Rest assured – you are going to read and think about this story for sure… I had carried the first notebook of 150 pages to my office which housed more than 5000 employees and I know from the reaction (about 700 plus of them) and my interactions that told me – they loved it… why, few creative of my colleagues came up with cover ideas because they thought that this was a publishing material and they wanted to contribute…
This was an introduction to the story and I think it was a long one too…
So, without wasting more time and space – I am starting to type out the pages with your blessings … and try and publish this over Kindle… for it is a platform where I can publish a long story without much effort or cost… For a paperback – the financial angle doesn’t seem to work out…
I may post few chapters as teasers on the website www.storiesandme.com for people to read those and I definitely would like wannabe authors / writers to read this one to understand how a story gets elongated simply because you are in love with your characters… or you can’t bring upon yourself to kill them…
