[It's been lying dead for a while now and it kind of pains my heart to see it thus. I am starting off on this. Please read and add.]
K turned the key into the lock and walked in. He chose the corner that was the least dirty and carelessly dumped his single bag there. A thick layer of dust covered the single table and chair. The matteress on the cot was ancient and probably was home to various bugs and insects. He would have to get a new one. Sunlight filtered in throught the wooden slats on the window and dust motes danced in the beams. The noises from the streets below - of hawkers crying out wares, taxis honking and people shouting in general - seemed muted and far away. He carefully cleaned a corner of the table and perched on it and began to think. He had clean slate in front of him - well, almost. He would have to make it matter, and he would have to be careful not to screw up like he had in Delhi.
Delhi, he thought, was far away. Diwakar had pulled strings and somehow he had escaped a prison sentence. He still did not understand fully what had happened, but from what little he could understand, he was in awe of Diwakar. Diwakar had faked K's death in an accident. They found a body in the mangled car on the highway with the right things on it. The coroner and the police had said that the face was crushed beyond any recognition. K was declared dead. In the meanwhile, Diwakar had arranged for the plastic surgery and since K was pretty much penniless, it had been decided that K would work for Diwakar and pay it off.
K became one of Diwakar's fixers. His job was pretty simple - whenever there was a problem, he had to fix it. With whatever means necessary. Violence was completely acceptable - a broken leg or an arm here, a missing finger there. And K did it well. It pricked his conscience sometimes, but he justified it with his continued survival and freedom.
Then one day, after about three years, Diwakar gave him an assignment that required delicate handling and trip outside Delhi. He was handed a fat envelope with tickets, money and vague instructions. Further instructions would await him at his destination, he was told. And that was how K landed up in Calcutta in that dusty room tucked away in the bylanes of Chowringhee.
[Tarun]
The room had come cheap from the cash-strapped elderly Anglo-Indian who lived there. "The city of Palaces indeed", he murmured to himself. Chowringhee had come a long way from its colonial glory days. The mansions reeked of neglect, with every elegant facade in various states of dilapidation and disrepair. He got onto his feet, and with a forlorn look, he surveyed the room. In a very apt way, the state of this room rather resembled his life at the moment. The room was nothing but a liability to the landlord. He locked the door and made his way to Sealdah railway station. The newly constructed Metro station was gleaming in just the way that the rest of the city was not. He got on a train to Kalyani, hoping his contact there would find him. The instructions Diwakar had given hadn't bothered to go further than this.
[Vivek]
The train ride was long and he killed time drinking tea out of little earthen pots. The beggars on the train sang out in rattling voices shaking their tins under his nose for money. He dropped some coins in. His good deed for the day.
[Tarun]
The man sitting next to him hadn't spoken a word since he had bumped into him at Howrah. He had just wagged a finger as if to say follow me. To K, he was the picture of the stereotypical Calcutta intellect. With a neat starched kurta, and his nose buried deep in "Shatranj Ke Khiladi", he would not have been out of place at the coffee houses. The train trundled into a station called Ghoshpara. Starched-Kurta got up and made for the door. K followed him. After an eerily silent train journey, K was more welcoming of what lay ahead. Not that it weighed on his conscience anyway.
Kalyani was a small town. Till very recently it was just another one of those towns that spring up near big factories. It was only now that Kalyani had woken up to modernization. Starched-Kurta walked out of the station and got into a cycle-rickshaw. K sat down beside him and the the rickety contraption lurched into motion with various creaks and groans. A twenty minute ride later, they were dropped outside the gates to a fairly-large sized park which was called Central Park since it was at the centre of the town. It seemed to be the main town centre with shops along the road that ran around the park. Starched-Kurta walked in and K followed him. Yet again.
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Sana looked at the corpse fearfully. Terror still gripped her. She was unable to comprehend the situation. K heard a whimper inside the house. It was Sana's mother. She lay in a pool of blood. A small boy, about 4 years old slept on a mat on the floor. K reached out and gently cradled her head in his arms. She was bleeding profusely. He whipped out his Mobile and called Diwakar. Diwakar would know what to do. He had got him out of many a mess before. But this was big. He had killed a man.
Sana staggered into the kitchen.
A lot had changed in the last 60 years of independence. Though there was one aspect of the Indian Republic that one could trust not to change. The judiciary. It still was the same over-worked, under-staffed and acutely clogged system that it was. So much the better for K.
The events of that day were sketchy at best. And the picture projected by the press of a alcohol maddened husband beating his wife to near death was more interesting to the base public than the actions of K. One one for certain knew what he did that day. For Sana wouldn't talk. On that eventful day, something cracked on the beautiful facade of Sana, something perhaps un-fixable. K supposed that when,a year later, she picked up her bags, she might have left in search of that illusive fix.
Godd stuff folks. I think we will need to add some stuff in between what silverine wrote and tarun wrote.
Tarun's should come some place near the end of the chapter. I am thinking we should put some court-scence police-station type stuff in the middle.
Or diwakar could be part of the shady tsubaki organization and gets some sleaze lawyer to save K from the prison sentence and thus K also gets stuck in tsubaki web.
Whatsay to this????
Lets not bring the Tsubaki corp so early in to the life of K. Let K get more shady and cynical before the Tsubaki events.
Perhaps Diwakar could be the guy guy who grooms him the ways of shadiness.
okay... up to you guys... i am ok with anything.
"Hello", said the voice on the phone.
"Hello! Diwakar?", K replied and asked at the same time.
"K this is not the right time. I am attending to some important business here."
"No, Diwakar listen. This is an emergency. I am in some really deep shit."
"Don't tell me they kicked you out of school again. I had a difficult time convincing them to take you back, the last time."
The small boy was now wide awake. "Papa", he shouted and ran to the hall and to his shock, found that his father was brutally murdered. The boy fainted. K was now nervous.
"I killed a man", he blurted into the phone.
"You son of a bitch, I cant get you out of this. I am a politician, not the President." and saying this Diwakar disconnected the line.
Sana now seemed to have come back to her senses. "K, What have you done ?. That was my father."
"Sana, I was just trying to protect you. He has injured your mother real bad and if I was not here, she would not be alive."
"K, you bastard. It was not my father who hurt my mother. It was the landlord. He was here some time ago about the rent that was due. When my mother spoke back to him, he tried to take advantage of her and when she fought back he hit her with a metallic rod. That was when my father arrived and he ran out through the back door. You retard, did you even see a weapon in my father's hands?"
K's nervous fits were now uncontrollable. He fumbled for his phone again and redialled Diwakar's number.
This time Diwakar had expected that K would call back. He picked the phone after just half a ring and asked, "How many witnesses ?"
"Th..Three", K said.
"You have absolutely no chance. What the hell were u thinking murdering someone in front of three people?"
"Diwakar..no, i'll explain it to you. Just get here. I'll give you the address."
"Not possible.. Do u want to get me involved too?..Fuck You."
"Then what do u suggest?", K asked.
There was a pause for about three seconds and then Diwakar said - "You can't run away, K. There are 3 witnesses."
"Diwakar, please help me!", K sobbed.
"Have you considered plastic surgery?", was the reply.
To Su: Silverline wrote, "Sana lay on floor sobbing. There was blood on her face. The gash on her head wasn't fatal but it must have hurt like hell." meaning Sana was hurt badly. If the landlord and the father were fighting, how did Sana get involved?
I wrote, "And the picture projected by the press of a alcohol maddened husband beating his wife to near death...". Maybe this piece was meant to come later. Still the other two entries contradicts your new post. See if a little modification will do.
"Have you considered plastic surgery?", was the reply"
That was a neat move!
Folks... gime sometime...There is some righteous stuff here. I'll put all of them together into a nice convincing story line.
I like su's ending.. but there seems to be a lot of inconsistency regarding story line as tarun pointed, also salpa variation in the 'way the story was being written'
Su can u take care of those...
Subbu make some modifications to my post man..and try to fit it.
Will do... swalpa time beku.
@AnupSu, silverine and Tarun
So far we have projected K as being totally screwed up and anti-social. Taking off on Anup Su's story, Sana's bloodiness can be made to look like being the result of the blood splattered from her father's murder. Pack the gash, it can be modified to not include the gash. My suggestion is this... It is a bold suggestion, but let's discuss how it might turn out...
Let it be that K has murdered Sana's father. Now, K shall not be known as K in his childhood, let's name him as something else. YoungK wants to make an impression on Sana, he thinks its her father who's beating her, he is unable to control his murderous anger , and trying to act like the knight in shining armor, he murders Sana's father. It turns out that Sana's father is indeed innocent. This is when he opts for a plastic surgery. Now, make Diwaker a handyman of a politician, one of the young thugs. We should say that K is an orphan, so that we do not have to deal with the complications of his parents coming into the picture. In an almost cinematic scene, YoungK calls Diwaker, YoungK doesn't panic, he is a cold blooded murderer, then Diwaker says you have fucked up, there is no hope for you. Then Diwaker coldly remembers that his politician boss wanted some specimens for trying out Tsubaki's plastic surgery. That is where Tsubaki should be introduced. Then, YoungK is reported missing, but K comes back to the school as "K" with a new identity, a new face and a new voice.
It may sound very pulpy, but if we handle the story well, it can turn out way better than just a pulpy Sidney Sheldon level story.
The twist would be that as a murderous psychopath, he takes a sadistic pleasure in his association with Sana. Back with a MillsandBoonesque face and voice, he woos Sana and she becomes his girl friend and later wife, perhaps. A departure from traditional stories, K is going to be a cold blooded killer without remorse, taking sadistic pleasure in having her fall in love with him, and she will never find out who he really is.
Stretching the story a little further, for fans of Kafka, Rushdie and dystopic sci-fi, plastic surgery and changing faces becomes an obsession, a sort of narcotic addiction for K. And it's this type of addiction, gives Tsubaki a major role in the story. By mass marketing of their surgery and its accessibility to the average middle class people, it becomes a sort of addiction. A world where people are changing faces and voices everyday.
It becomes a deeper question about what we associate people with, their faces, voices, and how we would cope if their faces and voices changed, but their personalities remained intact. When changing faces and voices wears down the weak masses and drives them insane, it makes monstrous super-villains out of cold blooded, strong men like K and the Thug.
I feel that a company that offers cheap quick plastic surgeries can make a big profit and have the kind of monopoly that coke and pepsi have.
sha's idea, as always appeals to me.
And I also think that a market like the young and poor capitalist economy that India is, will surely have a lot of buyers for cheap plastic surgeries. In a country where Shah Rukh Khan and Fair and Lovely are more important to the society than universities, cheap plastic surgeries would surely become a rage!
an alternative idea is that
is Tsubaki corp could be this agency that reconstructs memories and Sana really does not like K. K has altered his memories so that he now thinks that she used to like him
but the reality is that she died long ago(or thought to have died long ago) in some tragic cataclysm, like tsunami level thing.
the idea he thinks, and this gives a lot of scope to go in depth into the psyche, is that what is the difference between dream and memory
if you have nothing to compare it with...you can be made to believe whatever you want to.
and the other thing is that K must have some addiction
so basically, some time in the future when he meets sana, his drug abuse and the conflicting info that she is not dead...just fucks his brain up properly
therefore the idea is to see how he comes to grip with his altered memory...
This chapter has become unnecessarily fast-paced & more like a thriller, which is in deep contrast to the characterizations & subtleness of previous chapters. I'm not convinced with drunk father/torturing landlord scene in 2008 Delhi.
I agree with Sha's idea. AK's idea is nice but then the story becomes completely offline, we can't incorporate both of them (It reminds me of AK's fascination with dreams/memories/reality).
Sha's idea of murderous psychopath is nice, but we must dwell more into the roots of his behaviour. Also, let us not bring the landlord in, instead that K, upon seeing that Sana's father is 'on the verge of hitting' her, gets furious and murders her.
Also, I don't think that plastic surgery must be shown available to anyone, it must be something widespread, still illegal, like ganja. And the quality of techniques might also be shown variable. Let us show that face transplants techniques are already in(they are, as a matter of fact), but a new revolutionary algorithm for really easy/painless/cheap/extremely effective transplant is in testing phase. Tsubaki discovers K, by the aid of their political contacts which will bring Diwakar(though the name is way too sweet sounding) in the scene. He is rendered the most suitable candidate, and bribing the Human Rights people, Tsubaki will get hold of K and experiment on him.
Correction- I meant K murders Sana's father.
hey machies good going!! I think K's friend S must be left out of the 3rd chapter or be given more emphasis. Plus not everybody in the world has alphabets for names.
"She was pure. She was clean. It was as if this revolting hideousness all around him would never touch her. She stopped talking to her friends for a moment to turn around and he looked away.Sana, he thought, was one of God's better creations. She was a dream."
I suggest we fuck up Sana's face because she's perfect. K could surrender himself to Tsubaki for not being able to pay-up. K is anyways kinda hideous. I hope this does not offset the story too much. We'll have to tinker with the first part of the 4 th chapter. What say?
landlord incident is not a good twist, it brings in unnecessary complications, if not the plot could have deepened and developed more.. i was hoping Sana and K would come together but now thats not a possibility unless Sha or AK's ideas come in, but that would be a huge deviation at this point, such things should wait..
@Jammy,
It is not too early to introduce the nature of K's character. The events need not be in a chronological order, we can touch upon the aspects of K's childhood later, we can talk about what happened to his family and his links to Diwaker and Sana sometime later. Let us give a glimpse of what is to come and stop it at that, without explaining too much. The story line will not get complicated if you incorporate my idea and/or AK's idea. It is only going to give us a lot of food for thought and the story will go deeper into characters and feelings rather than remain a pulp-Batman-Superman-Sidney Sheldon type story with little more than the story to it.
the whole landlord incident seems very crazy, doesn't appeal to me much, someone killing someone with such a reason or rather the lack of it here..
In the few hours that I slept, foreign booys have gone in high gear and written stuff. I am a little busy at work today.
Sha can you please re - write the 4th chapter with your ideas included. Suggest the modification that we need to put in Chapter 3 to link it up.
Pandu, fuck subtlety for now. We will make it nice and subtle in the end. Worry about all that later.
At all, Ra is in Nagpur and most probably will not be online over the next couple of days. Sha, take over for the day. I'll sync up with you in the night(my night) today and we will rehash chapter 4 and 3 to reflect the new status.
Since K seems to be the protagonist in the story, I think it would be more appealing to a reader if it can be shown that K turned out to be what he is, not entirely because of his screwed up mentality but also because of certain situations that forced him to be a cold-blooded murderer. People would identify themselves with such a character more easily because they can relate to incidents in their real life where they felt that justice was denied to them. The story needs to be different but thats not the end of the story. :). The reader also needs to be engrossed. Playing on the reader's psychology is very important when it comes to deliver an interesting piece of reading. IMO, I think we shud make K a cold-blooded murderer but it must be shown that it was not entirely his choice. Also concentrate on postive aspects like the strength of K's character, his undying love for Sana and his intelligence in handling situations. People shud be able to see both the positive and negative side of K. His negative character shud outweigh his positive, very subtly.
Ok, if the landlord thing seems to be a bit anachronistic for Delhi 2008, then we could probably scrap that and include someone else. Anyway this is just an opinion.
It is not anachronistic in 2008 delhi. shit like that still happens in india.
I propose that we get rid of K as a bad guy. Let Sana look upon him as a her savior but with fear.
It should be an attraction that is tempered with fear. K should show flashes of compassion and humanity so that as su says , the reader realizes that he is a after all a human forced into bad circumstances. think of the main protagonist in the movie D - desu. he is a nice normal chap forced into circumstances that make him a underworld don.
Check your mails!
phoof.. so many...
Dude Sha i completely agree to what u r story line is
But i also belive that the juice is what u gave, Su idea of playing around with the minds of the charector and building them, i fell, is very important.
I would suggest that we can continue with small incidents (sub plots).
More importantly, let there be a story .. discussions are taking the 'pulp' out of it.. whatsay?
Guys, just take a look at this. This won't fit into the story now. Think of some time when u could probably incorporate this into the story. Dont want to forget this idea, so just posting it now.
Like the justifications of an underworld Mafia don, like a terrorist organization's religious justifications, K's justifications for his actions were based on a very simple piece of philosophy delivered in primary school - "Don't judge a book by its cover"
K felt in his mind that he lived in so shallow a world that you could not sink even some good sense into it by conventional methods. The way a person looks is a very important factor that decides how the World sees him. He thought that if external beauty is conquered, what remains is a person's internal beauty and what better way to do this than by bringing plastic surgery to the common man. When K murdered, tortured and cheated, he justified his actions on this fanatical theory - "Means always justify an end." He could quote from a hundred religious texts. But sadly, K's theories don't hold in a capitalistic society ridden by cut-throat competition. People developed and patented facial features. The crooked nose, the high forehead, mustard eyes, cheek bone structure, freckle patterns, "Aryan" ears and even some skin colours were all patented. How good you looked now, depended on how creative and intelligent one was in designing facial features. There was no change in shallowness because now instead of people getting attracted to physical beauty, they were attracted to intelligence and creativity, subconsciously knowing that such people can become beautiful in their unique ways when given an oppurtunity to do plastic surgery at the age of 21. Strength of character(or 'inner beauty' as K liked to call it) still did not have any role to play in this new plastic world. K had misjudged.
The room had come cheap from the cash-strapped elderly Anglo-Indian who lived there. "The city of Palaces indeed", he murmured to himself. Chowringhee had come a long way from its colonial glory days. The mansions reeked of neglect, with every elegant facade in various states of dilapidation and disrepair. He picked up his bag, and with a forlorn look, he surveyed the room. In a very apt way, the state of this room rather resembled his life at the moment. The room was nothing but a liability to the landlord. He locked the door and made his way to Sealdah railway station. The newly constructed metro station was gleaming in just the way that the rest of the city was not. He got on a train to Howrah, hoping his contact in Calcutta would find him. The instructions Diwakar had given hadn't bothered to go further than this.
The man sitting next to him hadn't spoken a word since he had bumped into him at Howrah. He had just wagged a finger as if to say follow me. To K, he was the picture of the stereotypical Calcutta intellect. With a neat starched kurta, and his nose buried deep in "Shatranj Ke Khiladi", he would not have been out of place at the coffee houses.
After an eerily silent train journey, K was more welcoming of what lay ahead. Not that it weighed on his conscience anyway.
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