My Misadventure

I observed him carefully as he walked to the door. I knew that time was running out but suppressed the urge to check my watch. I took a deep breath and started counting in reverse under my breath. "Ten, nine, eight, seven..."

 

“six, five, four..” I was still mentally counting when he came and sat at the bar stool furthest away from where I was sitting. He was more handsome from close quarters than in the printout I had in my purse. ‘What would you like to have?’ the bartender asked him. ‘I am waiting for someone, give me 10 minutes,’ he said. I finished the reverse counting and then got up from my stool and walked to the door resisting from looking back and walked out.

 

I walked to the café opposite the bar and sat at the window seat from where I would watch the bar door and get a flimsy glimpse of the insides of the bar. I waited. Around 10 minutes later, my mobile rang.  It was my sister’s mobile. I watched it ring, but did not pick it up. The ringing came to a stop. Then it started again. After a count of 10, I picked up the phone and said in a weak fake voice, ‘Hello….’

 

‘Where are you?’ the voice at the other end asked. ‘At home,’ I continued in my fake voice. ‘You were to come to 18 Park Avenue today,’ he said. ‘I know, I was starting to come, but my parents suddenly came home,’ I replied. There was a silence and then he said, ‘Ok, we shall meet tomorrow, or I will come home and talk to your parents’.

 

‘No, no, do not come, I will be there surely tomorrow’, I said and put down the phone.

 

I continued sitting there and in about half an hour, he walked out of the bar door. I also go up and started walking behind him. I did not have any plan nor was I sure what I wanted to do.

 

It all started a couple of months back. My younger sister of fifteen, Shraddha was happily chatting on the internet. Something in her expression made me go and stand behind her and see whom she was chatting with. A young handsome man of maybe 25 years stared out of the Facebook page at me. I was shocked. The guy looks older than me and what is my little sister doing chatting with such an old guy... these thoughts haunted me the whole day while I was in the college. I was all of 20 years old.

 

In the evening, I broached the subject. She happily told me that she made friends with this guy. ‘He is such a handsome guy, looks like a film star. I am very lucky that he wanted to be my friend. Most of my class are his friends’, an excited Shraddha told me happily singing praises of Pratik, the guy. I sat listening to her with fear and apprehension of the unknown. But I did not have the heart to give her a lesson about the dangers of befriending strangers on the net. I would often see Shraddha chatting very animatedly with Pratik at different times of the day and soon she was on the mobile talking to him. But I kept my silence.

 

I did not realise that my silence would be so dangerous. I was in a world of my own… college, friends, studies…. Or, maybe it was my immaturity. Today morning, Shraddha came to me and said hesitantly, ‘May I speak to you?’ ‘Of course, any time,’ I said perplexed.

 

‘Pratik is asking me to run away with him,’ she gushed in. I was shocked and appalled.  I composed myself and asked her to tell me from the beginning as to how she met him and why he was asking her to elope with him.

 

‘One day after school, while I was waiting for the car, I saw Pratik chatting with Swati, one of my classmates. He was so good-looking that I continued to stare at him. He saw me and asked Swati to introduce us. I thought since he was a friend of Swati, there was no harm in befriending him. So it started like that.’

 

‘We became friends on the Facebook and would chat on the messenger and later we moved to chatting and talking on the WhatsApp. About 15 days back, he told me that I was a beautiful girl and asked me if I could send him some pictures. I sent him some photos.’ she continued.

 

‘Then about a few days back, he started sending me ugly, dirty pictures. I asked him to stop. He laughed and teased me saying that I was too immature for my age and this was what life was all about. Then he sent me a picture of a scantily dressed girl and I was shocked to see that the girl in the picture was of me. But Sneha, I promise, I never wore such a dress,’ said Shraddha her eyes filled with tears.

 

Her tearful entreaties continued. ‘I stopped talking to him. But he would call me and plead with me saying that he was sorry. Yesterday he told me that he could not live without me and I should run away with him. When I told him that I was too young and I would not do so, he told me that he would be waiting for me today at 18 Park Avenue or he would come home and show our parents the scantily dressed photo. He says he has more photos like those’, a visibly distressed Shraddha said.

 

‘If I do not go, he will come home and parents will be very angry with me. What shall I do, Sneha?’ a petrified teary Shraddha asked me.

 

I consoled my sister. ‘I will go and meet Pratik.  We shall decide what to do after that. You promise me to stay put till I return and do not leave the house for any reason’, I said taking a promise from her. I felt that I was her saviour, her hero, her guardian angel. I carried her mobile and a FB Photo printout of Pratik with me and left to meet him with only the knowledge that I gained from seeing a few heroines in thriller movies and in television serials doing such heroic acts under such circumstances.

 

And so here I was, walking behind Pratik. I had no idea what to do or what I would tell him if he confronted me. I just continued walking behind him. A couple of times, he stopped and looked back. Sneha, he does not recognize you, so stop worrying, I reassured myself.

 

Suddenly he stopped and I saw him talking to two burly guys and all three of them went inside a building. I stood there wondering whether to go inside looking for Pratik. I was nonplussed. I will just go up to him, hold his collar and tell him to keep away from my sister… no, no, those two guys are like Pahelwan, they will pick me up like a garbage and bin me. Such conflicting thoughts were going in my mind.  Just then all three of them along with another couple of handsome guys and a couple of young girls of Shraddha’s age came out. The girls looked fearful and hesitant.  The two burly guys stayed back and the rest got into a car and left. I stood there stunned, not knowing what to do. All my heroism vanished seeing the girls.

 

I just started walking fast and then running, oblivious to the fact that people were watching me bewildered. I called an auto and went to my father’s office. My father was a very senior employee in a MNC and had a chamber of his own. ‘May I go to see my father?’ I asked the receptionist who knew me. ‘Sneha, what is wrong? Why are you crying? Do you want some water?’ the receptionist asked me sympathetically. It was then that I realised that I was crying. ‘No, please tell my father that I want to meet him urgently,’ I said.

 

My father came out to the lobby and ushered me in to his chamber. He was looking so worried since we had never been to his office on weekdays and that too without my father’s knowledge.

 

‘What is the matter, beta?’ my father asked lovingly with all concern.  I gushed out the whole story sobbingly. My father called my mother, who worked at another MNC in the vicinity. I was sitting dazed in the sofa and my father narrated the whole incident to my mother. It was only then that the seriousness of the situation and the risk I had taken by going alone to see Pratik sunk in and I started to shiver. My mother hugged me and consoled me like a small baby, while my father was on the phone talking to someone higher up in the police ranks.

 

We all went home. A very nervous Shraddha was waiting at home as promised crying her heart out. My mother hugged her and we sat huddled together waiting for the police. Some senior police officers from the cybercrime department arrived. They spoke to Shraddha and took away her computer and mobile. They also took the mobile numbers of Shraddha’s friends. They wanted to talk to her classmates and also intimate their parents and the school authorities. They also told us about cybercrime and the dangers lurking around: cyberbullying, cyberstalking, stalking, and about child abuse.

 

After about six months…

I had nearly forgotten about the incident and Shraddha was also back to her cheerful self. One evening, a police officer from the Cybercrime department came home. ‘We have got the guys’, he said. ‘It was a big network. Handsome guys would befriend one girl from a school, and through her slowly build the friendship with her classmates. Then they would spread their net and lure these innocent girls to elope or blackmail them to meet them up. Once these girls where in their loop, then they would use them for making child pornography,’ he detailed.

 

Once the police officer left, Shraddha and I hugged each other and thanked god for our good fortune. ‘You will always come to your mother or to me with any problem, however big or small,’ my father said comfortingly. We promised……

Reviews

[JayG]

• I observed him carefully as he walked to the door. I knew that time was running out but suppressed the urge to check my watch. I took a deep breath and started counting in reverse under my breath. "Ten, nine, eight, seven..."

When you read this it makes perfect sense. You know who this “him” is, his age, his situation, his history, why he is where he is, where he’s going, and why. The reader knows only that it’s an unknown “him," in an unknown place, going somewhere unknown.”

That aside, the speaker is equally unknown in all aspects. This could be a child speaking of watching Santa, could be someone watching with admiration, hatred, confusion, or any other reason.

And, he's going to "the" door? What door? The reader doesn’t even know what planet they’re on. They don’t know if the character is coming in or going out, or where the one speaking is in relationship to the one being watched.

The one who watches knows what’s going on, as they see it. The one walking to the unknown door knows what’s going on, as they see it. But the reader, lacking context for the smallest thing, has words that have no meaning to them, as they're read. Will that reader continue, hoping they'll eventually make sense of it? Given that you cannot retroactively remove confusion, and that there is no second first-impression, would you?

It’s not a matter of your talent, your writing skill, or the story. It’s that in our school days we learn not the smallest thing about how to present a story on the page. Why? Because Fiction-Writing is a profession, and professions are acquired IN ADDITION to our school-day skills.

In those classes we learn a set of general skills that will make us useful to future employers. And employers want our writing abilities to focus in giving the reader an informational experience. As such, you would tell the reader that a given character exited a certain place at a certain time, stepped into the rain, and found it uncomfortable. It's fact-based and author-centric writing—nonfiction—which is why we were assigned so many reports and essays.

Fiction? In the same general situation, as E. L. Doctorow puts it: “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.” And did any of your teachers even mention that it was possible to do that?

The short version: To write fiction you need to use fiction-writing techniques. And since they’re not given to us in school, and we no more learn them by reading than we learn to cook by eating, they must be learned as a result of a decision by, and work done by, the author.

Certainly, that’s not good news after all the work you’ve done. But since it is something you need to know, and fixable, I thought you’d want to know.

The bad news? It’s not a nice simple list of, “Do this instead of that.” It is a profession, after all.

The good news? Learning about something you WANT to know isn’t a task to hate. And…the practice is writing more stories. What’s not to like about that?

There are lots of ways of acquiring the information you need. Obviously, you could get a degree in commercial Fiction-Writing. There are conferences, workshops, and retreats. But the place to begin is at the beginning, with some basic texts on the skills and specialized knowledge required. My personal suggestion is to pick up a free copy of the best book I’ve found on the basics of creating scenes from the website address listed just below this paragraph. It won’t make a pro of you, but it will give you the tools and knowledge needed, if it’s in you to do that. So grab a copy before they change their mind.
https://ru.b-ok2.org/book/2640776/e749ea

And for what it’s worth, the articles in my WordPress writing blog are mostly based on that book, and might provide a bit of an overview of the field, and the differences between fiction and nonfiction techniques.

Do dig in. And while you do, hang in there, and keep on writing.

Jay Greenstein
https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/