Unknown hero

See how I battle terrorist and save my country

It was a bright sunny day. I was reading a book on my front lawn and I was really engrossed in it. When suddenly a
well-dressed man, possibly in his forties, threw a bag on my lawn. I barely got a glimpse of his face as he was wearing sunglasses and held a handkerchief over his mouth as he ran away. I called him out but he did not listen. He jumped into a red car and sped away.

Curious to know what was going on, I looked at the bag for a moment, wondering if it perhaps contained a bomb. I took the bag to my room but did not have the courage to open it. It was much heavier than expected which made me wonder what could be inside this mysterious bag. I started to put the bag on my table, but I heard a police siren so I hid the bag under my bed. I tried to calm myself before facing the police

Two young men dressed in black uniforms jumped from the police car and rang our door bell.

I barely got the door open before they demanded, "Did you see a red car around here?"

"No, no, what -- what's this all about?" I stammered nervously to police.

"These bank thieves stole three million rupees and fled."
"Well, yeah, I did see a red car zoom down this way and around that turn at the end of this street."

The uniformed officers jumped in their car in hot pursuit.

I went to my room and carefully opened the bag -- there I saw three million rupees. I had never seen that much money together before. I saw a sheet of paper folded on the side. I took it out and read it. It was written: I am Manoj Kapoor of the Indian secret services. Two men will come to your house and ask about me. Don't tell them about the bag I gave you but tell them where I went. They are terrorist and are going to fund terror with this money. The last part ran a shiver down my spine but I did not understand why he wanted me to tell them where he went. I was relieved that I didn't give them the bag. Then suddenly the bell rang.

 It was the two men they told me they found the car in the middle of a river but could not find any money or any person in the car. They asked me if I had seen a black bag. I said that I hadn't. I went up to my room. I was scared and didn't know what to do. My aunt was not at home -- she had gone to buy grocery but was supposed to come thirty minutes ago. I was alone at home. I picked up my mother's picture. I did not remember her, both my parents died in the Mumbai bomb blast in 2004. Just three years old, I was found in the cleaning room hours after the attack.

 Suddenly my room window opened and behind the curtain a man was trying to enter. I picked up a stick to defend myself, I was afraid it would be enough against a terrorist. I hid behind the door as the man crept in. Then he pushed back the curtain and I saw his face. He had a beard and was quite tall. I felt as I had seen the man before. He looked at me with tears in his eyes and said, ''I am Manoj Kapoor, your father''. He showed me a picture of him with my mother and me.

Before I could say anything the phone rang. I picked it up and someone said, '' I have your aunt -- bring me the money and Manoj Kapoor at square street corner in one hour and don't try anything smart or else.... ''and hung up the phone. I did not know what to do. I had just met my father and now some terrorist wanted him but I took the bag and headed to the address with my dad.

 When we reached there my aunt was tied to a bench and had a blindfold. There was nobody in sight or so I thought, A fourteen year old kid, Rajeev had seen some men tying a woman to a bench. When they saw him they threatened to kill him so he ran away. After ten minutes he returned and hid behind a small building and waited.

I  saw a black van coming towards us. It had tinted windows so I was not able to see inside.Then the back door slid open and a man wearing a mask came out with a rifle. I tried to run but then he shot my dad on his leg. I went to help him as he fell to the ground. The man snatched the bag from me and smacked me on my head with the rifle. I started loosing consciousness.

When I woke up I was tied to a wooden chair. For a few seconds I could not remember anything. I tried to move and started panicking. My head was paining. Then as I saw my aunt in front of me. She was crying. I remembered everything. I looked for my dad but could not see him. Behind me there was an empty seat with cut pieces of rope. Then suddenly the door was slammed open and my dad came inside with two rifles and blood stains on his white shirt. He said '' we can go home now.''. Then just as was coming inside to open our ropes a man came inside and knocked him to the ground with a metal chair ending my hope of survival.

My dad, aunt and I were then tied with metal chains and were informed that we would be shot down at three thirty pm as they could not take the risk of keeping us alive for any longer. It was already five minutes past three and were only twenty five minutes left as the clock kept ticking all my hope of surviving got lost. When there were only ten minutes left, I started praying to god. This was the most difficult time of my life.

As ten minutes past a man came into the room with a gun I was in tears I could not control myself. He pointed the gun at my head and put his finger on the trigger. I could hear my heart beating. I looked at my dad then closed my eyes. I had heard that people have flashbacks from their lives right before dying but I just sat there. I did not want to die. Then boom I heard the gun shooting but I didn't feel any pain. I wasn't dead. I opened my eyes and saw the person who was going to shoot me lying on the ground with a bullet hole in his forehead. I looked on the opposite side of the room and saw a boy, my age, holding a pistol in his hands shaking and was starring at the body. I could not recognize him. A minute past in silence. Then he opened our chains and told us that he would answer all our questions once we escaped.

We went out of the room. He seemed to know where to go and we followed him. As we approached the gate my hopes rose. Then we saw guards at the gate and the two men who were pretending to be the cops. They had the black bag they put the bag in a small room beside the gate and entered the main building. The boy who said his name was Rajeev told us how he had seen my aunt being tied to a bench and watched us being kidnapped so he followed the van on his scooter, entered the building, found us stole a gun and ...... he did not continue after that.
 
Rajeev had a plan to get past the guards he told us to sit the white van that was parked right beside the gate, take the bag and wait outside the gate until he returned. While he distracted the guards. He ran in sight of the guards shouted and showed them the gun he had, at this without much thought all the guards ran behind him and he ran away from us.

We sat in the white van. The keys were already inside as Rajeev had said, took the bag and waited outside the gate, five minutes later I getting really worried when suddenly I spotted Rajeev sprinting towards the van and chasing him were armed men and the guards. I thought that he would easily make it but as he was about to reach a man pointed his rifle towards Rajeev and shot a bullet straight to his leg. He shouted in pain and fell to the ground. He started crawling towards the van. I felt as if they were gaining on him. I realized that he wouldn't be able to reach to the van. So without thinking I got out of the van towards Rajeev and started dragging him to the van. We were almost there when another bullet was shot this time straight at Rajeev's chest and he fell there dead but before dying he told me to go as keeping the money away from the terrorist was more important and those where his last words. I was reluctant to leave him there but the men had almost reached me so somehow I sat in the van and we left.

Author's Note

How is it, any suggestions

Reviews

[barleygirl]

WOW! What an amazing & shocking story! I can feel that this is a true story, as your telling does not sound exaggerated or false in any way. This is a great job of telling your story in English, which probably isn't your natural language. But this would need much work to be a story that's easy to read & follow. I had to re-read several passages to get it straight.

I would be willing to work on your story to make it more clear to read & understand, if you want such help. I never offer this to other writers. I would only do it becuz your story is so powerful & told with genuine feelings. Your story deserves to be told well.

If you want to work on your story, the first thing that would make it more readable is to divide the writing into paragraphs, instead of a long block of writing all run together without any pauses. Another thing that would help us visualize what's happening, is to have more description of your surroundings in each of the places where this story plays out. Help us SEE, HEAR, SMELL, how this situation feels.

The best writing is when you have a gun to your head, you hear a gunshot, then you realize you're not dead. That is very well written & you brought the reader thru that almost exactly how it must've felt to you, making it very vivid picture of the scene. You could take this much time with each bit of action & this story would be 3 times longer, but more powerful & easier to follow. I hope this helps.

[DELETED]

Whoa!! Good Work. The flow of your story was too good. I felt like it was happening in front of me. Keep Writing. Good Luck Ahead.

[JayG]

Okay, remember that you did ask for this, so keep telling yourself that I’m trying to help. But there is a lot.

The biggest problem is that you’re trying to tell the story in the same way you would were we together. And in that situation, since neither of us is on the scene you would have to tell the story from the outside in, explaining it. But that approach is inherently dispassionate because it’s: This happened…then that happened…she said…and in response he said…and after that…”

Yes, the reader learns what happened, but there’s not a trace of emotion, because were you telling the story aloud, in performance, all the emotion resides in HOW you tell the story. The words are only the details of it. The emotion—the entertaining part of the story, is carried in the performance. You would use expression and gesture, tone, intensity, and all the tricks of storytelling to make the audience know what the character is feeling and thinking. But transcribe the words and hand them to a reader, and what do they get? Only the dry, emotionless words.

Shure, you can tell the reader how a given character speaks the words, but you can’t tell them how the narrator is speaking. And since intent doesn’t make it past the keyboard, the reader has no idea of how you want them to read a given line. They have to guess based on what the words suggest to them. And the one thong you can be certain of is that your reader probably won’t have the same background, education, upbringing, be of the same age group, or culture.

As you read it has everything the story needs, because you cheat. You begin reading knowing everyone in the story and what drives them. So for you the words point to images, action, ideas, and more, all held in your mind. But for the reader? The words point to images, action, ideas, and more, all held in YOUR mind. And since you’re not there to ask….

But that’s only part of it. What really matters is that you’re informing a reader who came to you to be entertained. History books inform, and who reads them for fun? They have adventure, romance, and everything a novel has, so they should be entertaining. But all they do is inform. They lack the excitement of being made to live the story.

Your reader doesn’t care that the character is falling in love. They want you to make THEM fall in love. They want you to fill them with emotion, not facts. They want to borrow your imagination and daydream something batter than they can imagine.

Here’s the trick. In our schooling most of us are never told there IS a set of writing tricks dedicated to emotion-based writing, because our teachers, not being professional fiction writers, aren’t aware there is anything other than the fact-based and author-centric writing we’re taught. They believe, like virtually all new writers—and I was included in that, too—that writing is writing and we’ve learned how to do that—when in reality, we’re given a set of skills that employers favor.

So it’s not a matter of good or bad writing. It’s that with sincerity, dedication, and desire, you’re using a set of tools inappropriate to the medium. You’re explaining, when you should be involving the reader.

I’ll get to the fix for that in a minute. First, some examples of the problem:

• It was a bright sunny day.

Why does the reader care? The weather has no bearing on what happens. The story would work were it cloudy, or overcast. And though the words give you a picture, those words could fit Antarctica on a midwinter day, a battlefield, and a million other situations, so while for you it calls up the scene, the reader gets no picture related to your intent.

But of more importance, the person experiencing the events is NOT paying attention to the weather. And fair is fair, it’s his/her story. So only what matters to that character, in the moment called now, matters to the reader—story, not detail.

• I was reading a book in my lawn

What you’re doing is presenting a series of explanatory sentences, setting the scene, just as you would when telling the story to a friend. But a film wouldn’t, because we have actors, right? But unlike verbal storytelling, where he storyteller is alone on stage, don’t we have actors, too? Why not let them act?

Here’s my point: telling the reader what’s happening is NOT the same as making them see it (or better yet, live it). And since you can’t present a still picture in detail without thousands of words—most of them about things the protagonist is ignoring—we narrow the focus to what the protagonist thinks is important enough to react to.

Doing that places us in the character’s viewpoint, something the page excels at.

• …when suddenly a man threw a bag in my lawn and ran away.

Think about this as a reader. This is a synopsis of the event, but…what does the place look like? Dunno. We could be in a modern city or a colonial age town. “A bag” could refer to an overnight bag, a shopping bag, something large or small, cloth, paper, or plastic.

And the term “a man,” could refer to almost any dress, appearance, and demeanor. Wouldn’t “a well dressed man in his thirties,” give a very different feel from “a furtive little man in a turtle necked sweater?” Were you the one who had it happen wouldn’t you?

And were it you wouldn’t you wonder what was going on, who he is, and what his intent is? Wouldn’t you look around to see if anyone else saw it, or perhaps participated? Wouldn’t you inspect the thing to get an idea of what it contained?

Of course you would. And if you suspected the slightest danger would you touch it, and carry it inside? Of course not. But if you didn’t think it dangerous, you’d look inside. So how real can your character seem if he or she doesn’t think, weigh evidence, and make decisions? And of great significance, what was the gender of your protagonist? No one seemed to have used that person’s name.

Okay, all that wasn’t to make you feel bad, or belittle your writing. It was to make sure you understood why it is imperative to learn the tricks of the profession. As Mark Twain so wisely observed, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

To get an idea o the breadth of the knowledge you need to learn, dig through the writing section of my blog. And if it makes sense, do some digging into the techniques of the profession, to give direction to your talent and wings to your writing.

I truly wish I had better news, and that there was an easier way to provide such news. But bear in mind that nothing I said has to do with you, your writing talent and potential, or the story. And armed with a few professional techniques, who knows where you’ll fly to?

Hang in there, and keep on writing.

Jay Greenstein
jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/

[richieb]

Ishaan, you have written a very action packed, dramatic story. I am very impressed that at 14 you are able to tell such a good story. One thing you need to do is break your story into more paragraphs for better organization and making it easier for the reader. The main thing is to listen to Barleygirl and let her help you. She has vast amounts of writing knowledge and experience. She can teach you the basic's to take your writing to the next level. Keep writing, Richie B.

[Workvio]

I started writing as a young teenager ... Science Fiction held my interest back then and that was about all I could manage to write about ... You have bipassed the world of fantasy and have progressed right into a scenario that is more than quite possible in many places around the world today, and in fact has a real ring of true story to it ... I have found that the best fiction is that which contains just enough true to season it and make it more paletable to be reader ... The same is advantageous for a true story in that seasoning it with just a smidgen of fiction helps people to believe what is going on ... I don't know why, but people have more of a problem accepting true events than they do ridiculous events that are purely fiction ... You have penned an interesting story that is faced paced and action packed ... Good Job ...

[Sir Drift & Mr. Pulse]

This was really good. I'm sad about Rajeev but I like how he sacrificed himself. It was a good story in all. Thank you for it!

[SilverAxeKnight]

uh.. well for the contest it's supposed to be a fluffy Male X Male fanfic. so yeah...

[SilverAxeKnight]

uh.. well for the contest it's supposed to be a fluffy Male X Male fanfic. so yeah...

[ishaan grewal]

Thank you everybody. For your suggestions. The sentences are short and there is less detail as It started as a school assignment but seeing the responses from my classmates. I continued It

[Ilana]

The main concept of this story is really fascinating. I can also tell that there are some issues grammatically which I would be more than happy to help you with. Good job!

[apersonfullofthoughts]

The idea of the story is pretty cool. I can tell English is not your first language but you wrote it pretty well. I would suggest making the sentences longer and giving more detail within the sentences so there aren't that many simple sentences in a row.