Vicious City of Valiant Dreams : 1
Hello Everybody. This is my first attempt to write a more detailed story with longer character arks. I’m sure writing it will be a joyful and learning experience. Hopefully reading it just as joyful for you. Obviously, I will need your encouragements, suggestions and any insights that can help me improve the story and complete this project. I will be posting other shorter stories in between to keep the flow going.
Here it goes
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It had rained all day in the city, which was nothing out of the ordinary in the month of July. So when it stopped raining around half-past nine at night, the rush of people and vehicles inundated the roads. Not that the roads were empty while it was raining but it gave a small window to the people who couldn’t afford the shades of cars or… well, a bit of cold and running nose the next morning.
And much like often it resulted in a traffic jam which, incidentally, was not out of the ordinary either. Especially in the month of July. There are times such as this when people are in so much hurry to get where they are going that they stop using the part of their brain where logic and reasoning reside, and begin to treat the traffic rules as guidelines; optional. As you know, stupidity is contagious, so much like any other night, it was a total disaster.
Adwiti had her fair share of bad moments that day. She was in no mood to wait in the rain as the traffic became more like an impossible math puzzle. First time in three years, she asked for an extension for her project and her boss had to be a dick about that. “Could have just said no, that self-righteous piece of shit.” She tried to finish the job by working overtime which she wouldn’t get paid for either. The project was new to her and it’s not like people around her were very helpful, they were neither willing nor capable of helping her, the job was literally above their skill. She hadn’t eaten anything all day. She just wanted to get to her home, fix herself hot chocolate milk and probably cry herself to sleep. So, she decided to take a detour. It was kind of a less traveled road that passes through an abandoned factory. People always talked about how dangerous it was-that people have gone missing on that road. While some of the rumors could have been true, Adwiti knew that most of them were just rumors. She took this road whenever she was late for work, which was more often nowadays than she would like to admit. But that was in broad daylight. There was no telling what could happen to her at night. The road did go through some spooky places. Adwiti’s brain was too occupied to give a second thought about these usual precautions . She took the turn and went back to her thoughts.
As she entered the factory area, the road started to get a little rough. She never thought it was that bad. It wasn’t being maintained properly since it was out of use, and there were some holes turning up on it here and there — some of the holes were deep but most were innocuous at any rate. It’s the rain that made it worse. Instead of holes, there were puddles, and she couldn’t tell which ones were deep and dangerous.
Adwiti was almost halfway through when she heard a roaring sound of a water stream. She didn’t remember the road passing through any river, or even a canal. Did she take any wrong turn? She looked around in doubt, the place did look familiar to her. She kept moving forward. As she got closer, the sound got clearer and a bit louder too. Suddenly she remembered, it did pass through a small bridge over something like a canal. Maybe it was an open sewage canal for the factory or something, but it was dry all the time. “It must have been filled with all the rain over the day.” That gave her a little confidence to move forward. “Fortune favors the bold, ” she mumbled the words as she twisted the accelerator of her scooter. The words weren’t quite fitting for the situation and she probably knew that — what she didn’t know was that she couldn’t have been more wrong.
Adwiti came to the ‘city of dreams’ around three years back, just after completing her graduation. She was among the top three of her class, she always has been ever since school. She was offered a good job at the firm, in which she was still working. Well, that wasn’t true — the part about still working. But she doesn’t know that yet.
Adwiti’s parents were…, well, just like all the other middle class parents in a small town. They had everything planned out for her. She was supposed to complete her graduation in whatever subject she wanted and get married. “Educated housewives are more in demand nowadays,” one of her neighbors used to say. The prospect of their only girl child working in a city like Mumbai never crossed through her Parents mind. But being educated themselves, they never forced those ideas on their only child, and a very intelligent one at that. So when she got the job even before her final exams they were rational about it. They made a deal with their little girl. Seeing no other way to convince them, Adwiti agreed to the deal and came to Mumbai.
Why did she choose to come to Mumbai? Adwiti has been a heretic since as long as she could remember. She studied hard in her school because her teachers believed that girls are never top in their class. She chose ‘Mathematics’ and ‘Computer Science’ because everyone in her town said that girls aren’t good at those subjects, they should take Arts or ‘home science’. She was always thankful for her parents’ support. But she knew what they expected of her. She was well aware of the fact that she is allowed to make her own choices as long as she delivers on them. So she never gave herself any room for failure. She has gotten so used to being independent that even the thought of someone else taking her decision, even if it was her parents, frightened her. But that was three years back. The reality of the world had hit her hard and she wasn’t prepared for it. There was no lesson either her teachers or her parents had taught her to help her deal with the challenges she faced in this savagely combative world she had thrown herself in. There was not a single book she had read that could help her solve the crisis she had stumbled into. The help she needed desperately and she had no one by her side to provide it for her.
So, to answer, “why did she come to this city?”
Probably because she always liked the idea of an independent girl, living alone, working her way up to make a place for herself in the world. But that idea didn’t excite her that much these days. The moment when she bought herself the scooter with her own savings, god! She was so excited. Sad, that it was probably the height of it all. She loved that scooter dearly and more than anything… or anyone. If she ever looked for a sign that she could make it in this world, it was that scooter she saw. She dreamed about buying a nice apartment someday, but that dream was receding like a ship on the horizon, the ship she wasn’t good enough to embark on.
Lost in her thoughts, Adiwiti was halfway across the bridge when the sky lit brighter than a summer afternoon for a fraction of a second. A moment later a loud thunder followed knocking her out of her wits. Adwiti was startled by the sudden lightning and before she could brace herself she noticed a puddle in the dim spotlight of her vehicle, like many others she had passed through, right in front of her. There was no time to circumvent it. She felt a strong, sudden jerk in her hands as the front wheel of her scooter landed into the hole which was a bit deeper than she expected. She lost her grip on the handles and the next thing she knew she was heading toward the edge of the bridge without railing. There was nothing to stop her from falling right into the stream of muddy water.
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