Melancholy and fogginess

[Day 1 of NaNoWriMo]

[This is bad and unedited. Recommended not to be read]

Note: Two years ago I started writing a novel. Over a period of coffee-fuelled anxiety at work, I wrote about 23 000 words. I haven't been able to find any of that again. Perhaps I'll find it some day, but I've given up hope. They say that as a writer, the first step in editing your draft is deleting your first ten pages, because you're over-explaining things. I am not going to rewrite those pages, and am continuing my story as if those pages were found and had been read. I realized after writing this that I actually have a 'history' that the readers don't, so that's a good thing, etc.

The mood was sombre. Raul had talked to Nakul dai the day before, and all he had said was that the government might change. That wasn't very helpful. Even if it did, the knowledge was useless without knowing which side would be the one to bet on.

Across the world, important, crazy things were happening. Madam president, the one who had gone to the same college as Saana, was nearing the end of her term. It seemed her country had gone mad in the last years of her presidency. A madman -- and clearly a madman -- was seen as the likely-winner in the upcoming elections. The world would be a very different place with him in power, it was clear.

It had started raining heavily again. Raul looked outside his living room window. The sky was dark as Bagmati's waters. The raindrops were hit the wall-to-ceiling windowpanes furiously. Across the road was Rani Pokhari, now with Blue water. There was a small crowd of people taking shelter on the temple island. He wondered how they were going to get out of there without getting drenched: the rains were predicted to last till the next morning. There was no way out, they were fools for waiting out the rain when they should just have run, he thought.

Saana. Every thunder every heavy rainfall reminded him of her. She was what now... 20 ? Raul stared at the ceiling, and shut his eyes. She was a child. And she'd been even younger then. What had he been thinking? Yet. He missed her. He'd cared for her like he hadn't cared for his live-in age-appropriate girlfriends back in the day. She had seemed so... mature, for her age, and despite her outbursts, was willing to concede, and admit that she'd learned something. She was humble in a gentle way, and she was kind, though that was often difficult to see through her murderous rage. She could make him absolutely hate her, and still, still, he'd want her. Just to hold her hands. Just to sit back-to-back on the floor, reading novels, as Kathmandu flooded, and the gentle noise of the rain drowned out the cacophony of the city in those months. Life with her had been peaceful, kind, gentle. Things were going to be very different, Raul realized, 'probably why I miss her now'.

He slid one of the window panes across the tracks. He was hit by a whiff of warm steam that smelled mildly sour. It had stopped raining. Somehow, the rain had stopped. The usual noise of the roads wasn't there... everyone had stayed out from the rain. The islanders were rushing into tiny boats, getting rowed away from the temple. He hadn't expected the rain to stop, even for a little bit. He had been wrong, they had made the right bet. On his side of the road, people were quietly lining up for their buses, as several buses came in at the same time. One, two, three, Raul counted three buses of the same Kathmandu-Bhaktapur route that were together. The throngs of passengers filled them up in no time. Three buses. Sixty, seventy people a bus, so that's at least two hundred people there. And each of them with their own problems and boyfriends and girlfriends, and people they missed, and aching hearts, and ambitions. How do you cope with all of that?

There was a clown in one of his college philosophy classes, a solipsist whose primary response to any philosophical argument was 'but what if you didn't exist, man, and like, this is all in my head'. Raul had always wondered how these people made it through four years of college. He'd found out much later that most of the clown's class-personality was essentially an act: he'd gotten straight A's, and had gone on to Oxford later. So he had been leading people to lower their defenses while he secretly did extraordinarily well. Raul had felt like an idiot then. 'But, but, he... he..., he's actually like that, right, a stoner philosopher, ', he had asked Ojesh, his college roommate who had shared a seminar class with the genius-clown. "He's actually really smart, and acts like an idiot to entertain people. I don't think he did much pot," Ojesh had said. For days after, he had been light-headed, asking everyone if they known that the stoner-clown hadn't been either. No one was as impressed as he was. The experience had lifted a shroud of fog in his mind.

And he was foggy now. He couldn't clearly see what was happening, or predict with any certainty what was about to happen. The suaveness that he seemed to have gained in the city after coming back wasn't useful anymore. No one was willing to talk. Party nominations were times of high stress, and for him as an outsider, it was going to be particularly hard. But with all the connections he had made, and the plying he had done, he had hoped to make at least some headway. And it wasn't that people were selfish: even those who were otherwise talkative and had no goat in the game had stopped talking. They would talk about just about anything -- expensive schools, American presidents, the drama happening in India, and the derivative movies that seemed to be all the rage these days -- but the nominations and tickets. "These things take time, and no one can really tell what is going to happen because there are so many forces at play," would be what he universally got. Just tell me what those goddamn forces are so I can try playing them, he had thought, but there was no real information flow. It had started raining again, and fat drops of cold water were coming in through the open window. Raul slided the window closed, and watched the road, his face against the glass.