Stories Of Young Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

seldom
bridged. At least, Adil’s novels haven’t covered the distance so
far. They are roosting on my Mac, and on his email but they seem to
be in no hurry to appear on bookshelves yet.
    What gets
published is his essays and historical articles for newspapers, and
occasionally, limericks and short stories for magazines. There’s no
money in the creative pieces, he says, but he takes some pride in
writing those. The newspaper work pays but the money is so little
that you can’t buy a week’s living with a whole month’s
cheques.
    He won’t admit it
but Adil is mostly my dependent. On Eid, his mother sends him a
generous gift and he accepts it without fuss, but the remaining 364
days he is a self-righteous, struggling writer whose conscience
does not permit him to accept anything from anyone. I am a nobody,
of course, so it is all right to live off me.
    Adil is not a bad
writer, although I am not the best judge in this matter. I like his
turn of phrase and his storylines, but I won’t say they are
remarkable. And then, so many people are writing these days. So I
don’t know whether he will ever make money from his writing but
there’s one little world where he is quite a star. About a year
ago, he started writing a novel about our adolescent years.
Everything about school and our city and the things we did and life
in the good old days. Pure nostalgia, and he was doing a good job
of it. Every time he finished a chapter, he mailed it to me, and
for once I looked forward to reading him. Unless I was seeing
patients I would read it at once on my phone. And I usually had
something nice to say to him about it.
    But one day he
just stopped writing it. I asked him why, and he said there was no
point. It would never be published. Neither have your other books
found a publisher, I felt like telling him, but refrained wisely. I
was really sorry to see that book stop midway.
    A few days later I
was talking to a childhood friend back home and we got talking
about a school teacher. I mentioned Adil’s book and promised to
send him the chapter about her. Adil and he hadn’t been friends
ever but minutes after I mailed him, he called up all excited.
Could I send him the other chapters too? I told Adil about it, and
he was happy, but he still wouldn’t resume writing the book. Then,
without telling him, I posted all his chapters on a blog and shared
the link with all my home contacts, making it clear that it was
Adil’s work and giving his email ID for feedback.
    Adil never had
many friends in school. Few students liked him because his father’s
clout got him VIP treatment everywhere. But after all these years,
his blog won him many friends. All day, his phone pinged with
effusive emails, and Adil was a happy man. Word spread and he soon
had more friends than me. Uncles and aunties read him, old
forgotten neighbours flashed back, school teachers mailed him their
blessings. And Adil, his memory jogged by all these online
encounters, started writing new chapters. I had embedded a web
tracker in the blog to give him a true picture of his audience. The
numbers were rising by the day, the first 1,000 came up in a month,
the next in three weeks, and after that the flow became a flood.
Some days, he had more than 200 hits. I advised him to tap the blog
for an income by accepting advertisements. But his artist’s soul
was horrified at the suggestion. “You want me to sully my sweetest
memories with advertisements?” he rebuked me. “What will it be,
Jockey undies next to a piece about Uma Ma’am, or Shaina
Aunty?”
    I agreed it
wouldn’t look nice but that’s the way the world moves now. Anyway,
I left it at that, and it was just as well because after a couple
of months, as Adil’s writing tapered down, the number of hits
dipped till it became sporadic. Some days there were just two or
three hits, and some days, usually over the weekend, had 20 or 30.
Only once in a long while did a long-lost acquaintance chance upon
the blog