Chapter 5: Between Smoke and Silence Part 3
476 Words
The next few nights, Aarav wrote in secret.
After work. After class. While others snored in the dormitory or played cards by torchlight, he sat on his mattress with the torn notebook Mala had given him, scribbling page after page by the dim glow of a borrowed lantern.
He wasn’t trying to be poetic.
He was trying to be honest.
He wrote of the moment the sky cracked open over Baragaon.
The smell of wet earth before the storm hit.
The cries in the night.
The dead radio in his father’s box.
The walk to nowhere.
The hunger.
The shelter.
Mala’s cows.
The first laughter after weeks of silence.
Each night he wrote, the pain didn’t disappear—but it became something useful. It became memory with direction.
By the end of the week, the notebook was half full.
On a rainy evening, when the streets hissed with water and the factory had shut early, he handed it to Ramesh.
“This is what I have.”
Ramesh opened the first page and read quietly for nearly ten minutes. Then he closed it and looked up.
“This is not a diary,” he said. “This is a book. You’ve written something real.”
Aarav shook his head. “It’s just my life.”
“That’s exactly why it matters.”
Days passed. Aarav kept working. Kept writing. Kept watching.
One night, a guest speaker visited their class—a man from a publishing trust. He had once worked in a factory, just like them. He now printed small books with real stories from the working class—tales that weren’t fiction, but felt more powerful than any made-up plot.
Aarav listened in silence, heart pounding.
At the end of the talk, Ramesh nudged him.
“Show him your notebook.”
Aarav hesitated. His palms were sweaty. His voice caught.
But he stood, walked over, and handed it over.
The man read the first two pages.
Then he looked at Aarav and said, “How old are you?”
“Twenty.”
“And you wrote this?”
“I lived it.”
The man smiled. “That’s the kind of writer the world needs.”
Two weeks later, Aarav received an envelope. Inside was a printed copy of his first story—his name printed at the bottom. It wasn’t sold anywhere. It wasn’t famous.
But it was real.
He returned to the dorm that night, holding the pages close to his chest like a child with a toy. His fingers shook. His throat tightened. In that moment, he didn’t just feel proud.
He felt seen.
Later, under the same flickering bulb, Aarav took out a new page.
At the top, he wrote:
Chapter One: The Road Beyond the Storm
Because now, he knew…
That storm didn’t end his story.
It only began it.
- Writer
