by Influencing Thoughts
This post is a part of the Bloggers Challenge by BlogAdda
This post is a part of the Bloggers Challenge by BlogAdda
Team : Qissa
A city of infinite possibilities, dreams and a varied culture absorbed in rich history, Delhi offered a lot to its age old population. Sirius aka Cyrus Daruwala was no exception to this and had been a hardcore Delhiite ever since.
Having taken his own path since childhood and not conforming to the common paths of his peers, friends and relatives, he always believed in an idealistic society. After a traumatic schooling, being alienated for his introvert behavior and constantly picked on by his classmates, even shifting to different schools in and around Delhi didn’t help much.
Cyrus envisioned the day he would live on his own, leading a life on his own terms and not those dictated by society. The day of his passing twelfth standard gave him new wings and a direction that he was always looking for. Looking around, he found thousands of people joining engineering, medicine and computer science. Yet the fire in him to change society and more importantly understand it meant that he had to pursue law. At least for him. A lawyer’s degree would enable him to understand the way the justice system functioned and more importantly, the ways in which one could get away with it.
While studying law he discovered his flair for writing. Always being surrounded by books in his little room, Cyrus had a passion for reading and for writing. Out of all the gifts he used to get for his birthdays, the ones he loved most were books. Everywhere he travelled, he wouldn’t miss buying at least one book to explore new cultures and ideologies. He even seemed to memorize many a line from several famous novels. Books about fantasy worlds, mysteries and science fiction seemed to enthrall him. No wonder he had read The Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter series and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to Galaxy almost twice from cover to cover.
One fine Saturday evening, Cyrus took his usual stroll down the dilapidated streets of Old Dilli amidst the chaotic bazaars. He usually ignored the screams and calls of the hawkers selling everything from electronics to bags to clothes. However this time, his eye happened to catch upon a quaint little second hand bookshop that had hardly any onlookers. The books looked old but in perfect condition. Having loved the scent of old books, the smell naturally attracted him even closer to the store and the first thing he saw was a thick novel by an author called Shekhar Dutta. Something about the blurb of the novel made him want to purchase the book. The old man at the bookstore smiled and gave a small laugh. He then smirked “Fantastic choice for a guy like you. Do read”. Cyrus was even more attracted to that book and immediately paid its asking price and couldn’t wait to take it back home and devour it.
The book was finished in just a day, Cyrus having no qualms about forgoing his precious sleep in his objective to finish the book before dawn next day. The words kept swirling in his mind creating an illusion that he had never dreamt about. It created a haze and made him enter into a fantasy world where he couldn’t recognize himself. He lost track of time and place and had no idea where he was or what he was up to.
The week passed away, with him merely staring at a dull wall in his small apartment for hours together, missing several court appearances and cases. There were many missed calls as he couldn’t get away from the world Shekhar had created for him through the book.
Cyrus suddenly woke up with a start, feeling a completely different person than he was earlier. Everything around him looked new and he found himself getting out of his comfort zone and willing to express himself more clearly. He walked up to his neighbors and greeted them with small talk. It was something that he hadn’t done since he had moved to the apartment. He began idealizing Shekhar and began to act like the characters in the book, which was in a way a direct reflection of how Shekhar was in real life too.
Shekhar’s book defined a new style of writing that Cyrus longed to adapt. He began wishing that one day he’d turn up at his doorstep and tell him how much he meant to him and how he had changed his life in a significant way. Thus, what turned out to be a hobby in his spare time, in the pre-Facebook era, ended up becoming a zone where he could express his thoughts and get immersed in the fantasy world. He discovered blogging in his late twenties and began transcribing his thoughts into stories almost on a daily basis.
It all started with a case he had argued tooth and nail in court against a rich kid who had been accused of rummaging his car over two platform dwellers, after driving in an inebriated state. The case hanging in balance over a split verdict, he felt compelled enough to blog about it adding to it his own thoughts and sentiments of the case and his perception of society. He knew the dangers of writing the exact facts of a live case directly from his blog account, and that was the time he discovered the concept of a fictionalized form of a true story from Shekar’s book, and thus began his own story creating fictional characters and imaginary towns to illustrate the perils of society and the loopholes in it.
