How the Writer Died.

First, they just used to laugh at him. Laugh at his thin legs and arms, as he tried to lift burdens that were too heavy for him. They laughed at how his knees used to buckle under him, and at how his wrists were on the point of cracking, and at how he never gave up. They thought laughing would make him stop torturing himself like that. But he never would; he would pay no attention, and keep on trying, with shivering, trembling limbs, to hold up what he thought was his burden that day. He held up dams and irrigation projects, he held the entire weight of the corrupt bureaucracy, and he held up vats of blood that other people had spilled. "It is not your burden to carry", they would shout, and he would pay no attention, and go on. She would watch him. Sometimes she used to think that she should go to his aid. But she would never have the courage, and she was a little too lazy to engage in a battle that was not hers. But her eyes would fill with tears at the sight of him, so brave, so gallant, and so sickly. Her tribute to him was that she never laughed at him, she did not even smile, merely looked at him with a solemnity that she hoped gave him strength; she did not know, she did not think it did. Anyway, he seemed equally oblivious to mockery and encouragement.

(When she submitted her little essays and stories, the teachers would smile indulgently. She would be enormously riled, she would imagine them tittering at her little attempts, passing along her precious sheets of paper to each other with mocking smiles. She wanted to scream at them, howl at them that they did not realize what went into those stories, those pretty poems. She wanted to make them read each one aloud, explain what she meant by every single word, why every word was used where it was. She never did. Just glared, a little mutinously, a little afraid of what their judgment meant to her.)

He was stronger now; his limbs did not look like little sticks. His effort displayed sinew and muscle, and no one could laugh anymore. They began to be afraid of his strength. He ignored them, as set in his unreadable eyes and his hidden purpose as he had always been. She always gave him a friendly, comradely grin as she went past. She did not know if he noticed.

(Nowadays she did not have to pore over her paper. Words flowed from her pen like little confident streams. She knew the little arts of adjectives and metaphor. She could be tender, scathing, majestic, intricate. She wrote with abandon, with madness, with magnificent fury, with gentle serenity. The teachers no longer tittered. They looked worried at how her papers seemed like molten lava these days, liable to scald them if they held them too long. Liable to amber immortality if kept for too long.)

So they chained him. And they starved him. “We’ll see how you make a martyr out of yourself now”, they said. His eyes were never pleading, merely surprised that they thought he wanted to be a martyr. In this forced inactivity, he noticed something that he had not had time to notice before. The girl did not smile at him anymore; she merely glowered at him, half painfully sympathetic, half resentful.

(“Do you think money grows on trees?” the teachers asked. “How will you feed yourself? Write indeed! An excuse for living on charity. Learn a trade and then you indulge in hobbies.” She was immune in the beginning. The she felt sandpapered, eroded into an alien shape, a shape that was afraid of small things. Silly things, like not being able to afford autos, or never being able to buy new clothes, or being laughed at.)

He waited patiently, hope undying. She could not meet his eyes or stare into their honest, clear depths anymore.

(She embarked on the adult business of making money, of subsistence. She embarked on the very adult business of earning a living.)

No one else mourned his passing, or thought about him, except with a feeling that was relief compounded with guilt.

He died that night, in chains.

She cried herself to sleep.