1.
I was sitting alone in the room, the lights dimmed out and a faint blue glow on the wall because of the laptop. There were papers spread out all over the bed, sheets and sheets of attempts and failures. There was a spilled ink bottle on the floor with newspapers dabbed on it, they had taken a deep indigo blue tinge. I checked the bottom right and saw it was 3:48 AM. My eyes felt dry and heavy and my head was spinning. In the background was the top link from a YouTube search for “Chill Music” playing. The bass-lines had a comforting hum around them. The green cursor sat blinking on the wide black expanse of the screen. Mocking the lack of inspiration. I stood up, stretched my arms and looked around to realize that there was no water in the small one room apartment I called home. Under the table lied an old battered and bruised plastic bottle, I reached out for it and then left the room locking it behind me. Outside it was cold and quiet. Somewhere far away in the distance the watchman tapped the stick on the cold pavement. The air was slightly foggy and I felt a shiver run down my spine just looking at the workers curled up in bare basic blankets on the roadside. I took long strides to cover the distance quickly and reached the temple just around the corner where a small tap was on the outside wall of the courtyard. I reached and filled up the bottle and quickly started walking back. Awkwardly jostling with the lock with one hand and holding the fairly heavy bottle in the other hand, I was almost half way through with opening the door when the phone rang. I felt it softly vibrate in the pockets of my pyjamas. I pushed open the door and kept down the bottle and pulled out the phone. It was Vidhu. I answered the call.
You should be asleep, she quipped.
Well, that’s funny, because ironically you are calling me at this ungodly hour.
Yes because I know you would conveniently leave your phone on silent if you were sleeping.
Yea, my mom doesn’t like that either.
Still blocked?
Yea, I never realized that lack of inspiration can hit you so hard.
You need a muse, I know where you can get one.
For real? Where?
Chandani Chowk.
Oh you are so funny, listen, I’m going to crash.
Yea fine go, maybe try some new music?
Maybe. Ciao
She wasn’t wrong, that was the problem. There was no muse. It all started last summer when an article on the rising censorship on the internet caught some flame and got republished by a few reputed blogs. As an aspiring creative the idea of a million eyeballs reading my words was too tempting and so I gave up on pursuing a post-graduation degree. I convinced my parents that I needed some time to discover myself. And for some reason they believed in me, and so here I was, lying in this little one room flat, discovering myself, trying to write, trying to inspire, trying to be inspired.
So far so good. I got a small part time job writing as a freelance content generator for a company that outsourced the cheap Indian writing force to the States. I would write about what a client wanted me to write about, and I didn’t complaint because it let me write about the things I enjoyed writing about in my free time. The money wasn’t too good but it was okay.
So where lies the problem? The problem lies in the inspiration. When I was younger, I fell ill. Considerably ill. Well ill enough that I was sure I would die. I would keep my eyes open the entire night scared that if I shut them, I wouldn’t wake up the next morning. I was on the verge of being a psychological mess when the saviour came to me in the form of Chuck Palahniuk and he quietly handed me over the message, “when people think you are about to die, they listen to you, like actually listen to you instead of just waiting for their turn to speak.” And I found the secret to getting audience. I shall write about the darkness of death. And it was all nice, a muse in the form of death was brilliant till the doctor actually called up my local guardian once and instructed him to push you a tube with a camera down my throat to try and see what has gone wrong, till he instructed the guardian to tell my folks to drive down to the city because their son was going to die.
