The Queen of Cats

Prologue: I Look For The Ocean But The Ocean Does Not Look For Me

Trailer by Welc0meT0MyW0rld.

EDITED 

This chapter is dedicated to Wattpad for being an excellent medium through which I can tell this story. Honestly, you guys are amazing. 

"But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning."

---Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

He hoped the girl would come again.

He walked towards the bus-stand, his eyes shifting either way across the road, his rucksack slamming into his back, chock full with the evening magazines. The paper's he'd get on the way.

Evening settled like a pall on the city, orange flame lighting the shit and squalor of the streets. The scent of chemicals hit him again just as it had hit him the first time he had been here.

Mumbai.

Fresh from U.P with dreams to fly. Maybe paint hoardings for Bollywood.

He had a job now. Selling newspapers.

As good a job as any, he supposed.

The bus was packed with a strange concoction of degenerates and the middle-class men on their way back home. Saving what they could to feed the kids, he guessed.

He was a kid once. He was a good kid. He studied hard, all the way up to the sixth standard. He could read English. He even scored seventy-six in it before he was kicked out into the world. He could measure the volume of a cylinder. He could still recite the old Hindi poems his teacher had taught him in her awkward sing-song.

He learned some other things as well. But not from school. He learned that men got excited by hurting you. Old, fat, smelly men. You stay away from those men. He also learned how to fix old bulbs and jack power from houses. He learned, in his own way to stay warm at night.

And to stay out of the slums.

The bus jostled him and he pressed closer to the grills of his window. He held his book tight so it wouldn't slip away into the streets and he read. It was called Old Wisdom Tales and he liked it. He liked Heart of Darkness too but he didn't understand all of it. The same went for Pride and Prejudice. He had to ask this one nice customer who used to stop to chat what those words meant. Pride meant thinking you were a big-shot and prejudice meant not liking lots of people for something stupid. Like what they prayed to.

He understood that word very well. A little too well for his comfort.

He read Old Wisdom Tales slowly and carefully, not wanting to miss any of the words, filling in the gaps when he didn't understand anything and trying not to vomit. A nice old lady sitting next to him had told him once that reading on moving buses could make you nauseous. He could never shake the feeling after that.

The bus ground and crawled through the city, stopping with a ding of the conductor's bell and letting people out. Not many people rushed in to take their place.

The boy stretched. He found the bus ride delightful, in the end. One of the few pleasures he could enjoy throughout his long and lonesome day, hawking books and magazines in three different spots till the sun came down.