The Battle Between Truth and Fiction

Fiction's stance..

The blob of luminescence was dancing brilliantly, hanging on to the roof with wires sans their rubbery drapes. 'Fluctuation' they called it. On. Off. On. Off. Light. Dark. Light. Dark. Kalpana sat their electrified by the fluctuating wonder. It had been like that for a while. Her mother complained about it. Kalpana was rather partial towards it, it gave the feeling of a Disco you see in those movies they showed at Ghatra's sole village theatre. She fed on the movies. Big dreams, Big love, Big hopes and Big people(always with the capital 'b'). Mother dearest didn't fancy them either. She was the one who always complained. Depressed soul that she was. Not a pinch of imagination. Hence not a teaspoon of contentment. If habits were inherited traits, you'd say Kalpana was adopted. Like her mother's somatic chromosomes had got lost somewhere in Prophase-I. Neither did she resemble her father. Forever consumed by those brown bottles of liquid heaven. And 'heaven' is a relative word.

And then kaboom. That deep shade of black. Blackout for the nest five hours. Inactivity in action. Just like the infantile paralysis or 'poliomyelitis' she suffered from because of which she walked funny; lifting her left leg placing it at an angle no lesser than 30 degree outwards and then dragging her right foot. It was kind of a game now. Kalpana didn't mind this lilttle virus in her body. She enjoyed games. The virus seemed to sting her mother more than her. She couldn't much lend a hand to her in the field. The mere two acre land piece that could hardy sustain three stomachs. Education was too big an ambition for it. Kalpana had been forced to withdraw her name from the village school in the summer of third standard when severe drought had hit. She took this bane quite sweetly. Sitting for six hours and reciting about lone gone heroes? She rather stayed an illiterate. She liked Edison though. A man who epitomised a dreamer, a man whose seed of idea lay planted across every corner of the world and glowed like a shining star. It is an entirely different argument that it hardly did in Ghatra. Kalpana dreamed and put her ideas into not action but pictures. Her favourite piece of toy thus being a slate, an instrument towering power. Draw whatever you wish to and just quickly wipe it with a a wet cloth in case ma was around.

One should feel for her mother too. A poor soul who struggled and juggled between the household and her daughter. Another mission was just added to her kitty, finding a groom for Kalpana. This seemed like an undoable task considering the piggy bank they had as dowry and the added asset of diseased leg. The torch, no bulb of education rather faced a voltage shortage in this little village. Here babas prevailed more than doctors and logic and community sympathy lay locked in a box.

Kalpana didn't belong to Ghatra. Her calling came from the open skies. Where her ideas would lift her away, far way from this cruel terrestrial being. It was just a matter of time before she went there, she was sure.

Truth's stance..

Handicapped young girl. Drunkard father. Poverty stricken. Conservative society. No hope.

- Sleeping Devika