Must Read: Paradox Of Abel - Season 1 - Episode 14

Episode 7 years ago

Must Read: Paradox Of Abel - Season 1 - Episode 14

Sipping Nescafé Three-In-One coffee, his favourite drink, and rereading the chapter he had drafted the previous day. He made a lot of pencil corrections in his notepad before he switched on his computer laptop to enter the changes. Ariel mostly preferred writing his chapters on paper before using the Word Processor. The feeling of having a pen in his hand was enough inspiration, he liked the smell of ink, and writing itself brought him slews of interesting ideas.



After fudging with the computer system for about half an hour, he shut down the laptop and closed it. He would have loved to continue though; he still hadn’t finished typing the written scripts, but the battery was already giving warning signals. There had been no power supply for close to eighteen hours.




Remembering that he had promised himself to complete the chapter he was writing this morning, he pulled out his drawer and selected his favourite ballpoint pen. He took a candle out of a packet. He lighted it, let a little wax pour into a saucer and struck the candle firmly onto it.



Books were stacked higgledy-piggledy on the floor. Barbara Cartland, Frank Yerby, Daphne du Maurier, Elsie Lee, like that. Romantic novels. Gothics. Edwardians. Regencies. Women with long glittering, low-cut gowns. Men with moustaches, wearing open, ruffled shirts and carrying swords. Castles in dark mountains with one light burning in a high window. Most of these elements of literary romance belonged to the deceased Ella. Ariel himself, like Ella, was also a romance novel aficionado who fancied the historic offerings of the genre. He sometimes saw himself as the guys on the colourful covers, often named Thor, a Viking with a stomach that resembled an old woman’s grinding stone and a chest that was often continued on the back covers. Ariel, in the guise of Thor, raided towns and ravished beautiful women from Morocco to Spain and back again in a century somewhere between the fall of an ancient Rome and the rise of the Protestant reformation. Evidently, this was not healthy reading for a man years past puberty, but Ariel’s interest in the genre was more of a literate endeavour than a perusal of Victoria’s Secret catalogues. Even romance dominated a large percentage of his books, both written and unwritten. Ariel had read more novels than the average human; good ones and bad ones alike. As much as he had read some great books he also had read a shitload of silly stories, and most of them were probably just made up by silly novelists trying to make some silly cash while they peddled their silly manuscripts to silly publishers.



Ariel held his hand poised; ready to write, but nothing came. Writer’s block again. Most times, when Ariel experienced the block, he got away from his writing table to relax himself. He sometimes could go for days without revisiting, and when he did, he always impressed himself with what he came up with. He had experienced the same creative impasse this morning and he had refused to go off for days anymore, he had promised himself that he was going to finish today that chapter he had been writing for over a week past, he was sure that when he returned to the script in the evening, he would pen something brilliant and impressive, something that would match those he had often written after every usual block in the past. Ariel was afraid that he would have to break the promise he had made to himself. All his life, he had never broken a promise; not to anyone, not to himself.




At fifteen, in the first year of his senior class, he had carried the tenth position out of twenty students in the class. The boy who carried the first position had laughed most particularly at Ariel, his sworn foe, after seeing Ariel’s report card. He had taunted, insulted and made jest of him. With eyes red with fury and humiliation, Ariel had promised the boy that come next term he, Ariel, would be the one carrying the first position. The boy had laughed at him so hard that he had to be carried out of the class. The promise he made to the boy, he also made to himself.



The next term came, Ariel studied like he had never done before. He forsake novels, which was the hardest addiction for him to give up at the time, and picked up his class textbooks. He studied every subject extensively. He took extra coachings, completed the notes he had been too lazy to write, listened attentively to class teachings and asked questions on topics he did not understand. Lo, when his result was released, all his teachers were amazed; Ariel came first. Undisputedly. Shamefully, the bully, who came in the second-place withdrew from the school. Ariel kept to his promise that term; if he hadn’t carried that first position, he’d promised to hang himself by the mango tree planted in his neighbour’s backyard, he had gotten the noose ready when he was expecting the result. The third term, he maintained his average position, at least he didn’t promise to always carry the first position forever. His classmates had blamed him thereafter for causing the shameful withdrawal of their best student.



Then, suddenly, like a bolt lightning of which lacked the preceeds of thunder, his idea came.




And he almost leapt with joy. He was going to turn one of his characters into a writer! The idea had erupted from the errors he had made in the previous chapters; errors which he didn’t catch before, even after reading them for gazillion of times. In Chapter 9, he wrote that a girl took a cab because it was raining heavily. Two chapters earlier he had described the same night as crisp and clear with a full moon shinning. Contrary chapters. In Chapter 11, the muscled but dumbest one of the gang of thieves, a real mor*n, said, ‘I have a feeling of deja vu’. How the goodness would a mor*n know what deja vu means? Chapter 15, the policeman was moustached. Policemen generally should be clean-shaven. The bank manager was broke. That was quite silly.





Chapter 16, the rich billionaire was as ugly as a vulture. Unnecessary cliché. Chapter 17, the catheral was rolled carefully. How many people knew that ganja was called cathedral?




Chapter 18, the gun went Aachoo! Since when does a gun go Aachoo? B*ng, maybe. Or blam. A gun could snap, or pop, or roar, or thunder. But Aachoo? Always sounded like a sneeze. All these and more, Ariel suddenly noticed. Hence the need to turn one of the characters into a writer. A part of him was telling him that he had suddenly become Mr. Waziri, the insane publisher. But he knew it was not true. He was so glad at this sudden inspiration that he was immensely proud of himself. This character was going to have all the adventures he had not. He was going to write what appealed to him, no matter what the publishers or critics may say contrarily.



He was happy at the impressive way his pen was now dancing on the paper and he smiled as he wrote. The ideas were flowing now, there was nothing going to stop him tonight; he was going to complete this chapter today. Of course, changing one of his characters was going to affect the previous chapters and the plights of other characters, but he already had a medicine for that, thankfully. He would finish this chapter first, then make the necessary corrections and changes in the previous chapters later. He wrote and wrote, stacks were piling, pages increased and words multiplied. His phone rang but he ignored it. Nothing! Absolutely nothing was going to stop me, he decided, with grim determination. Not even if my pair of trousers was on fire.



He gave a second thought about that, perhaps he would take a few minutes to extinguish the fire before it burned his cojone, then continue writing. There was no sense in having a burnt organ due to stubborness.
He wrote for over an hour, and the candle was beginning to burn out. By the time he finished the chapter and dropped his pen, the clock struck midnight and his phone carried seventeen missed calls; he wasn’t even aware that the phone had rung seventeen times. And he had a text message. When he checked the missed call, the number was hidden. And the message read:
Your parents await you for Christmas. Come home.