Amphigory

By Shitiz Srivastava

This book comprises of seven unique and distinct collection of motley stories blended in different flavors of life, love, humor, philosophy, literature and black comedy.
The first story "The perfect escape‟ is about a conflict of ideology between a police officer and a perfect evil minded criminal and how that police officer goes through an ordeal of new logic and confrontations to defeat the criminal in his own game. The second story "A film maker convicted" is a dialogue-based courtroom drama in which a film maker is convicted of making bad films influencing people in bad ways which he justifies them all in a very unique and extraordinary way. The third story "Love form the past times" is a coming of age love story in which an old doctor encounters a love story which makes him remember an instance of his love that made him change his life forever. The fourth story "Twice dead for the beauty" is a drama story in which a photographer suffering from mid life crisis goes beyond usual ways to attain a masterpiece of his life, finally losing his mind and going insane. The fifth story "Smoke of honor‟ is a story about an old couple who are left alone in this world by their near ones, have a made a small world of their own and realize how much they mean to each other when a crisis befalls on them. The sixth story "Things of her that I miss now" is a autobiographical account of comic reminiscences form my own life about my girlfriend, the time I spent with her and what happened to me when she left me. The seventh and final story " The conundrum‟ is a dark black comedy about an actor who feels that he has brains of Sherlock Holmes and his journey to solve the murder of his best friend in a complete dysfunctional world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shitiz Srivastava
• Release date: Mar 24, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301205615

Shitiz Srivastava

A Film maker and writer who lives in Mumbai.

Book preview

Amphigory

amphigory [ˈæmfɪgərɪ], amphigouri [ˈæmfɪˌgʊərɪ]

n pl -ries, -ris

(Literature / Poetry) a piece of nonsensical writing in verse or, less commonly, prose

[from French amphigouri, of unknown origin], a nonsense verse or composition : a rigmarole with apparent meaning which proves to be meaningless.

Amphigory

By Shitiz Srivastava

Copyright 2013 Shitiz Srivastava

Smashwords Edition

ISBN : 9781301205615

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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I wrote this book.

Shitiz Srivastava

Dedicated to my parents who were always cynical about my future as anything, society who is refusing to change with the speed of apple products, girls who broke up with me and don’t pick my phone now, friends who stayed with me to laugh at my failures, facebook friends who were always there(online) and those whose names I can’t remember but I am sure helped in their own ways to stop me from becoming anything.

The Short Stories

First Story : The Idea of Perfect Escape.

Second Story : A Film Maker Convicted.

Third Story : Love from the Past Times.

Fourth Story : Twice Dead for the Beauty.

Fifth Story : The Smoke Of Honor.

Sixth Story : Things Of Her That I Miss Now.

Seventh Story : The Conundrum.

Postface.

1. The Idea of Perfect Escape

No Crime can escape. Because if escaped, it’s not a crime.

A little introduction of Ravindra Thakur (R.T.).

He was born and brought up in a bourgeoisie family at Patna, Capital of Bihar, to a stationery and book shopkeeper. He went to Delhi for higher education, to St. Stephens. After doing his graduation he started preparing for IAS, his father’s dream. He couldn’t get selected for IAS so he decided to quit after the third attempt but luck struck him this time and he got selected after his third attempt, though not in IAS proper but in a very different way prestigious, PPS, the Indian police services. He has been working for 20 years now and surprisingly he turned out to be exceptionally brilliant in his profession considering his shy nature. He kept on getting promotion after promotion and finally he made it to CID. He was soon named as star detective and one of the finest policemen ever recruited. He had a wife but she left him after ten quarrelsome years. He misses her a lot but his ego stops him from calling her. He does sometimes give her blank calls to listen to her voice but now keeps himself busier than his usual just to keep him away from her thoughts. He has a daughter and a son too whom he is only legally allowed to meet on Saturdays and Sundays. His personal life is shattered but professionally he is achieving new milestones with every case. Everyone admires him but his only problem is his overambitious and finicky nature which always puts him into trouble of getting too much involved in whatever he does.

1.

That was unbelievable. That was too fucking unbelievable to happen on its own.

The question was why would it happen? What was the reason behind it?

Detective Ravindra Thakur or what everybody calls him R.T. was in a very difficult situation. He got what he desired for so long now but the way he got it was not the way he imagined it would happen.

Everybody was congratulating him on what he had done. He knew he didn’t do anything. People don’t seem to care how he did it; all they were busy doing was congratulating him. He felt guilty for all those compliments. He felt he didn’t deserve it, anyone of it.

The chief of C.I.D, Mr. Mathur personally called and congratulated him. That was the final hit on the nail, it made him feel more terrible about everything and he wanted to puke then and there in his office. But he didn’t do it. The carpet was way too expensive and exquisite to be ruined by puke.

The moment he came out of the office of CID chief, there was a telephone call for him from Delhi. It was from the President’s residence, of course Indian. This was just too much for him to take in one day. He couldn’t take this anymore. More congratulations. More fake laughter. But wait, there was more self-humiliation along with national honors to come for him. Everyone was happy, except him, when the opposite should have been the outcome. The President wanted to give him a special award next year on Republic day for his meritorious contribution in the field of criminal investigations and his current brave act…… fuck, what luck, and what timing. Most of the time your dreams are achieved when you are least supposed to enjoy them.

After listening to the president’s secretary giving him, what in other situations would be called as good news, he ran to the toilet.

Finally he puked.

He hadn’t eaten anything whole day so it was just water that was coming out of his mouth with a little pulp of something that he couldn’t figure out what it was. He felt a terrible twisting pain in his stomach. He couldn’t control himself anymore. The puking was getting severe with every passing minute and every second to him felt like a year of terrible pain.

He got over it finally, like everything, sooner or later he always got things over with. He sipped some water, drank some of it, gargled rest of it out. He was feeling relaxed now physically… mentally he was fucked. He knew he needed solace, isolation whatever for some time. He wanted to go into hibernation, a process in which insects and animals underground themselves and sleep for a brief period to pass the difficult and bad time of climate change, except RT wanted to pass this congratulatory good time.

He felt relieved after puking but he knew the moment he would go back into the office, the puking would start again.

For different people, the definitions of success are different. Some remain happy in undeserved success but some work so hard that they want every moment of success to be very special when it comes. They know that they have done everything to deserve every bit of success they have got so they want to enjoy it and hence wait for it eagerly. Worst thing that could happen to these hard-work loving people is when they get what they want on its own, by fate or by luck or whatever you call X-factor, at the last stage when they are dreaming of achieving it with their own abilities and are near the end of getting it. It shatters the man who believes in his own work. They work so hard to achieve their goal and suddenly they get it, lying there, down under their feet, like alms thrown to someone in charity.

R.T. decided to run away from his office but he knew that going out from the main entrance of the building was not the option for him. He had to find some other way. He looked randomly for something to help him get out, suddenly he looked at the window, and he realized he can easily escape out of the building from it. He was sure he could get out of it because one of the prisoners from his custody went out of that window long time back; then and there he decided to follow the footsteps of that prisoner whom he once cursed for doing what he was going to do now. He looked back, confusingly thought for a while and convinced himself that this is enough for him, he would not tolerate the enjoyment that was going everywhere inside and outside this building, he needed to be out, and he needed some free, fresh, pure oxygen with lots of frustration mixed in it.

He carefully removed the glass tiles from the window and put them on the ground carefully to avoid making any noises. First, he threw his coat outside the window and lifted his pants up to the knee, also pulled his sleeves to the elbow. Then he put one of his legs out, gradually moved out of the window and thump jumped on the ground. He was safe, no one saw him and he made no noise. No one used that lane; it was really narrow and dirty, advantage. He crept out straight to his car, turned the key, ignited the engine and rushed out from there.

He needed sometime. He needed sometime because he didn’t know what to do next.

What can be done with an achievement? Once you achieve something, it becomes useless, then you want something else to achieve.

Sometimes we run very fiercely after something to achieve and then perhaps achieve it but once we achieve it after thorough hard work and determination we have no idea what to do with it then. We concentrate so much on achieving it that we didn’t think further like what it would be like to possess it.

He was feeling like that only.

He was completely clueless about his next step. He was wishing that whatever happened hadn’t happened and he was still engaged in doing something to make it happen.

Running after something is always more interesting than getting it. Life seems so dull when we achieve our goals.

He pushed the steering in the right direction. It was decided; he was going home now.

2.

The news headline was ubiquitously same everywhere in the town.

They got him finally; he was finally caught.

The man who single handedly masterminded every big crime that happened in India in last fifteen years.

When he was nine, he split open the skull of his school teacher with a brick because he was beating him for not doing the homework. He could never control his temper. His father was a contractor, so you can say he inherited the rowdiness from him. He was never punished anywhere outside the school. No one said anything to him, not even his mother or his father, they couldn’t, they died one year after he was born. They were a family of ten people and one of them was his grandmother; it’s not easy for an old lady to concentrate the whole day on one kid. He grew recalcitrant with time. There was no stopping him. He had sex when he was thirteen with a woman twice his age. That was not a right time for a child to experience the most enjoyable act of human beings. Life desires struggle, if you don’t do it now, you have to do it sometime later but you got to do it, it’s one thing you cannot escape. His life was no struggle because he did not want to meet the critical demands that struggle has laid for people who want to go on the right path, he chose the other path. He killed his first lot of human being when he was seventeen because the man he killed refused to give him money for the work he had done for him. This was the last time he worked for anyone.

He opened his own smuggling syndicate when he was twenty one and since then his biography got updated regularly in every police organization.

Now that was some kind of resume. Today he is forty one years old. He committed his first crime at seventeen so for twenty four years he had been constantly busy doing crimes and surprisingly never been caught, except for today.

Why am I telling you this? Because this story is basically his story and you must know it. This story is about what happened to him after twenty four years of life in crime and forty one complete years of life.

The name, well the name is Devendra Khan. The name that once terrorized the whole of India, leave alone Mumbai, His capital. The government of India, the Interpol, the Scotland Yard, you name the organization and they had his file and he was, well he was free. He was a free man with no boundaries to stop and laws to control. In India, talking crimes, he was bigger than the President of India and more famous than Amitabh Bacchan.

But on 24th September 2008, he was caught. He was caught by one of the most celebrated officers of the Indian police force. He was caught by R.T.

R.T. once claimed on an Indian television interview that he will be the man who will catch Khan; so true it became one day when he was caught. R.T. became hero of the nation. Newspapers, magazines, television no matter what kind of media you choose, you will find stories of R.T. and his photos with Devendra Khan posing just next to him. Right from the birth of this modern hero and modern villain to how they become one, they were showing everything. There was a terrible competition between television channels to show the maximum information they could show about India’s most hyped arrest. When they couldn’t find enough information about them, they started showing their personal life, their wives, their kids, their families and like that was not enough, they further degraded themselves to a level where they started showing the opinion of people who lived in their neighborhood.

Everything that could be possibly known about this event was on the television but there was one thing that no one knew. Only five people in this whole world had any information about it. One was the chief of C.I.D. and other four were ones who arrested Devendra Khan, which included R.T.

3.

R.T. was very angry on the media and the reason was more than 99 missed calls on his cell phone.

Call a person once, if he is not picking your call then it either means that he is busy doing something else or he is deliberately not picking your call; calling again and again doesn’t make any difference, does it; I don’t think so either.

R.T. came out of his old esteem 1997 model and moved towards his government-given meager-rent big house sufficient enough for two families and in which he was living alone. He stopped and thought about something and then with a determined face he started moving again, this time with confident steps, like he got a clue for something .He moved inside his house.

Only after 15 days of trial and everything, R.T. will get the chance to talk to Devendra Khan. RT was perplexed by the acts of Devendra Khan that why had he deliberately got himself arrested when he could live a comfortable life as an outlaw, which he was living. He was confused but somewhere back in his mind he knew what could be his plan. One thing that he could not understand was why everyone else was so blind to what was so easy for him to comprehend; can’t they see what’s happening, when it was like an obvious fact to him. Then RT remembered that he is the one of the five men who knows how Devendra was arrested so society can be excused for overlooking things.

A question that kept bothering RT’s mind- Is he taking the whole matter too seriously unlike everyone or are there more layers yet to be peeled off?

RT took out his diary and started writing something. When in doubt, he wrote. It clears his mind of all doubts. When the things are written down, they become easy to sort out for him. More than that when you have no one to talk to and share, writing comes as the only option to bring peace to mind. RT took some whiskey in a glass and filled the glass with ice cubes; this is going to be a long night for him. When in thoughts, nights become long for him. He was thinking about the face of Devendra Khan and how satisfied, emotionless and confident he was when he was going for trial in front of the magistrate. That was the first time he saw such a face. There was nothing special in his face he felt except his past activities which were creating an aura around him that was making him look extraordinary in every way.

No one is good or bad except for our thinking for them.

He was a criminal but what annoyed RT most was the fact that Devendra was treated like a celebrity for no reason at all, at least for no good reason at all. Everyone wanted a glimpse of him, no one had seen him before, and he never had his photo taken for over twenty years. Photographers compensated for all those photos that they should have had over all those years.

RT tried not to bother himself with such trivial things. He never bothered about these things before; he would not have even today if it was not for Devendra.

4.

"The crime that has never been committed is ‘The perfect crime’ and an escape that has never been tried is called ‘The perfect escape’. Both of them need loads of intelligence and knowledge along with ability to use them well.

What exactly are they? RT asked.

"Now consider this, I am sitting in front of you. Suppose we have an argument, a heated argument. You say something to me, I say something to you. You start to abuse me, I start to abuse you. You get angry and you kill me by poking this knife lying on this table intoS my stomach. I die instantly. What will you do now? What will be your first thought? Will you repent what you have done? The answers to these questions will lead you to the concept of perfect crime.

After this incident, you won’t be in your comfortable state of mind, of course, in panic you will try to hide my body and remove all the evidences of what you have done. Your first thought will be full of anger that you have finally won the argument, your next thought will be of self realization of your act and then you will try to estimate the gravity of the situation, which will terrify you no doubt. You won’t repent killing me at that moment because your concern is not me but you yourself, you will instantly hope for something to happen that would undo what has been done, you wish it would be a bad dream, you would wish you haven’t done it, not because you killed a man but because you are afraid of punishment. You don’t regret the crime you have done but you regret the whole event because of punishment that will be given to you which defies the whole purpose of giving punishment. Anyway that’s a different matter.

Now suppose the same murder is committed by you but under a perfect planning, by weighing beforehand all the consequences, finding cures to eliminate all the risk factors and most important, consciously