After finishing a lovely dinner at your favorite restaurant, you pay the bill and walk toward the exit. Suddenly someone taps you on the shoulder. You turn around and…
it’s a mother along with her 10 years old brown-eyed son. Her son is looking at you anxiously and has a shinning smile and tears of joy. You look at the woman. She is in her early 30’s.
“You are the one who wrote that fantasy story, right?”
Oh! It’s just a fan, you thought. You just nod and smiles. She looks at her son and he pulls out the book from his hanging bag which you wrote long ago. The condition of the book is mess. It feels like that the book has been traveling from a generation. All those years back when you bought your own book, it was white as snow but now, this book in your hand looks like the evening color of those roads, which shimmered by the big yellow street lights which falls on it in heavy rainy days – Your favorite book color.
“His father used to read him your book every night. It was my son’s favorite bedtime story. After my husband’s demise last year, I started reading him this story of yours but couldn’t match up with the emotions which his father used to convey, I tried my best but…anyways he is reading your book everyday. He goes to school, he takes it. When all the kids of his age are playing in the school ground, he sits quietly with your book on his laps. I think that there is something which he is trying to find out in these pages.”
You look at the boy and smiles at him. An admirer is what you always needed. You see yourself in him, when you were 10 years old and read Harry Potter for the first time, all you wanted to do was to go and meet J. K. Rowling. Ah! what a feeling it was.
“What’s your name?” you ask to the boy.
“Abhijeet” he says and he rubs his nose with his index finger.
“I know you are very busy, but one of my friend told me that you always come here to eat. So we both are coming here from the past one week to ask you one favor.” Abhijeet’s mother continued.
She might be needing an autograph, you thought.
“Can you read him any paragraph from your book? It will make him happy and this is the best thing which would happen to both of us after my husband’s death.”
You met many fans, people always said that they loved your book. They found their own part in those stories of yours but when that young child looks at you with the eyes of hope and excitement, you finally realize that before a writer you were a storyteller. That pen with silver body and those white blank pages only opened a way for your voice. You lift the young boy, the best fan you ever got in your arms and start telling him a story.
Just a brief.
“…but this part is not in the book!” he says in his childish tone. A look of fear on his face – what part did he miss reading?
You look at him and rubs his nose with your index finger and your thumb which had color of dry inks, “I know this is not in the book….this is the start of its sequel.”
FIZZY MOON 