The Stories I Am Always Writing

The Story I Will Write about a Character and Hyacinth

In this story I will write about a character who will walk around a tiny artificial bush of plants trying to find meaning in an argument that happened last night, looking up and down the arrangement of trees while closely examining their colours and patterns and failing regularly in this endeavour; then the character will dream up a hyacinth flower and not call it that, unsure if that’s how hyacinths look—

greyish black, a mound of petals, odorous so never plucked and offered as present to lovers—once in a while remembering the childhood where near the table at the study they would be kept potted with the character always imagining butterflies hovering over the pot, bees swarming over them in search of something, out with their tentacles searching, smelling, finding, failing and wondering in return if those are really hyacinths; yet the character would know somehow because of eyes, of ears, of nose that those are the flowers that bloom at night, never during the day, from there the character will conjure up the image of another travel within these travels: once in a public bus travelling without tickets and destination, walking inside it, scratching the surface of the ragged seats, sponge by sponge a wonder and thinking of absorption and thinking of patterns, refusing to vacate seat for co-passengers and thinking of hyacinths shred by shred in broken patterns thrown here and there and this and that way and feeling them while tearing them off, that until the point of arrival of an unknown destination, the time to get off, and someone would ask where’s the ticket to wherever the character has been going.

 

Debojit Dutta is a writer based in New Delhi, India, from where he runs a webzine called Antiserious. His writings have appeared in various magazines like the Himal Southasian, Kindle magazine, Motherland and the Northeast Review.