I once fell in love with a certain phrase which I assumed described rootless characters that floated on alien lands without shelter or any form of affiliation whatsoever in sight, what is often called the literature of the dispossessed.
And as a writer, I have found patterns like this in some of my writings, particularly a short story published in Sentinel’s first issue titled Pot of Gold.
Kabir, the protagonist, is a cynic after the order of Diogenes. An underachiever who disbelieved his certainty of good fortune, he fell in love with a beautiful prostitute to whom he tested his first stint with trust on. Obviously, this had disastrous implications and this was what I attempted to plough with my narrative. Sadly, one and half years or so after I wrote this story, I find myself in a precarious condition my character was in.
My story began almost routinely with a knock on my character’s door and ended almost on the same note but the second knock was imagined and expected. The first knock was assumed to be the knock of a Jehovah’s Witness. The last knock was expected to be his landlord’s demanding a rent which, for reasons to be found in the heart of the narrative, he wouldn’t have.
I have become Kabir in just a matter of years. My scenario is rather colourful as opposed to his, as I have the good, or is it bad fortune, of having my rent of three months advance refunded and told to get out of the small cubicle I am writing from in less than a month.
Like Kabir, I have become dispossessed. Like Kabir, I expected this event from when my Landlord sent a summoning text message. Like Kabir, I have no where to stay and I wear that plight on my face like makeup. Like Kabir, I didn’t sleep well last night as I felt
Perhaps now that I have experienced what it feels like, I can write the story of Kabir better. Perhaps I can safely say fiction is a fact teased from the loins of reality. Kabir is my imagination and as now become my plight.
But I pray I strike a pot of gold.
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