Thursday, April 21, 2011

My Earliest Surviving "Work" !!!

For as long as I can remember, I have been telling stories, either writing them or dancing them out (yeah, don't ask!) or narrating them. Going through an old file (like in the old days, an actual paper/cloth file), I found a story I had written when I was a little over nine years old. There are other older poems and couplets somewhere back home but this, if I could claim so, is my earliest surviving "work"! It is too short to be a story really. But I imagine these kind of narratives to have been the sorts that scared us poor innocent children in that era. Kids today would probably laugh on my face reading it.
Did I show any promise back then, I wonder! (Wink!)
Note: Not a word has been changed except for breaking up the story into paragraphs.
(Emphatically titled...!)

NO ONE KNOWS….
It was midnight. Maria was not yet asleep. Her parents had gone to visit a sick relative and would not be back until the next morning. Her mother had not wanted to leave her behind but Maria had insisted that she would be perfectly ok. Though Maria was a young girl of eleven, she had a lot of courage.
As Maria could not sleep, she decided to walk around the big estate which her father owned. Walking on and on, she came to a small, neglected hut in the middle of the estate. Although her mother had told her not to enter the hut as it was haunted (or thought it was), she became curious and pushed the strong locked door with great force. It didn’t budge. But after pushing a couple of times, the door gave away.
There were two rooms. One, the living room and the other, the kitchen. There was only a small jar in the kitchen and nothing else. The other room too was empty. Maria wanted to see what was in the jar and opened the lid. Suddenly, a deep, loud voice came. Maria guessed it came from inside the jar. “Maria, you are a brave young girl whom I always wanted to have! But your braveness has taken you too far! Ha…ha….ha…You will never return. Pay for your braveness,” it said with an ugly laugh. And before Maria could open her mouth, a sudden fire occurred in the kitchen.
After sometime everything ended. The hut was also as it had been before with everything inside intact. There was not a sound in the silent night!
07.05.1994

4 comments:

Giribala said...

This is superb, Deepa! Loved it! I also discovered a couple of stories from my teenage, but I used to write run on sentences :-)

Deepa Bhasthi said...

Thanks Giribala!! :D
You should also maybe brush them up and put up somewhere, those stories. Would be fun to read!

Captain Nemo said...

For someone that young, it is a damn good effort... I wonder how I missed this. Horror is my fav genre, please post if you have more of these stuff.

Deepa Bhasthi said...

Thanks Captain!!!
I am not a fan of horror myself these days. I started on a detective novel back then and went on to two whole pages before I think I solved the mystery!! I must look for those...