My First Story

“THERE ARE THINGS THAT I TALKED ABOUT AND NEVER DID…AND THERE ARE THINGS THAT I DID AND I NEVER TALKED ABOUT…I WISH I OULD HAVE HAD A CHANCE TO RECONCILE THEM BOTH!!”


I am George Darcy. They say I am a great storyteller…with all of my creations in black and white being the best sellers to date. Written over a wide range of topics from touching love stories to stories of great rebels who rose to fight for their fundamental right of freedom…all of them were born in my mind and nurtured with my imagination and my vast experience. They just had to be the best…they had to appeal to and to touch everyone…after all , all the while that my pen transferred my thoughts to black and white it was me myself and I within my mind doing all those heroic and noble deeds that my characters were so well known for . I was the mentor of the hero who saved the earth from fading into the oblivion…I was the noble knight in shining armor who had had the honor of saving numerous damsels in distress…I was the revolutionary leader who guided his nation through dark waters, better yet made a path for them through the impassable Nile…I was the stir of all movements…I was everyone, I was everything.

              My stories boasted of me doing all the things that I had ever wished of doing…from every trivial little pleasure that I had been deprived of by life to the greatest happiness that can confront any being in the universe I had enjoyed in the ink that I made my slave on paper. I had freed the great nations from the chains of slavery that had bound them through the mind of Abraham Lincoln…I had raised the planet above my head through the Herculean strength, strolled across the dusty yet radiant surface of the moon for the first time in human history, discovered mars and what not. I had fulfilled all challenges , overcome all obstacles, got rid of every demon that walked the planet, passed every boundary of human or supernatural achievement ever possible.
Yet I had done nothing, for every time I narrated these stories to my children and to my grand children and to my great grand children , they clapped and laughed and wow-ed at all the right places and at the end of it looked at me as a man looks at a little child’s follies. And I knew that one day when I will be lying on my death bed and my son would come to me and say that now that he was going to become a father I should start acting like myself and start being what I am , he wouldn’t want me to lie about myself to his child. I knew I would be infuriated and be utterly misunderstood. That was the day I feared the most of all. I feared it more than death itself, for all my life I had lived my stories , felt them in every vein of mine and now it was all going to turn out to be a lie,
                        However ALL of my life had not been a fantasy. There were things I had done which were as heroic as my stories. The time when i had volunteered to fight in the World War II , the most courageous step that I have ever taken perhaps; the training that was given to us in the grounds of an old school of London (Brook shield, perhaps) the boom of the cannons, the shrieks of the bombs as they were dropped on enemy targets, the spirits that ran high whenever victory approached; the excitement and the occasional fear of losing my loved ones. And not to forget the time when I met the Love of my life, Eve Stella. I had seen her sitting graciously in a stage ballet and had to pay the price of a couple of ribs in my efforts in my efforts to get to her in the mayhem, so my Eve was literally my Eve!!
      There are things that have lasted in my memory for so long that now I doubt them ever happening. I remember that eventful day when I met an old fellow of mine, William Henry, in a bank in an urban town of Texas. I was only enquiring him of his well being. When I don’t know what mannerisms of mine struck him so well that he handed me a moazzer and shot a bullet in the air and made me his partner in looting the bank (for which he had already planned of course!). How the bank ended up being bankrupt later is an altogether different story!!
        Today every time I sit down in my cozy old arm chair by the fire to recall all the wonderful times that have passed, I have one desire prickling in the depths of my heart. I wish I would ever get one chance again to write down my own life, the life that I lived and not the one stat my characters made me live; the life that has George Darcy in it, his wife, his children, his adventures, his stories so that one day when I am no more and get transformed into all the stories that I have so marvelously narrated all my life, I would not just hang around like a misty veil of illusion, rather be the cloud behind the silver lining.