Madness: A Synopsis

 

Madness is a visceral, slow-burning work of the human and ecological spirit, set along the Rispana River—a fragile, hemorrhaging spine that cuts through the heart of Dehradun, India. Written in a voice that is both a scalpel and a shroud, the novel follows an aging photojournalist, known simply as "the old man," as he navigates the daily ritual of the riverbank. His lens does not seek the grand or the panoramic; instead, it obsessively records the granular collapses—the quiet, systemic insanities that pulse through his community, his rotting marriage, the dying water, and the deepening shadows of his own mind.

The narrative voice operates with the clinical intimacy of a witness, watching the old man’s life unfold with a compassion that refuses to look away from the ugly. Structured in chapters that mimic the erratic, struggling bends of the river, the novel explores the "slow unraveling"—the invisible fractures where ecological decay and human loneliness become indistinguishable from one another.

The story awakens at dawn, where the old man harvests images for a fading local newspaper. His home, perched precariously on a patch of land near the water’s edge, is a study in domestic claustrophobia—half sanctuary, half pressure cooker. Inside, he exists alongside his wife, a woman whose internal landscape is fraying into a chaotic tapestry of murmurs, curses, and rising incoherence. Their marriage is a long-exhausted geography, decaying in perfect, agonizing parallel with the Rispana; as the river chokes on silt and plastic, the woman chokes on the unspoken.

As the old man traces the river’s descent—from the pristine, cold springlands through the bickering midlands and finally into the "feverlands" of the urban sprawl—he encounters the many masks of ordinary madness. He observes women trading sharp gossip on verandas, men fraying at the edges of the market bridge, and children throwing stones at the shrinking current. These vignettes are the book’s quiet, devastating thesis: that madness is not a sudden explosion, but a sedimentary accumulation—a thousand tiny abandonments of care and attentiveness.

Haunting the periphery of the frame is a lone owl. It is the anti-symbol—not a creature of myth, but a heavy, moving shadow that crosses the sky whenever human disorder reaches a pitch that can no longer be ignored. The owl sees what the town has chosen to forget. Late in the narrative, when the bird finally descends into the material world, it pays the ultimate price for its witness. Its eventual disappearance leaves behind a silence that is perhaps the most haunting note in the book.

Countering the owl is a stray dog—shy, patient, and persistent. Unlike the owl, the dog never intervenes; it persists. It survives. It remains sane. Its quiet, detached loyalty to the movement of the water serves as the novel’s understated moral axis—a reminder of what it means to live without the baggage of a fractured psyche.

As the Rispana reaches its crisis point—choked by forest fires, stagnant pools, and chemical lethargy—the old man’s wife descends into her own final storm. Her madness is framed not as a medical pathology, but as a cultural consequence—the inevitable destination for a heart in a world where the infrastructure of empathy has collapsed.

The novel’s final movement is an intimate, dust-choked convergence. Following the owl’s disappearance and a day where the sky rains ash, the old man finds himself at the river’s edge at dusk. He takes a photograph of the dying water. There is no easy redemption here, no cinematic catharsis. Instead, there is a moment of profound, wordless humility—an unadorned recognition between two wounded bodies, the man and the Rispana, acknowledging what remains after the noise of the world finally falls away.

Madness is a haunting portrait of ecological grief and cultural rupture. It is a story for the forgotten, a testament to the fragile, luminous threads of sanity that bind us to the earth, even as we learn to survive a world that has forgotten how to truly see.

Madness is now available on Amazon and in bookstores 

https://notionpress.com/in/read/madness

Email: shaleen.rakesh@gmail.com

Phone: +91-9810800483

 

Old Dog

He was a man who practiced the art of disappearing long before the sun had fully retreated. By nine o’clock, while the surrounding tenements still hummed with the domestic friction of clinking cutlery and muffled arguments, he would draw the thin, yellowing curtain across his window. He switched off the lamp out of a quiet, seasoned acceptance. He lay down in the dark, surrender masquerading as sleep. The silence of his throat felt natural now, a well-worn stone polished by years of disuse.

But the night, in its infinite complexity, always held a seam.

Somewhere near three in the morning, the air would undergo a molecular shift. The world grew colder, sharper, as if the darkness were tightening its grip. And strangely on that precise pattern of time, the sound would arrive.

A bark. Distant. A silver needle piercing the velvet skin of the valley.

It was a metronome of the soul. Fifteen seconds of silence—empty, expectant—followed by a single, sharp volley. Bark. Pause. Bark. It was a rhythm so precise it felt mathematical, a private geometry mapped out against the void. The dog marked the passage of the abyss with the cold reliability of a ticking heart.

He never saw the creature. In the theater of his mind, he cast the dog in various roles. Some nights, it was a weathered guardian perched on a crumbling stone wall, eyes reflecting a light that had traveled centuries to reach the earth. On others, it was a solitary wanderer in a field of dry grass, barking at the memory of a master who had long since dissolved into the loam. The distance softened the sound, stripping it of its feral edge until it became something ceremonial —a prayer uttered in a language of bone and breath.

Half-submerged in the tides of sleep, the man would listen. On the nights when his spirit felt anchored, the rhythm was a lullaby. But on the difficult nights—the nights when the silence in the room felt predatory—the barks were like flares sent up from a sinking ship. They were proof of life. A reminder that somewhere, out in the shivering dark, another pulse was defiant.

He vacillated between two definitions of the beast. On his better days, he viewed the dog as a sage—a creature that had reached the far side of understanding and found that the only response to the universe was a steady, rhythmic protest. It was a monk in fur, chanting its solitary mantra to keep the night from collapsing in on itself.

But in the hours when his own bones felt like brittle glass, he suspected the dog was mad. For what else but madness would fuel such an unrewarded ritual? It was a lunacy of order, a frantic adherence to a pattern that no one requested and no one acknowledged. Yet, even in that suspected madness, there was a strange dignity. It was a commitment to a duty that existed outside the peripheral vision of men.

Between three and five, the man and the dog shared a tether.

It was the comfort of knowing the void was occupied.

When the sun finally bruised the horizon and the first birds began their frantic, melodic competition, the dog would vanish. The morning brought the mundane: the ritual of the kettle, the watering of a wilting fern, the negotiation with the chronic ache in his knees. During the day, the dog was a ghost, a dream-fragment lost in the glare of the actual.

Yet, as the shadows lengthened and the light turned to copper, the anticipation would return.

He had spent a lifetime at the edges of things, a spectator to the grand dramas of others. He understood that humans are architects of meaning; we build cathedrals out of coincidences and gods out of the wind. And so, he had built a cathedral around the dog.

To find the dog would be to kill the miracle. To see a stray, mangy creature scratching at fleas would shatter the monk, the guardian, the madman. The mystery was the thing that kept the man upright; the anonymity allowed the sound to remain elemental, like the rustle of dry leaves or the shift of plates below the ground.

As winter descended, the air grew brittle. He wondered if the dog’s paws were cracking on the frozen earth, or if its breath hung in the air like a tattered shroud. One night, the barking faltered. It arrived late, the rhythm staggered and heavy, as if the animal were dragging the weight of the entire valley in its lungs. The man sat up, his heart hammering a frantic, uneven beat against his ribs. He felt a cold surge of terror. He realized then that he had woven his own survival into that thread of sound. If the barking stopped, the silence that followed would be absolute. It would be the kind of silence that swallows men whole.

The pattern eventually steadied, but the man remained awake, staring at the ceiling. He understood then that the stories we tell ourselves are the only light we have against the dark. The dog might be wise, or it might be a broken thing acting on a fading instinct, but the meaning belonged to the man. It was a bridge built across the solitude, a silent pact between two creatures waiting for the light.

The night would always return. He would draw the curtain. He would close his eyes. And somewhere in the throat of the valley, the dog would lift its head and begin again.

Bark.

Pause.

Bark.

A pulse in the dark. A shared breath. A slow, steady march towards a morning they both hoped to see.

Email: shaleen.rakesh@gmail.com

© Shaleen Rakesh

The Window

The Dehradun heat is an intrusion. It carries the scent of parched lychee orchards and the gritty, pulverized spirit of a city expanding too fast for its own skin. For Mrs. Kapadia, the dust was a personal affront, a grey legion perpetually marching against the sanctity of her bungalow.

She lived within a geometry of hygiene. Her days were measured in the rhythmic shuck-shuck of a damp cloth against teak, the acidic bite of vinegar on glass, and the ritualistic exorcism of shadows. To be alone was to be in control. In the silence of her home, she had curated a museum of the static—lace doilies pinned like moth specimens, silver tea sets reflecting a distorted, solitary world.

Every afternoon, the "meticulous widow" retreated to the high-backed chair by the eastern window. From here, she sipped Darjeeling tea, her gaze flickering with a cool disdain over the chaotic sprawl beyond her gates. Dehradun was a smudge on her lens. She watched the rickshaws jostle through the haze of diesel and dust, viewing the world as something that needed to be wiped away.

Then came the Redstart.

It appeared on a Tuesday—a small, vibrating flicker of slate-grey and russet. It perched on the sill, a scrap of life against the bleached stone. Mrs. Kapadia watched, tea cooling, as the bird deposited a singular, messy twig upon the pristine ledge.

The offense was instantaneous. It was an aesthetic insurrection.

She rose, the joints of her knees popping like dry wood, and unlatched the window. With a sharp, practiced shooing motion, she drove the creature into the white glare of the street. "Filthy thing," she muttered, immediately reaching for the spray bottle. She scrubbed the stone until it gleamed with a sterile, unnatural light.

For three days, the war of the window persisted. Each morning, the Redstart returned, its beak laden with the debris of the outside world—dried grass, a strand of colorful nylon thread, a fragment of a dried leaf. Each morning, Mrs. Kapadia dismantled the progress with the efficiency of a state executioner.

Day One: A foundation of twigs. Swept away.

Day Two: A soft bedding of moss. Scoured with bleach.

Day Three: A stubborn persistence of mud. Chiseled off with a butter knife.

That night, however, the silence of the house felt different. Usually, the quiet was a velvet cloak; now, it felt like a vacuum. Lying in her starched sheets, Mrs. Kapadia found her thoughts deviating from the usual inventory of the pantry. She thought of the bird’s eye—a tiny, obsidian bead that held no malice, only a frantic industry.

She imagined the Redstart out there in the Dehradun night, huddling under a corrugated tin roof or balanced on a swaying power line, clutching its singular purpose against the wind. For the first time in years, the meticulous widow felt the fragility of her own walls. What was her cleaning, after all, but a nest-building for a ghost?

The next morning, the sun rose in a bruised purple hue over the Mussoorie hills. Mrs. Kapadia sat by the window, her cloth ready in her lap like a weapon.

The Redstart arrived at 7:15 AM. It landed with a soft thud, a bit of sheep’s wool trailing from its beak. It looked at the glass—at the woman behind it—and hesitated.

Mrs. Kapadia’s hand moved towards the latch. She saw her own reflection: a face mapped with the lines of a hundred thousand grievances against the dust. Then she looked at the bird. She did not open the window.

She watched, breathless, as the Redstart began to weave. The bird moved with a frantic, rhythmic grace, tucking the wool into the crooks of the twigs. It was messy. It was chaotic. It was undeniably alive.

"In the sanctuary of the sterile, the first sign of life is always a smudge."

Over the following weeks, the transformation of the window became the transformation of the inhabitant. Mrs. Kapadia stopped noticing the layer of fine silt on the bookshelves. Her tea grew cold as she charted the bird’s sorties. She learned the geography of the street through the bird’s flight path, tracing it to a specific, gnarled neem tree across the road—a tree she had previously dismissed as a nuisance of falling leaves.

Now, the tree was a landmark. The city bustle was no longer a "hideous" roar, rather the source of the bird's materials. The window was no longer a barrier to be polished until it disappeared but a frame for a miracle.

One afternoon, she saw the first egg—a pale, freckled promise resting in the center of the debris. Mrs. Kapadia leaned her forehead against the glass, no longer caring about the smudge her breath left behind. She realized then that the dust of Dehradun wasn't something to be feared.

Her house was still quiet, but it was no longer empty. Outside, on a ledge of stone she had once tried to keep barren, life was pulsing, messy and persistent, turning her cage into a kingdom.

 

 

ख्वाबों के परिंदे

खुले नीले आस्मां तले

हवा ने अपने पंख खोले

और तुम्हारी मुस्कान से चले

एक राह निकली है मुझतक

 

तुम्हारे ख्वाबों में जलता हूँ

अपने ही प्यार को देख देखकर

 

मेरा ख्वाब और मेरी आँखें बंद न हों.

 

 

पारियां और पतंगे

उस लड़के ने मुझसे प्यार किया
पर वो मुझे पतंगा ना बना सका
मेरे परों का शब्द याद रख पाने को

वो पर, वो पारियां, वो पतंगे

लड़के इन्ही को प्यार करते हैं क्या?

फिर क्यों मुझे इतनी नाज़ुकता से-
प्यार करना नहीं आया?
क्यों मैं कभी जलते घरों की ओर नहीं दौड़ा?
क्या उन घरों में कुछ रखा था?
किसीका पागलपन?

मैं किसी लड़के से इतना प्यार नहीं कर सका-
अँधाधुन
पागलों की तरह
रातों को जाग-जागकर।

 

हैल्लो ३७७

हैल्लो ३७७ आज मुझे तुमसे कुछ बातें कहनी हैं.

 

मुझे ये जो ज़रूरत महसूस होती है

अचानक बेबाक कहने की-

मुझे उससे प्यार है, मुझे प्यार है उससे

और यह भी

कि उसके पंखों कि उड़ान

मेरी ही उड़ान है 

 

वो बारिश भी उसी की है

जो मुझे ओस की तरह छू कर जाती है

और वापस आती है बादल बनकर

याद दिलाती है मुझको

जनवरी कि सर्द शामों की

 

उसके कांपते होंठों का एहसास

जो मेरी पीठ पर चलते हैं

धीमे से

उस एहसास का क्या कहूँ?

 

तो क्यों ना

उसका हाथ पकड़ चलूँ 

उसकी धड़कनों के तले

उसके जिस्म की राह पकड़

 

लोग कहते हैं

तुम्हें हमारा प्यार पसंद नहीं?

 

तुम जिन सख्त निगाहों से हमें देखते हो

जैसे हमें कैद कर देना चाहते हो

 

क्या तुम प्यार के रंगों को

कैद करना भी जानते हो?

 

या उस शब्द को

जिसे मैं रोज़ सुबह

अपने जिस्म पर महसूस करता हूँ?

क्या आजकल आकर्षण को भी कैद किया जाता है?

तुम जानते हो क्या?

 

वैसे मैं तुम्हारे बारे में इतना कुछ नहीं जानता।

ये तो मेरे दोस्त हैं

जो मुझे तुम्हारे बारे में बत्ताते हैं

काफी पढ़े लिखे हैं मेरे दोस्त

कुछ तो वकील भी हैं

उन्होंने कहा तुम १५० सालों से हमसे नफरत करते हो

काफी आश्चर्य हुआ था मुझे ये सुनकर

और हंसी भी आयी थी

१५० साल कि नफरत

प्यार को काबू करने में कम कैसे पड़ गयी?

 

तुम थक गए होगे है ना?

 

तुम्हें आज एक दोस्त चाहिए

मेरे जैसा

जो तुम्हें समझ सके

 

जो बाकी सबकी तरह 

तुम्हारी काया को

इक कागज़ का बेकार टुकड़ा ना समझे 

 

मेरे जैसा दोस्त

जो तुम्हें सही राह दिखाए

जो प्यार से कभी ना थके

 

जो तुम्हें बता सके

ये प्यार ही तो ज़िन्दगी है

 

मेरे दोस्त

 

इसमें थकते नहीं

इसमें सिर्फ चलते है

बहुत तेज़ बहुत दूर-- नफरत से!

नफरत से बहुत दूर

और बहुत आगे

 

Darker still

You shouldn’t try

to visualise the end

of the tunnel

if it will be light

or darker still

just keep going

not overcoming

but only giving up

 

Its best

to not look back

to not search anything

around you

only what is

inside.