MADNESS
A Novel
by
Shaleen Rakesh
Email: shaleen.rakesh@gmail.com
Phone: +91-9810800483
© Shaleen Rakesh
Introduction
Prologue
Part 1: The Springlands
Chapter 1: The River
Chapter 2: A House
Chapter 3: Women
Chapter 4: The Office
Part 2: The Feverlands
Chapter 5: The Market
Chapter 6: Festival
Chapter 7: Fire
Chapter 8: The Collapse
Epilogue—The River of Rumours
Cities are built upon things we agree to forget. They thrive in the peripheral—in those scarred patches of earth that carry a thousand small, festering wounds in the glare of the afternoon sun. Along the eastern hem of Dehradun, where the frantic pulse of the city dissolves into the sun-bleached skin of half-finished colonies, a river moves through this vast, quiet forgetting. The Rispana does not perform for the eye. It possesses no mountain roar, no crystalline posture, no postcard shimmer to offer the passing tourist.
It is a long, slow endurance that pulses through the city like a suppressed memory: bruised, silt-heavy, but stubbornly, almost violently, alive.
For decades, we have treated Rispana as a common grave—a bin for our plastic shames and a basement for our architectural greed. We built over its breath and turned our faces towards the light, yet the water still found the cracks to move. Some call this resilience; I think it is a weary, divine patience. A river keeps its course even when that course is a jagged, broken thing. In its survival, the Rispana holds up a mirror the city lacks the courage to look into. For the slow poisoning of a landscape is an account of the soul; not merely a matter of physical decay. It is the story of what a people will permit, what they will ignore, and the specific kind of ghosts they carry in their nub when the world isn't watching.
This book is about that carrying.
It is a study of the quiet madness that gathers like dust in the folds of an ordinary life. This is madness as slow inheritance—the rot of a promise, the silent fraying of a community, the small, daily desertion of our duties to one another. It is the corrosion of meaning, one drop at a time.
It is here, where the water turns to sludge and the spirit turns to stone, that an old man walks each day with his camera. He is a servant of a fading local paper, the kind that still honors the holiness of small, dusty stories. His task is a daily prayer: follow the water, witness the wreckage, and bring back some fragment of truth for the city to feast upon. This rhythm has been his orbit for years. He walks because he believes that if no one looks at the things we have discarded, then we ourselves are truly lost.
The old man is driven by a singular, fierce fidelity to the act of seeing. He is no sage; he is neither hero nor prophet. He does not burn like the reformer or carry the hubris of ambition.
He is tired, possessed of that specific, heavy-lidded exhaustion common to those who trade their lives for honest labor. He is worn in the way of long-married men, whose love has morphed into habit, and whose habit has hardened into a vast, unbridgeable distance. His wife remains only a room away, a ghost in her own house, tending to her own private fractures and the quiet, desperate chore of not disappearing entirely. They do not see their marriage losing its shape, just as one does not see a mountain move; they know only the fatigue of trying, and the hollow, echoing weight of finally stopping.
Through his lens, the Rispana becomes a corridor of ghosts and grit. He captures a funeral spilling its grief over the ghats; a construction site’s yellow teeth gnawing at the embankment; a woman washing clothes in a silence so thick it feels like a wall; a knot of boys diving into toxic currents with the reckless grace of the doomed. An owl perches on a splintered eucalyptus branch, its gaze older than the valley, watching the city unravel. With every shutter-click, the old man harvests a piece of the valley’s fraying mind. He brings home the loneliness and the disorder, the slow-motion collapse of a world that has forgotten how to care for its own.
I, the one who speaks these words to you, witness him as he witnesses the river. I do not dare to cross his path. I do not guide him. I do not offer him the mercy of an intervention. — I keep a distance where understanding is possible, but intrusion is forbidden. He is my lantern in this dark landscape. Through his steady, rhythmic movement, I watch a quiet madness rise like mist from the valley floor. It is a madness born of the burdens people drag behind them like invisible sleds; a madness found in a history the city refuses to name, and in the cruelty of a river expected to serve even as it is strangled.
Do not look here for a diagnosis. This is no prescription, no clinical
map of the broken mind. It cannot tame the madness it describes.
What it attempts is something far more fragile: to show how the "insane" is woven into the hem of the everyday. It hides in the sharp gossip of the neighborhood women, in the suffocating silence of an aging couple, in the laughter of children playing on the edge of the abyss, and in the myths we cling to when truth becomes too heavy to lift. Madness is a reflection in the water rather than a monster in these pages.
The river holds it all. It collects our discarded shames and remembers the things we have buried. It preserves the geometry of wounds that no one has the language to speak of. And day after day, the old man walks beside it, his camera a silent witness, unaware that he is documenting the slow death of a river and the quiet rot of a culture, one frame at a time.
This book follows him through a single year along the Rispana.
A year in which a river, a marriage, a neighborhood, and a city reveal the paper-thin border between sanity and despair.
From here, the story begins.
Prologue
At first light, the river is nothing more than a thin, silvered line of breath. It moves across the stones without the arrogance of sound, touching the earth the way a half-forgotten memory brushes against the mind—softly, tentatively, asking for nothing and promising even lesser. The city remains a shuttered thing, its eyes pressed closed, the houses huddled in a sleep that feels less like rest and more like a collective withdrawal. In this suspended hour, the air carries the particular, biting chill of a valley that has lost the rhythm of its own seasons, a ghost-cold that lingers in the bone. Here, in the hollows of the morning, the Rispana gathers itself; waking from the night is a remembered, solitary ritual it must perform without audience.
Along the embankment, the grass bows under the impossible weight of the dew, each blade a brief, shimmering jewel that glitters for a heartbeat before dissolving into the gray permanence of the day. A dog drifts past, a withering punctuation mark against the mist, stopping to press its snout into a corner where the evening’s rain once pooled. Now, only a thin, brittle crust of silt remains—the river’s signature left upon the concrete. Overhead, high in the cathedral-hollow of a eucalyptus tree, the owl settles deeper into its feathers. Its amber eyes dim as the light invades, carrying a gaze that is older than the valley, a calm the world has long since traded for noise. It watches now with a different kind of knowing—the heavy, quiet wisdom that arrives only when the familiar begins to lose its contours and the world starts to blur at the edges.
The river moves through this fragile hour, an artery of liquid patience. It understands, with a fluid intelligence, the precariousness of the land it holds. It curves around the jagged teeth of concrete debris, slips like smoke beneath fallen branches, and glides past the old bridge where moss grows in long, elegiac strokes of dark green. It carries the city’s unwashed scent: the iron tang of rusting metal, the sweet rot of sodden leaves, the weight of a thousand forgotten prayers tossed into the current. It absorbs it all without a murmur. A river accepts the world’s offerings, even when those offerings are nothing but the things the world no longer wants.
Slowly, the city begins to rattle its bones. A rooster’s cry shatters a distant lane; the sharp, domestic hiss of a pressure cooker rises from a nearby kitchen; the rhythmic, abrasive scratch of a woman’s broom against her courtyard; a truck coughing itself into a violent awakening. These sounds do not break the silence so much as they soften it, stitching themselves into the river’s low murmur to create a thin, trembling weave of life. Soon, the streets will swell with the frantic machinery of the day. The sun will climb, the noise will thicken, and the Rispana will vanish once more—swallowed by the blind familiarity of a people who have forgotten how to look at the very ground that carries them.
In this fleeting, unguarded suspension of time, the Rispana reveals its true face—that of a survivor, not the face of a god or a ghost.
It is tired, watchful, stubborn, and profoundly, almost aggressively, alive.
The old man emerges onto the bank, moving with the slow, deliberate precision of one who has learned that to disturb the world unnecessarily is a form of violence. His camera hangs from a strap frayed by the friction of a thousand mornings, a heavy anchor against his chest. He pauses where the earth dissolves into the water’s edge, letting the stillness settle over his shoulders like a coat. He knows this river the way a man knows the rhythm of his own lungs—instinctively, without the clutter of romance.
To him, water is a living companion rather than a metaphor. It drifts through the architecture of his days, a silent vessel for everything he has no words to name.
He raises the camera, his body becoming a statue, and he waits. The light is still a bruised, hesitant gray; the world is not yet ready to be seen. He understands that a photograph, much like the truth, cannot be forced. It must arrive on its own terms, or not at all.
Across the water, thin, acrid wires of smoke curl from a pile of yesterday’s garbage. The smell of burning plastic drifts towards him, sharp and chemical. He does not flinch. The river has been a patient teacher, and its primary lesson is this: that suffering, when ignored for long enough, eventually becomes ordinary. It becomes part of the weather. He takes a step forward, then another, his boots sinking into the silt, searching for the singular angle that will expose what the city has spent decades learning to overlook.
In the eucalyptus, the owl stirs. It shifts its weight on a branch that feels too fragile for its lineage. For a heartbeat, its wide, unblinking eye catches the old man’s movement. They look at one another across the divide of species and light—two creatures caught in an awkward transition. One is awake when the laws of nature demand sleep; the other is asleep in most ways that matter. Their meeting lasts only the space of a single breath, a communion held in the soft, blue-bruised light of dawn, before the owl turns away and vanishes into the thick, feathery dark of its own existence.
The river continues its low, rhythmic dialogue with the stones. The old man moves on. The day prepares to enter itself.
Later, when the sun hauls itself over the ridges and the valley is choked with the frantic noise of survival, no one will remember that the city began in this profound hush. No one will recall the river’s pre-dawn face, or the slow, deliberate blink of the owl, or how the old man lifted his lens with the hesitant grace of a man who knows that truth is the most fragile thing we possess.
But the river will keep the record in its silt.
The owl will carry the memory in its hollow.
And perhaps, in some recessed, shadowed part of his own heart, the old man will too.
This story opens from that hour—from the shy, cold trembling of a morning that isn't sure it wants to be born. It begins with a river that carries far more than water and a man who traces the length of its shifting, bruised body, collecting not just images but the faint, jagged outlines of a collective unraveling. What follows is a chronicle of a quiet madness—the kind that moves as naturally as breath, slipping into the mundane and settling into the bone like an inheritance. It is a madness that rises the way the light rises: slowly, soundlessly, reshaping the landscape before anyone thinks to notice.
Here, in the valley, as the Rispana bends towards the city’s violent
awakening, the first crack in the day finally appears.
And the old man walks into it.
Chapter 1: The River
(1)
Before the sun hauls itself over the valley ridges, before the first scooter coughs its mechanical phlegm into the morning, and long before the city’s domestic quarrels can gather their strength for another day, the old man is already moving.
There is a clock in him that strikes before the birds—a mechanism driven by something weaker than resolve, and infinitely gentler than discipline. He has trailed this ritual for years, though the exact moment of its inception is lost to him now. He can no longer name the precise sorrow, nor the specific, localized longing that first compelled him to abandon the warmth of his bed and drift towards the water.
Perhaps it was the pull of the silence. Perhaps it was the terrifying certainty of the river’s movement in a world that felt stuck. Or perhaps it was the simpler, more brutal truth: that his home had long ago ceased to be a place where mornings could be born. It had become, instead, a place where the previous day refused to leave.
He locks the gate with a lover’s softness, ensuring the metallic click does not travel back through the dark to the woman sleeping within. There was a season, once, when he would pause at the threshold, waiting for her to stir—expecting a name called out or a word suspended in that fragile space between an invitation and a grievance. But those days have encrusted. Memory has become a distant, boarded-up house he no longer possesses the keys to enter. Now, the closing of the gate is a mechanical grace; his hand is steady, his breath slow, a gesture the body performs with the cold approval of a machine.
The air is sharp, though the calendar denies it is winter. It is that peculiar Dehradun cold—a thin, ghost-like chill that settles on the skin like a fine dust. It serves as a persistent reminder that the mountains are watching without demanding the armor of wool or scarves, yet the old man inhales, and the air seems to startle something dormant in his chest: a soft, primal alertness, like a small animal shifting in its burrow, preparing for the hunt.
The river is never truly distant, yet the walk to its edge is long enough for the city’s contradictions to surface, one by one, like stones pushed up by a frost. He passes a temple that has been a spare scaffolding for seven years—a renovation so stalled it has achieved its own kind of permanence, a second skin of rusted iron and splintered wood. He passes a house with a locked jaw of a door and a guava tree erupting from the masonry, its roots drinking the mortar. He passes the stray dogs, curled in a matted circle near the chai stall, waiting for the hour when the air will thicken with the scent of bruised cardamom and the sweet, scalded steam of boiling milk. These sights are his rosary. For him, repetition is not the herald of monotony; it is the city’s heartbeat. A city does not reveal its soul through the frantic theater of change, but through the stubbornness of what remains.
When the Rispana finally appears, the sky has begun to bleed a thin, anaemic light, though the sun is still a secret kept by the ridges. The river lies before him like a long, unanswered question. Even in its most hushed hour, it possesses the restlessness of a creature that wants to speak but has forgotten the shape of words. The water moves—it always moves—but the movement feels devoid of destination, a journey without the hope of triumph or the mercy of completion. It is a persistence without reward, a liquid mirror for the lives built upon its banks.
He descends towards the water, his boots finding the cold, smooth indifference of the stones. The camera against his chest is heavy, but it is a weight he no longer calculates; it has become a graft, a second pair of eyes that have kept him company through the long desert of his years. He does not take photographs immediately. He stands first in the posture of a listener, allowing the river to speak its strange, silt-heavy language. The water bends close to the earth, whispering secrets into the dark soil, and the earth, with a patience that borders on the divine, listens.
Then, the first arrival: a white-throated kingfisher. It flashes a blue so sharp, so violently electric, that it seems to slice the dim light in two. It perches on a rusted pipe that juts over the current like a broken finger, then dives. A sudden, silvered puncture of the surface—and then it emerges, empty-beaked. A failed attempt. No triumph. It returns to its rusted throne, shakes the failure from its wings in a spray of diamonds, and settles to wait again. The old man watches, his gaze devoid of judgment.
He takes the first photograph of the day: the kingfisher poised, wings slightly unfurled in a gesture of suspended intent, with the river behind it looking like a sheet of brushed metal. He does not check the screen to see what he has caught. He never does. He trusts the ghost of the image in his mind more than the digital lie on the glass.
As the light swells, the river’s confession becomes more intimate, more brutal. The Rispana begins to reveal the grit of its burden: the bright, suffocating choke of plastic wedged between the rocks, the ghostly trail of soap suds bleeding from a nearby drain, a torn strip of a sari snagged on a submerged branch like a discarded prayer. None of this is new. The river has been the city’s silent, long-suffering packhorse for generations, yet every morning the old man looks upon it with a fresh ache. It is as if the water is constantly trying to articulate a secret he has not yet found the courage to understand.
The human procession begins, rhythmic and mute. A man from the settlement appears, his bucket clattering against the stones; he stares at the water with a hollow, transactional gaze, fills his vessel, and retreats into the shadows. A huddle of schoolboys, still thick with sleep, gather near the path to trade whispers that dissipate in the damp air. A woman in a brown shawl pauses, shifting the heavy, jagged weight of firewood against her spine. Life resumes its daily, slow-motion drama, and the old man watches it all unfold from the wings—the quietest spectator in a theater of the mundane.
There are moments, sharp and fleeting, when he wonders if he has spent too much of his life in the silence of the audience—if he has watched for too many years and spoken for too few. But words have always been a heavy masonry he could not lift; they felt like jagged stones that tore at the throat. Images, however, are lighter. They are honest. The camera allows him the grace of the ghost: to witness without the violence of intrusion, to notice without the sharpness of interference. It is his greatest, most secret comfort—the knowledge that he does not need to announce himself to the world in order to occupy his own place within it.
At dawn, the Rispana is a mirror rather than a spectacle.. It does not reflect the vanity of faces, but the deeper, shifting states of the mind. Sometimes, as he moves along the bank, the old man feels as though he is navigating the corridors of his own psyche. The river’s movement is a liquid echo of the life he carries within—a trembling, precarious balance between stillness and a profound unrest. It is something unresolved, yet strangely peaceful in its refusal to be finished.
He continues his pilgrimage along the curve of the bank. The stones crunch under his boots—a dry, rhythmic percussion against the rising humidity. The scent of wet earth and ancient silt rises to meet him. Above, the sky finally surrenders its gray for a pale, watery yellow, and with the light comes the city’s inevitable roar: the frantic cough of scooters, the impatient staccato of horns, and the aggressive, rhythmic scrape of a broom against a distant veranda. But the river clings to its early quiet, cradling the last, cool fragments of the night in its current, refusing to let go until the sun demands.
Then, he sees the owl.
It sits atop a splintered branch that juts from the mud like a fractured bone, its head swiveled towards him, eyes fixed in a golden, unblinking stare. Owls are the ghosts of the night; they usually retreat into the dark folds of the valley before the heavy footfalls of humanity reclaim the morning. But this one lingers, anchored by an unsettling stillness. The old man raises his camera, the lens a cold eye meeting a warm one, but then he lowers it. Some things are too majestic to be captured. Some things deserve the mercy of being left untouched, unrecorded, and free.
The owl blinks—a slow, deliberate shutters-down—then turns its head and dissolves into the thick, shadowed lungs of the trees. In its wake, a strange stirring rises in the old man’s chest, a quiet warmth edged with the sharp salt of recognition. To the city, the owl is a vessel for old fears: an omen of madness, a harbinger of misfortune, a shadow to be avoided. But to him, it is a fellow witness. It is a silent keeper of truths that reside in the sediment, beneath the polite surface of the world.
He resumes his walk.
The Rispana widens here, its current easing into a more contemplative pace, the water itself is slowing down to think. A breeze drifts from the north, carrying the thin, resinous scent of pine from the higher ridges. In that breath, he feels a ground shift within himself—a small, unintended exhale, as if the river has reached into his chest and untied a memory he had forgotten was there. He cannot name the sensation, but he can feel its weight: the fragile relief of movement, of being carried by a current larger than his own history, even if only for a few hundred yards.
He pauses once more, lifts the camera, and takes another frame: the river’s long, silvered spine bending around a cluster of granite rocks, the sky caught like a blue bruise in the surface, and the distant, rhythmic silhouette of a woman beating clothes against a stone. There is no flourish in his work, no presumption of composition. There is only the quiet, brutal honesty of the morning, spreading through the valley without asking for a single eye to notice it.
He finds a large, flat stone and sits. The camera rests on his lap, a heavy, familiar companion. He watches the sun finally shatter the horizon. The first rays strike the water, igniting the surface into a sheet of trembling, molten gold. The warmth crawls slowly across the current, over the smooth stones, and eventually, over him.
For a heartbeat, he is stripped of his names. He is not a husband, not a photographer, not a servant of a dying paper. He is a pulse in the light—two living things, the man and the river, sitting beside one another in the shivering silence of the world, both composed of the same weathered, quiet matter.
The day will soon arrive with its jagged complexities. His wife will be awake when he returns, her silence waiting for him in the kitchen like an unwashed dish. The newspaper office will call, his editor’s voice a frantic staccato of errands and deadlines. The city’s ten thousand small madnesses will begin to bloom in the streets. But for now, in this baptism of early light, the world feels as clear as a polished lens.
The river moves.
The old man listens.
And the day begins.
(For more information on the novel, write to shaleen.rakesh@gmail.com)
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