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.
No comments:
Post a Comment