A Story about Stories

Part 1: Irreverent stories

 I had once written a collection of around eight to ten stories, all of them twisted and whimsical. I shared them with a voracious reader friend of mine. She read them all while I nervously waited for her feedback. She warm-heartedly responded "dude-they-are-brillliant. Try getting them published. The world needs to read them. They are like a fine mixture of Etgar Keret, Kundera, Salinger and Kafka". I told her that she was extra kind and asked he if she found the stories to be too irreverent. She said it hardly mattered and reiterated that the world needed to read these stories.

Part 2: Book publisher

I went out in search of a book publisher. I didn't know anyone except a faintly acquainted college senior whose love for my college was quite conspicuous. I hadn't liked him much for he felt like too businessy. I had that same bad taste meeting him which you get after meeting some extrovert MBA. Too many shenanigans and too less content. But then in my work life, I learnt that I should not judge anyone and instead ask for help. 

It was in that college bonding, I mailed my stories to the school senior who with his business air and fake professionalism sent me some rules of his publishing house. I wonder if he read the stories or not but the senior responded that he was ok to publish on two conditions First,  I needed to pay him some money for his fixed charges (as COVID19 had dented his business too, I wondered how) and second the stories needed to be edited by professional editors. He also told me that he will be sharing some 11.5% royalty with me over and above sales of some fixed count. I agreed on all conditions and asked him to forward the copy to his professional editors.

Part 3: Ex-boss

The so-called professional editors fucked my stories. They not only corrected my grammar but added adjectives and adverbs, rephrased sentences from active to passive thus completely distorting the twists, the plot and the humour. The senior excitedly mailed me asking for an OK on the mail to proceed for publishing the book. I was too sad to respond for two days and then an idea came to my mind. 

I called my ex-boss. My ex-boss always wanted to be famous and he had this habit of taking credits for things he never did in the office. So I offered him a deal of making him the author of a book and pay the fixed charges to my college senior. My ex-boss was exhilarated at the idea of being a published author and he gladly agreed. I responded to my senior's mail by saying OK but that the author name and author details will have to be changed as I had decided not to be an author of the edited stories. The school senior got shocked and asked why I wanted to give on my creative possession to somebody else. 

Part 4: Literature Festival

The book got published and it made a lot of noise in my ex-company whatsapp group. People were startled at the creative inclination of my ex-boss, although nobody ever read the book. I never contacted my school senior or ex-boss to get any idea of how well was the book received. It was only today that I got a whatsapp forward video of my ex-boss reading from the same book in a literature festival and then I noticed that the literature festival was sponsored by my ex-company giving a hint as to how he got that reading slot.

Part 5: Its just a story

Lot of people ask me as to why I did that. They suggest that I should have instead asked the senior to restore the stories or else go to some other publisher. I lie to them that nothing like that happened. It is just a story!