Short Story by Agnita Pandian
There lived an ordinary middle class guy called Chiyaan who from a Brahmin family. Born in 1982, Chiyaan was educated in Chennai city in B.Com Finance. He took over his father’s job as a bank teller in Chennai’s Kodambakkam area State Bank of India branch. He has a loving mother, a younger sister in 12th std. and younger brother who was in middle school. He played road cricket with his younger brother and took his sister to school on his bike. They were a loving family.
Chiyaan was content with who he was and considered himself a mediocre guy. Although ordinary in all forms, Chiyaan had one special gift that he didn’t know about. He had very vivid dreams. In these dreams he saw strange things but felt very real. He was in every one of those dreams doing certain acts. He dismissed these as just silly or bad dreams. This continued for a while. One day he dreamt that a regular guy poojari comes to deposit 1 crore rupees. He forgets the dream in the morning and went about his day in the morning. To his astonishment, the same poojari man deposited 1 crore that day. This dream to real life parallelism repeated a few times and he realized that he had a special gift to see the people and their futures via dreams. He saw a lot of bad things happening and in a few instances acts on them and gets recognized as the hero by the society. He started to like this new found popularism.
He often dreams about a girl called Tamizh. It was not his dream-girl that he would have loved to meet or any such thing. Tamizh is an ordinary woman who is from the lower class. She’s often dressed in just the same 3 cotton sarees and often working cleaning jobs in people’s houses etc. She’s drop dead rustic gorgeous and has a kind soul which makes her eternally beautiful in Chiyaan’s mind. But she’s in trouble. Chiyaan repeatedly dreams about Tamizh because he sees her in a miserable state in those dreams and he’s trying to find the source of her sufferings. One day he attempts to talk to Tamizh in his dream but in vain as she obfuscates from him. Next day in his dream, Chiyaan follows her to her work place and somehow she escapes again. Same things happen on few occasions and he does not succeed in meeting her. He likes dreaming about her although it’s a dead end dream.
After a long day of work at the bank Chiyaan goes out with his friends and when he’s returning home late evening he feels like he’s in road that looks familiar. He’s realizes he’s on the same road that he chased Tamizh once in his dream. He spots the same girl Tamizh from his dreams, only this is real. The difference is Tamizh is dressed in military outfit and has muscles as big as cage fighters. Nothing like what she looked like in his dreams. She’s also killing people and doing bad things. Chiyaan is shocked and confused. Shocked because he was fond of the simple Tamizh from the dreams and confused because he thought his dreams showed accurate description of people, but now he saw a wrong interpretation of this girl, usually he’s right.
Chiyaan tries hard to follow Tamizh and talk to her. But, somehow he misses the exact same way he missed her in the previous dreams. This happens a few times and he’s not able to stop the bad things she’s doing to people. Chiyaan thinks Tamizh’s associated with this secret man character that’s making her do things. Chiyaan sometimes gets confused when he’s following her in dreams and when he’s following her in real life because she appears in both.
To put a stop to this, Chiyaan tries to figure out why he is even chasing her to begin with. This takes him through a journey. Chiyaan finally meets Tamizh when he helps her out of trouble a couple of times from her enemies. Tamizh slowly starts to unfold her story to Chiyaan. She’s a simple girl who changed herself to fight circumstances. He gets even more deeply absorbed into her. In the process he gets into dangerous things like robbing assets, killing people and doing bad things with Tamizh. Slowly he realizes that he’s crossing boundaries between good and bad. He tries to stop Tamizh but she gets angry. She gets close to killing Chiyaan one day. Chiyaan is shocked and hurt. But, there’s no way out. Chiyaan then decides to kill her. In the process the girl makes him realize that in reality he’s actually the bad guy and he’s been doing bad things all this while.
In reality Chiyaan is a negative character who tries to disrupt peace in the world. He’s born orphan, and he develops hatred for the world. He just starts to destroy the world for fun. The banker guy is the dreamt fiction of the bad guy. All what bad Chiyaan wanted from life but never had was the banker guy’s life. However, Chiyaan had some goodness in him and wanted to change. So, bad Chiyaan creates the girl himself to either change the bad guy’s mind so Chiyaan becomes a good man or destroy him – One of the two outcomes. The girl hence is set on her mission.
In the end, the girl is killed by Chiyaan that drives him to insanity because he loved her dearly. Killing her kills his spirit but that just pushes him over the edge because he lost the only thing he loved. He’s driven to more negativity.
Dedicated to Chiyaan Vikram!
Agnita 