Ek Baar Aur

(One More Time)

One

Arjun's alarm went off at six-fifteen every morning.

He didn't need it. He was always awake by six. Had been for four years — ever since he'd taken the bank job and his body had quietly accepted this as life. Six-fifteen. Shower. Iron the shirt the night before so the morning moves faster. Two rotis, whatever sabzi was left from dinner. Out the door by seven-forty.

The bus from Sitabuldi to Dharampeth took twenty-two minutes if the signal at Laxmi Chowk didn't catch him. It usually caught him.

He'd calculated once that he spent sixty-seven hours a year waiting at that signal.

He'd stopped calculating things like that.

The bank was a medium-sized branch on Wardha Road, the kind where the same forty people came every week and knew everyone's name. He processed fixed deposits and loan paperwork and sometimes explained to elderly customers why the mobile app was easier, even though he knew it wasn't really easier for them, and they knew it too, and everyone just went through the motions politely.

He was good at his job. Mr. Thakre, his manager, had said so twice in four years. High praise from a man who communicated mostly through silence and an occasional look at the clock.

Arjun is reliable, Mr. Thakre had written in last year's review. Consistent. Asset to the branch.

Arjun had read it and felt — not proud, not sad. Something in between that didn't have a name. He filed it in the drawer with the previous ones.

At home there were three people: his mother, his sister Priya, and a ghost.

The ghost was his father, who had died two years ago but was still everywhere — in the volume his mother kept the news at, in the chair nobody sat in, in the EMI on the house loan that Arjun now paid every twenty-third.

His father had run a small electrical goods shop on Itwari road for twenty-two years. When he got sick the shop started shrinking. By the time he died there was nothing left but debt and a shutter that the landlord rented to someone else within the month.

Arjun had been twenty-two then.

He'd had other plans at twenty-two.

Two

The other plans had looked like this:

A letter from the Film and Television Institute in Pune, dated March 14th, four years ago. We are pleased to offer you admission to the Diploma in Direction and Screenplay Writing, commencing July...

He'd read it in the kitchen before anyone was awake. Read it three times. Then sat down on the kitchen floor — not because he was overwhelmed, though he was — but because his legs had just stopped.

He'd gotten in.

He'd applied on a dare to himself, spending three nights writing the application after everyone slept, not really believing. They took twelve students a year from the whole country. He'd gotten in.

He remembered thinking: okay. This is the door.

Then he'd done the math.

Tuition. Hostel. Two years. His father already sick. His mother's school salary covering groceries and Priya's fees and nothing else. The shop already bleeding.

He folded the letter and put it in the back of his notebook.

He never told anyone it arrived.

Three weeks later he applied for the bank position.

He wasn't bitter. He'd made peace with it — or thought he had, on most days. Nobody had forced him. His mother had never asked him to stay. He'd looked at the situation clearly and chosen, the way you do when you're the only son and the floor needs holding.

You chose. Then you got up at six-fifteen and held it.

Three

The thing that cracked it open was a wedding.

His cousin Sahil's, in November, at a small hall in Kamptee. Arjun went because you always go, and because his mother wanted company on the bus, and because he hadn't left Nagpur in eight months.

Sahil's wedding had a DJ.

Most weddings had DJs now. But this one had a DJ who, between the Punjabi dance numbers and the Bollywood medley, played — for reasons Arjun never worked out — an old song. Slow. Something from the nineties. The kind his father used to hum while fixing things around the house, off-key and completely unbothered about it.

Arjun was near the food counter with a plate of poha when he heard it.

He put the plate down.

He stood very still in the noise and the lights and the crowd, and for a moment he was twelve years old, sitting in the back of his father's shop doing homework on the counter while his father fixed a ceiling fan and hummed this exact song, badly, and was happy.

He stepped outside and sat on the steps.

The music came through the wall, muffled. The parking lot was half-dark. Someone had left a plastic chair out there and he sat in it and looked up. The sky over Kamptee was black and full of stars — more than you ever saw inside the city.

He sat there for a long time.

When he went back in his mother looked at him once and didn't say anything. She handed him his poha plate, which she'd covered with another plate to keep warm.

That was his mother. She noticed everything and said very little.

Four

The notebook was in the bottom drawer of his desk, under a UPSC preparation book he'd bought two years ago and opened twice.

He found it that night after he got home.

He sat on his bed and held it without opening it. The cover was faded blue, one corner bent from when he'd dropped it getting off the bus four summers ago.

Eighty-three pages. Story ideas. Character sketches. A half-finished screenplay he'd been working on when the FTII letter arrived. Scenes he'd written on his phone and copied out by hand because the act of writing slowly made him actually look at the words.

He opened to a page in the middle.

His own handwriting looked like someone else's.

A man walks into his childhood home after fifteen years. The house is the same. He is not. He doesn't know whether to feel relieved or devastated. Maybe both. Maybe that's the whole point.

He'd written that at twenty-one, in the college canteen, thinking it was the start of something. He'd had the whole short film mapped out.

He closed the notebook.

Turned off the light.

It's too late, he thought. That's not your life anymore. You made a choice. It was the right one. Stop doing this to yourself.

He'd given himself this speech many times. He was good at it.

He turned the light back on and opened the notebook to the first blank page.

He sat there.

Then he wrote one sentence. Just one.

What if it isn't?

Five

Nothing dramatic happened after that.

This matters. There was no overnight shift. Nobody handed him an opportunity. He didn't quit the bank and move to Mumbai. Life didn't rearrange itself.

He got up at six-fifteen. Took the bus. Processed fixed deposits. Came home. Ate dinner with his mother and Priya, helped Priya with chemistry she found pointless, watched fifteen minutes of whatever serial his mother was following.

But at eleven p.m., after everyone slept, he opened the notebook.

He started with what he had — the half-finished screenplay. He'd been twenty-one when he put it down. Reading it now it was rough, scenes that went nowhere, dialogue working too hard. But something in it was still there. A specific feeling about small-city life that he recognised because he'd lived it.

He worked for an hour. Closed it. Slept.

Next night, opened it again.

And the next.

He didn't tell anyone. Deliberate.

He'd learned something from being twenty-two: new hope is fragile. Say it too soon and other people's reactions — even kind ones — can kill it before it gets its footing. He needed it to get stronger first.

So he worked alone. Eleven to midnight, sometimes twelve-thirty when a scene was going well. His mother asked once why his light was on so late. He said he was reading. Close enough.

Three months later he finished the screenplay. Sixty-two pages.

He read it through on a Sunday morning — mother at the temple, Priya at coaching — and thought: this isn't perfect, but it's honest. It felt, strangely, more real than what he'd written at twenty-one. Like four years of an ordinary life had quietly gone into it.

He thought: now what?

Six

He found the competition online at two a.m. on a Tuesday.

A screenplay contest. Small film collective in Pune. Prize was twenty-five thousand rupees and a reading by a working director. Entry fee: four hundred rupees. Deadline in six weeks.

He looked at it for a while.

Four hundred was four hundred. There were EMIs, the electricity bill, Priya's coaching fees, his mother's medicines.

He also had a savings account where he put a small amount every month — no particular reason, just the habit his father had given him. Always keep something, even if it's small. Nothing is its own kind of safety.

He submitted the screenplay.

Told nobody.

Went to bed at three. Woke at six-fifteen. Took the bus. Processed fixed deposits. Came home. Helped Priya with chemistry.

Opened the notebook and started something new.

Seven

The call came on a Thursday.

He was at the counter explaining to a woman in her seventies why her passbook wasn't updating, when his phone went in his pocket. He ignored it. It went again. He finished with the customer, excused himself, checked the screen.

Unknown number. Pune area code.

He went to the small courtyard out back where people smoked. He didn't smoke, but it was the only quiet spot.

He called back.

A woman answered. Named the collective. Said: "We wanted to let you know your screenplay has been shortlisted. Top five out of three hundred and forty entries."

He stood in the courtyard.

"Hello?" she said.

"Yes. Sorry. Yes, I'm here."

"We'll need you in Pune next month for a reading session. One day. Will that work?"

He thought about bus tickets. One day off. Mr. Thakre's face.

"Yes," he said. "That will work."

He hung up.

A crow landed on the wall across from him and looked at him with no particular interest.

He went back inside and processed fixed deposits for the rest of the afternoon with steady hands.

Eight

He told his mother that night.

Not everything — not the FTII letter, not four years of telling himself it was too late. Just: the screenplay, the contest, the shortlist, the Pune trip.

She was making chapattis when he told her. She kept making them. Rolling, pressing, putting on the tawa. He couldn't see her face properly.

When he finished she was quiet for a moment.

"Top five out of how many?" she said.

"Three hundred and forty."

She turned the chapatti over.

"When do you leave?"

"Next month. Saturday. Back Sunday morning."

She nodded. That was the whole conversation.

Later that night he was at his desk when he heard her knock on Priya's door and say something low. A minute later Priya appeared at his door — oversized t-shirt, hair in a bun, sixteen years old and already exhausted from coaching.

"Mummy says you got selected for something," she said.

"Top five."

She looked at him with an expression older than sixteen.

"That's really good, bhaiya," she said.

"Thanks."

She went back to her room.

He turned back to the notebook.

Nine

He didn't win.

First place went to a twenty-year-old from Delhi — a tight, precise screenplay about online gaming addiction. The director praised it for its "contemporary relevance." It was good. Arjun read the summary later and thought: yeah, that's better. That deserved it.

He came third.

Third place got a certificate, his name read aloud in a room of forty people serious about film, and a short conversation with the director:

"The middle section drags a little. But the voice is specific. That's rarer than people think. Don't lose it."

On the bus back to Nagpur that Sunday he sat by the window and watched Maharashtra pass — the highway, the small towns, the sky getting lighter — and thought about the word specific.

It meant: this story could only have been written by you.

He sat with that for a long time.

Ten

He still worked at the bank.

Still got up at six-fifteen. Still took the bus. Still helped Priya with chemistry. Still paid the EMI on the twenty-third, every month, without thinking about it.

But at eleven p.m. the notebook came out.

He submitted another screenplay six months later. Didn't place.

Submitted again. Got a mention.

He started a blog. Posted his writing. Twelve readers the first month, most of them arriving by accident. He didn't care. He kept writing.

A director — small and independent, the kind who made films for forty-lakh budgets and sent them to festivals most people had never heard of — found the blog. Messaged him. Said he needed a writer for a short film. Paid work. Not much, but paid.

Arjun took it.

He wrote it in six weeks, at eleven p.m., at the same desk, in the same room, with his mother's serial playing through the wall.

The short film got into a small festival in Kerala.

He didn't go. Couldn't take the time off, tickets were expensive, it was a small festival.

But somewhere in Kerala, on a screen, were his words. His specific words. Being said aloud by actors he'd never met, in front of an audience he'd never see.

He sat at his desk that night and felt something he hadn't felt in a long time. Not success. Not arrival. Just — movement. Like something that had been standing still had taken a small step.

Eleven

One evening he came home and found his mother at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and his notebook.

He stopped in the doorway.

She looked up. Not embarrassed. Just calm.

"I was looking for the electricity bill," she said.

He said nothing.

"You wrote all of this?" She looked down at it.

"Yes."

She turned a page. Then another. Reading slowly, the way you read something you're actually trying to understand.

"This character," she said. "The father. With the shop."

His chest tightened.

"It's not exactly—" he started.

"He hums," she said.

"Yes."

"Off-key." She looked up. "Your father used to do that. He had no idea how bad it was. Genuinely thought he was quite good."

Small smile. To herself.

He sat down across from her.

"Amma. I should have told you earlier. About all of it. The writing. And — there was a letter. When Baba was sick. FTII, they had offered me—"

"I know," she said.

He looked at her.

"You left it on the table one morning. By accident, I think. I put it back before you noticed." She turned the notebook in her hands. "I was going to ask you about it. Then things got — I didn't ask."

"You should have. I would have—"

"What?" she said. Gentle, not sharp. "Gone? Your father was sick. The shop was closing. Priya was in ninth standard." She shook her head. "You wouldn't have gone. You're not built that way." A pause. "That's not anyone's fault."

He sat with that.

"I thought it was too late," he said. "I thought the door was closed."

She looked at him.

"Arjun." She closed the notebook and placed it on the table between them. "You wrote sixty pages in a drawer. While working full-time and paying everyone's bills. In the middle of the night." A pause. "When exactly was the door closed?"

He looked at the notebook.

He didn't have an answer.

She got up, rinsed her cup, moved toward the door. Stopped.

"Your father would have liked to read this," she said. "He would have claimed the father character was very good-looking. Very accurately described."

She went out.

He sat alone at the kitchen table.

Outside: a rickshaw, the pressure cooker from the flat next door, a dog, a child calling out to someone, the evening azan drifting over from somewhere far. The ordinary sound of the street, the way it always sounded.

He picked up the notebook.

Opened it to the next blank page.

Started writing.