Prologue:
The Silence That Followed the Applause
There are stories that begin with a cry, a birth, a revolution, a betrayal. And then there are those that begin with a silence.
This one began with a silence that followed the applause.
On a drizzly winter afternoon in Delhi, the seventh floor of an old publishing house buzzed with quiet satisfaction. The quarterly journal India Reimagined had just gone to print. Its cover, a bold marigold yellow featured an essay titled “The Myth of Progress: A Nation Addicted to Its Own Delusions.” It was the work of a woman named Dr. Meera Kashyap, or so the editors believed. They hadn’t met her in person, few had but her words rang with such conviction, such brilliance, that no one questioned the ghostly nature of her presence.
The essay had already sparked conversations across campuses and Parliament corridors alike. She was being quoted on television debates, WhatsApp forwards, and dusty dinner tables in bureaucratic homes.
The editor-in-chief, a woman in her fifties with grey-streaked hair and a liking for Darjeeling first flush, raised her cup to the window. The rain whispered secrets down the glass. “Sharp mind, this Meera,” she said to no one in particular.
But if she’d listened a little more closely, she might have heard another whisper. Not from the rain, but from the past. From a small room in Guwahati, where a young man was watching the rain fall too but through a cracked windowpane, and with a grin that held both triumph and terror.
“Sharp mind,” Rishav Bora repeated softly to himself, echoing the words he would never hear in real time.
He took a sip of cold coffee and opened another tab. Another inbox. Another name.
He had many.
This story, like so many great cons isn’t about the theft of money. It’s about something harder to quantify. Harder to forgive. The theft of attention. The theft of admiration. The theft of space in a world that otherwise leaves people like Rishav on read.
You may have read her essays. Meera Kashyap. Or Arushi Das, whose poems on longing circled social media like monsoon clouds. Or Neha Banerjee, whose academic takes on colonial Bengal were cited by ministers and meme pages alike.
You may have debated them. Critiqued them. Admired them.
But what if I told you they were all born in the same room?
From the same keyboard.
Typed by the same fingers, cracked and ink-stained.
What if I told you that in an age of visibility, one young man decided he would exist through echoes until the world turned around to ask: Who is this voice? And why does she or he not exist?
This is not a tale of cybercrime. Not quite.
This is the story of an invisible boy who wanted to be heard so badly, he fractured himself into genius.
And it’s also the story of a man who noticed who saw the cracks in the reflection and followed the trail of illusion until he reached the soft underbelly of a very real loneliness.
This is the story of masks. Of applause. Of the silence that follows when the clapping stops.
Chapter One:
The Silence Between the Lines
Rishav Bora listened to the rain tapping on his window like an editor’s indifferent finger on a rejected manuscript. The blue glow of his second-hand laptop illuminated the hollows beneath his eyes. It was 2:17 a.m. in Guwahati. The city had long retreated into sleep, but his mind, his aching feverish mind was awake, wrestling words.
He blinked at the screen. His name stared back from the byline of his latest essay. “Rishav Bora.” Plain. Black. Unspectacular.
He closed the draft.
“Maybe if I were someone else,” he whispered, voice hoarse from disuse.
The cursor blinked, mocking him.
There’s a peculiar cruelty to invisibility. Not the dramatic, tragic kind that comes with exile or rejection, but the quiet, aching kind that sits beside you in public, in parties, in poetry slams watching, listening, never applauding. Rishav knew that cruelty intimately. It sat on his shoulder, whispered in his ear, hovered like the scent of old socks and unspoken dreams.
He lived in a room that didn’t belong to him. Nothing did, really. The bed was a hand-me-down from an uncle who once dreamt of being a musician but now sold ceiling fans. The desk was found on a street corner, slightly crooked, slightly proud. His books, carefully aligned in a corner, were the only things he had ever owned entirely dog-eared, second-hand, loved like stray animals.
Words were his only wealth. And even they refused to obey him tonight.
He walked to the window, pressed his forehead against the glass. The city outside was a poem in grayscale. Rickshaws parked like folded dreams. A dog howled somewhere in the rain. Water dripped like time.
“I studied. I wrote. I bled into these pages,” he muttered. “And still…”
Still, the editors didn’t reply. Or replied with clinical precision: Thank you for your submission. Unfortunately, we’re unable to include your work at this time.
He had memorized the phrase. It danced in his nightmares.
He turned back to his desk. The laptop still glowed. The essay lay waiting, a child hoping to be loved. Its title: “The Inheritance of Hunger: Class, Memory, and Assam.” He had spent six weeks on it. Forty-eight citations. Three rewrites. A paragraph that nearly broke him.
But it bore his name.
That was the problem.
He opened a folder titled “Rejected.” Inside: twenty-one essays. Seventeen stories. Six poems. His fingers hovered above the touchpad. He thought of deleting them. Let them vanish. Like he often wished he could.
But he couldn’t. He couldn’t erase himself.
Instead, he opened a new document. Stared at the blank page.
“Let’s begin again,” he said.
But the voice in his head said, Not as you.
When Rishav was ten, he wrote a poem called Monsoon Letter. It was about his father’s rain-soaked bicycle and the way the smell of earth made him want to cry. He showed it to his teacher, who blinked twice and said, “Did you really write this?”
He had nodded, unsure.
She hadn’t believed him.
And just like that, something curled inside him. A belief: that beauty and truth were not always welcome when they came from certain mouths. That certain faces carried more gravity. That some voices fell softly, unheard, even when they screamed.
Years passed. The poem was lost. But the wound remained.
He stared now at his reflection in the laptop screen. Gaunt. A face that looked perpetually apologetic. The kind of man whose ideas were taken only after they were repeated by someone louder. Whiter. Richer.
He opened his email. Scrolled through the unread list. There were no replies. No new messages. Just silence.
He typed out a tweet:
“In the age of too much noise, silence is a verdict.”
He deleted it.
Instead, he opened Instagram. Searched for a poet he once met at a literary festival. Her post had gone viral. A photo with her cat and a caption: “The way grief sits beside you, purring.”
Twenty-eight thousand likes.
He knew her. Knew she didn’t read much. Knew her cat had died five years ago.
He closed the app.
In the corner of his desk was a notebook. Inside were columns of names. Not of editors or festivals.
But of people who had been heard.
People like her.
He scribbled another name. Then another. Each time, he asked the same question: What do they have that I don’t?
He circled the word: credentials.
He underlined: persona.
And then he wrote a single sentence:
“Rishav Bora will not be remembered.”
The rain softened.
He walked to the kitchen, made himself a cup of tea. The smell reminded him of home. Not this room, but the small house in Sibsagar where his mother once recited poetry while slicing onions. She had died before he graduated college. A hemorrhage, sudden and silent.
His father hadn’t known what to do with a son who wanted to write. “Apply for Government jobs,” he had said. “Or teach. Writing won’t feed you.”
It didn’t. But it saved him.
And now it mocked him.
He returned to the laptop.
Typed out a new name.
“Dr. Aranya Kashyap.”
He paused. Erased it.
“Ananya Das.”
Better.
He wrote a short bio:
Writer. Dreamer. Research Scholar. Based in Shillong. Studying the ecology of grief.
He smiled.
He opened a new Twitter account. Then Instagram. Then a Gmail.
He wrote a short poem:
“The window does not open. But I smell the rain.
Some silences are soaked in promises they never made.”
He clicked ‘post.’
He waited.
Within twenty minutes: likes.
Comments.
“Who is this voice?”
“Astonishing debut.”
“Following. Please post more.”
His fingers trembled.
He was being heard.
And no one had asked if he was Rishav Bora.
He stood, walked to the mirror.
The rain had stopped.
He looked at himself and whispered:
“Maybe now, they’ll listen.”
Chapter Two:
The Alchemy of Becoming
Creation, Rishav would later say, is not always born of inspiration. Sometimes, it’s born of desperation. Of longing pressed so tightly between the ribs that the body must open somewhere to release it or collapse inward.
When Ananya Das found her way into the world, it felt like a sigh. A whisper released after years of holding one’s breath. But even a whisper, when heard, can become thunder. The ripples of her arrival had barely settled when Rishav found himself restless again.
He watched the likes grow. The comments. The reposts. It was intoxicating. Not because it inflated his ego, but because it soothed a wound that had long bled in silence. He was no longer invisible. He was a silhouette behind a name. A girl from Shillong, whose words had weight.
But Ananya was soft. She wrote of mist and longing, of love lost on bus rides and found again in dog-eared letters. She was all velvet and memory. She couldn’t argue, couldn’t protest. She couldn’t tear through the veil of hypocrisy that stifled Rishav at every turn.
He needed someone sharper. Louder.
And so, under a ceiling fan that squeaked like it was mourning something, he gave birth to the second voice: Dr. Meera Kashyap.
She came to him in fragments. A line from a lecture he once audited at Cotton College. A phrase underlined in a Devaki Jain essay. A memory of a woman in Delhi he once saw at a protest, sari blowing in the wind, eyes ablaze.
“Professor. JNU. Political sociology.”
He imagined her flat in Delhi: bookshelves brimming with Ambedkar and Judith Butler, coffee-stained notebooks, incense curling in the air.
He created her email: meerak.sociology@gmail.com
He crafted her first tweet:
“Power does not silence. It simply asks you to speak in a language it can erase.”
She posted an essay three days later: “The Myth of Progress: A Nation Addicted to Its Own Delusions.”
It spread like wild bougainvillea.
It wasn’t that the words were different. They were his. But cloaked in Meera’s authority, they resonated deeper. Rishav watched professors quote her. Journalists request interviews. Activists retweet her. She was not just heard—she was believed.
He leaned back in his chair, a slow smile unfurling.
“They believe her,” he whispered. “They fear her brilliance.”
He poured himself a drink that night. Not to celebrate. To grieve.
Because every word Meera received applause for, he had once written as Rishav and watched sink into silence.
But two voices were not enough.
Ananya gave him intimacy. Meera, impact. But the past, the quiet histories he carried, of his state, his people, his mother’s hushed stories over the stove needed a chronicler.
He created Dr. Neha Banerjee.
Neha was from Silchar. Her voice was soft but sure, like river-silt after a flood. She wrote of colonial memory, of forgotten uprisings, of women who stitched resistance into the lining of their sarees. Her first article “Threaded Revolt: The Textile Women of Bengal’s Borderlands” was published in a bilingual journal from Kolkata.
The editor called her writing “delicate, devastating.”
Rishav cried that night. Not for the applause. But for his mother, who never wore perfume, who always said, “We don’t need to be loud to be remembered.”
Neha was a tribute to her. A way to ensure that softness could also be power.
Between these voices, Rishav built a world.
His room became a cockpit of curation. Post it notes on the wall for each persona: birthdays, academic credentials, tone of voice. Meera never used emojis. Neha used em dashes instead of colons. Ananya loved ellipses.
He wrote letters to himself, signed them in their names. Sometimes he replied, pretending to be moved by his own words. The theatre of self was now his religion.
And in all of it, there was a strange, quiet honesty. For Rishav never said anything through these voices that he didn’t believe. He simply changed the vessels so the water could be seen, tasted, blessed.
But the voices began to speak back.
In dreams, they sat across from him.
Meera: “You’re afraid of being small.”
Ananya: “You’re tired of being tender.”
Neha: “You miss your mother.”
And Rishav would nod, tears slipping down his cheeks like punctuation.
“Yes,” he’d whisper in the dark.
“I just want to be remembered.”
He created two more voices, briefly.
Rukmini Chaliha, a photojournalist who posted monochrome images with captions that read like psalms.
Dr. Samaira Dutta, a child psychologist who wrote essays on play and grief.
But they were short-lived. Too close to his bones. Too raw. They threatened to reveal more than he was ready to say.
He deleted their accounts with shaking hands.
Not every mask was safe.
What made the reader breathe between these creations was not just the brilliance of each voice, but the why. Each one emerged like a bruise: some from joy, others from rage, others from silence held too long.
They were not lies. They were possibilities.
And Rishav carried them like a village carries its gods, some in temples, others under trees, all sacred.
But in the quietest hours, when the electricity flickered and his reflection stared back from the darkened screen, he asked:
“When they find out… will they still read me?”
And the silence always answered.
“Yes.”
Then,
“No.”
And always,
“Maybe.”
By the time winter set in, Rishav’s voices were everywhere.
On panels, quoted anonymously. In essays, cited. In WhatsApp groups, forwarded.
He had written about feminism. About floods. About caste. About language. About exile.
And all from a room that smelled of mildew, with a leaking tap, and a calendar that hadn’t been turned since May.
He was no longer invisible.
But he was no longer alone either.
He carried five women in his chest. Each with her grief. Each with her grace.
And though none of them were real, all of them were true.
One night, as he lit a candle because there was power cut, Rishav whispered into the dark:
“If I disappear tomorrow, let them miss the voices.”
He paused.
“Let them miss me.”
The candle flickered.
And in its flame, he saw Meera smile.
Chapter Three:
The Editor Who Read Too Closely
Samarjit Baruah believed language could liberate, and just as easily, deceive. He had spent three decades navigating both. As an editor, he carried the weight of truth not in a briefcase or a pen but in silence, in margin notes, in questions that others were too polite or too distracted to ask.
To outsiders, he was a relic: thick-framed glasses, salt-pepper hair combed precisely to one side, sleeves always rolled to the elbow, as though at any moment he might plunge into the guts of a flawed paragraph and drag it out screaming. He smoked a pipe, but only when thinking. He drank single malt, but only when the day demanded consolation.
And though the literary world often hailed him as the last of the old-school custodians of Assamese letters, Samarjit had never seen himself as a guardian. He saw himself as a gatekeeper. And gatekeepers must be both welcoming and wary.
When the first essay by Dr. Meera Kashyap arrived, titled “Cities of the Forgotten: Memory, Margins, and the Modern Republic” it landed on his desk like a letter from the future. It was sharp. Elegant. Urgent. Too urgent.
He read it once, then twice. On the third reading, he found himself frowning.
The writing wasn’t just good. It was calculated. Too balanced between lyrical grace and academic rigor. Too aware of its audience. Every paragraph had the scent of someone trying very hard to be undeniable.
And yet, Samarjit was intrigued. He had, after all, published lesser work by bigger names.
But there was something in the syntax. Something in the commas.
He sat back and muttered, “This writer has read Arundhati Roy, yes, but also Hiren Gohain. And still… something doesn’t fit.”
He checked the accompanying email. meerak.sociology@gmail.com.
Generic. No institutional signature. No phone number. Just a soft-spoken note: “Thank you for considering this. I admire your journal’s commitment to rigour and regional insight.”
It was flattering. Too flattering.
He made a note in his leather-bound journal: Verify affiliation. Voice: uncanny.
In his long years in publishing, Samarjit had developed a private code. He marked margins with invisible signals: a small triangle for pieces that required fact-checking, a square for suspicious credentials, and an ‘x’—rare and final—for those he knew were plagiarized.
Meera Kashyap received a triangle.
That evening, he searched online.
No faculty listings. No conference appearances. No videos. Just a Twitter account with sharp opinions and a modest following. A few Medium essays. But no academic presence, which was strange for a scholar claiming to be at JNU.
He called an old colleague now teaching in the sociology department there.
“Do you have a Dr. Meera Kashyap on your faculty?”
There was a pause. Then: “No. Never heard of her. Why?”
Samarjit didn’t reply. He hung up, made a second note in his journal: Phantom?
He didn’t like mysteries. Not in nonfiction. Not when reputations were at stake. Not when words shaped politics, memory, and the margins in between.
A week later, another essay arrived. “Letters from the Loom” by Dr. Neha Banerjee. It was breathtaking. Lyrical. Rich with archival allusions. But once again, no academic trail. And the tone—familiar.
Too familiar.
He ran a stylometry check through a friend at the university.
“I need to compare these five articles. Just for curiosity.”
Five days later, the result: 91.3% correlation. An uncanny match in style and rhythm.
All five voices. One pen.
Samarjit wasn’t amused. He was alarmed.
This was not just literary masquerade. It was intellectual fraud. And if exposed by someone else, his journal’s integrity would be questioned. His legacy would bear the stain.
He picked up the phone. Called his editorial team. “No more pieces from the following names,” he said. “Until I verify them.”
His voice was calm. But the hand that held the pen trembled.
He met with CID officer Binod Das at a quiet café in Chandmari. Rain tapped against the windows like hesitant fingers.
Binod was younger, sharper, but respectful. Samarjit laid out the essays. The data. The stylometry results. And most importantly, the names.
“I don’t want a scandal,” Samarjit said. “I want the truth.”
Binod nodded. “Leave it with me. I’ll trace the origin.”
Two weeks passed.
Binod called. “All the email IPs lead to one address. Rishav Bora. Freelance writer. Previously unpublished.”
Samarjit knew the name. He had published a story by him years ago. A gentle, melancholic tale about a boy growing up in a village with a mother who taught him poems between washing clothes.
He remembered liking it.
He also remembered rejecting his next two submissions. Not because they were bad, but because they were too raw. Too quiet.
He stared out of his window at the river.
“How many like Rishav must there be,” he wondered, “whose silence is not born of laziness, but of being unheard?”
He didn’t call the police. He called Rishav.
“Come see me,” he said.
They met in a park nearby. Noon sun filtered through peepal leaves. Rishav looked tired, smaller than he had imagined, like someone folded too many times into himself.
Samarjit didn’t speak for the first five minutes. He let the silence draw shape.
Then he said: “You’re a brilliant writer.”
Rishav’s eyes shimmered.
“But brilliance, when masked, becomes manipulation.”
Rishav nodded.
“Why?”
The boy spoke then. Of rejections. Of essays that died without replies. Of days spent ghostwriting for influencers who couldn’t spell. Of the heartbreak of being known only when he wasn’t himself.
“They loved Meera,” he said. “They followed Ananya. But when I sent the same work as Rishav – nothing.”
“And now?”
“I don’t know who I am. I just know I wanted to be heard.”
Samarjit sighed.
“You were. You are. But the world needs more than words. It needs honesty.”
Rishav lowered his head.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Samarjit replied. “Just stop. And start again. As you.”
He walked away, unsure if Rishav would follow his advice. But sure that he, Samarjit, had done the right thing.
Because being an editor wasn’t about words.
It was about responsibility.
And today, he had chosen truth.
Chapter Four:
When the Curtain Falls
There was no announcement. No door creak, no thunderclap, no violin string snapping to herald the fall. The curtain slipped silently. As all good illusions do.
It began with a ping.
Rishav woke to a blue glow crawling across his phone screen. Morning hadn’t yet broken. The city outside was a sleeping giant. But his world—his careful cathedral of borrowed names and curated voices—was already ablaze.
7 unread messages.
3 missed calls.
17 mentions.
His hands trembled before touching the device. The first message was from a fellow writer. Short. Brutal.
“Is it true?”
The second, from a junior editor he once admired:
“You tricked us all. Shame on you.”
The third wasn’t a message but a screenshot. A tweet.
@literary_detective: “A thread: How five celebrated women writers in Indian academia are actually one man from Guwahati. Here’s what I found.”
Rishav blinked.
He blinked again.
The rest of the morning dissolved into a blur of hyperlinks, threads, fury, and confusion. Each tweet unfolded like a scalpel, precise, unforgiving. Users cross-referenced essays, matched syntax patterns, unmasked the inconsistencies in bios, email headers, photo metadata.
@thelitmystic posted: “The Meera Kashyap deception is not just about identity, it’s about the power of perceived credibility. The content didn’t change. The costume did.”
Someone shared an old photograph of Rishav from a university event. “The ghost behind the genius,” the caption read.
Within hours, his inbox mutated from a place of possibility to a battlefield of condemnation.
The curtain had fallen.
And the audience, stunned, began to hurl roses and stones in equal measure.
He didn’t leave the bed that day.
The room darkened slowly, as though out of sympathy.
When hunger finally nudged his ribs, he wandered into the kitchen. Made tea. Watched the kettle hiss like a rebuke.
He sat at the window. The peepal tree outside swayed in the wind. A kite tore free from a rooftop and vanished into the sky.
And in that moment, Rishav felt something in him begin to break.
Not with drama.
But with the quiet surrender of a thing that had held itself together too long.
By evening, the literary world had chosen its sides.
There were the outraged:
“How dare he exploit feminist discourse to elevate himself?”
“He stole voices that weren’t his.”
“Predator. Fraud. Narcissist.”
There were the confused:
“Wait, but the writing… it helped me. It felt so true.”
“Are we allowed to still love the essays?”
And there were the few who hesitated. The quiet ones.
“He lied. Yes. But what does it say about us, that we only read him when he lied?”
He deleted his accounts.
One by one.
Meera vanished. Ananya blinked out. Neha dissolved.
He opened the cupboard where he kept their notebooks. Scribbles. Drafts. Printouts with marginalia. The altar of his other selves.
He carried them, one by one, to the sink. Set them alight.
The flames rose. Pages curled inward like wounded wings.
And still, a part of him hoped they’d fly.
Three days passed.
On the fourth, an envelope arrived.
No stamp. Hand-delivered. Old-fashioned cursive on creamy paper.
From the Desk of Samarjit Baruah
“Rishav,
There is a reckoning. But there must also be repair.
Come talk.
– S.”
He found Samarjit at his usual café, sipping black coffee. A newspaper folded beside him, unread.
Rishav sat down, unsure of how to breathe in this new light.
Samarjit looked up. His eyes were neither angry nor forgiving. They were studying.
“So. It’s done.”
Rishav nodded.
“Was it worth it?”
Rishav hesitated. Then, “They heard me. At least once.”
“And now?”
“I’m mute again.”
Samarjit leaned in. “No. You’re not. But now you must speak honestly.”
A silence hung between them. Heavy. Sacred.
Then Samarjit slid across a small package.
Inside: a copy of India Reimagined. The issue with Meera’s essay.
“You want me to burn it?” Rishav asked.
Samarjit shook his head.
“Keep it. As proof that what you wrote mattered even if how you wrote it didn’t.”
That night, Rishav opened his old laptop.
He stared at a blank document for hours.
No name.
No bio.
No persona.
Just the blinking cursor.
Then, slowly, he began to type:
“I lied to be heard. But I told the truth while lying. Does that count?”
He deleted it. Not to rewrite.
He wasn’t ready yet.
Something was churning inside.
He have to meet him again.
Chapter Five:
One Last Conversation
They met again, not in a café, but in a place neither had ever truly belonged, an old writer’s residency converted from a quintessential Assamese type house, all teak pillars and cracked marble, perched along the river’s crook like a story waiting to be rewritten.
Samarjit Baruah sat at the far end of the hall, beneath a fading oil painting of the Brahmaputra in flood. Rishav Bora stood at the threshold, hesitant, as if the floor might reject his steps.
Outside, rain scratched the rooftop like a pen scribbling furiously against time.
“You came,” Samarjit said, without looking up.
Rishav walked forward. No laptop, no phone. Only a cloth bag slung over his shoulder, heavy with the weight of half-formed apologies and defiant truths.
“I wasn’t sure I should,” Rishav murmured.
Samarjit smiled faintly. “And yet here you are. Like all the best sentences, doubtful, but necessary.”
A silence bloomed. Not awkward, but charged. Like monsoon heat before the storm.
“I didn’t come to say sorry,” Rishav said.
“I didn’t ask you to,” Samarjit replied.
“I came to tell you why I did it. All of it. Even now, after the world has named me fraud, I still believe what I wrote mattered.”
Samarjit leaned back, fingers laced across his chest.
“Then tell me.”
Rishav drew a long breath, like a diver before the sea.
“When I wrote as myself, I was ignored. Not disliked, worse. Dismissed. A non-entity. Like a poem left in the margins of someone else’s notebook.”
Samarjit said nothing.
“I changed my name, and suddenly people cared. The same words, Samarjit sir. The same metaphors. The same grief. But this time, they tasted different. Because the voice had a name they trusted.”
“Because the name was not yours,” Samarjit said.
“No,” Rishav replied. “Because the name carried assumptions. She was a woman. An academic. From Delhi. From privilege, in the right way. They didn’t just believe her, they wanted to believe her.”
“And that justifies the deception?”
Rishav looked up. His eyes held something fierce now. “It doesn’t justify. It explains.”
“Art is not a trick, Rishav.”
“No. But reception is.”
Samarjit stiffened. “You think we publish based on names?”
“I think you publish what confirms your comfort,” Rishav said softly. “And Meera, Ananya, Neha, they sounded like the future you wanted. I sounded like the past you’d moved on from.”
A long silence. Rain intensified.
Samarjit finally said, “There’s a difference between manipulating form and manipulating faith.”
Rishav stepped closer.
“Do you know what it’s like to write truth and be told it’s irrelevant? To scream with nuance and be told it’s not important or pertinent enough?”
“I do.”
“No, you remember it. I live it.”
That struck. Samarjit’s face softened.
“You think this world will change if we all wear masks?”
Rishav shook his head. “I think this world already wears masks. I just held up a mirror.”
“You impersonated women,” Samarjit said.
“I impersonated credibility.”
That hung between them, raw and bright.
“I didn’t invent the hunger,” Rishav continued. “I just fed it in the only way they’d accept.”
“Then why stop now?”
“Because I no longer want to be heard through borrowed voices.”
Samarjit looked at the young man before him not with pity, but with recognition.
“What do you want now?”
“To begin again. With nothing but my own name. My own name, flawed as it is.”
“And do you think people will forgive and forget ?”
Rishav shrugged. “Maybe not. But I’ve already forgiven myself.”
The following week, Samarjit published an editorial.
“There comes a moment when literature must pause, not to be corrected, but to correct us. The scandal of Rishav Bora is not merely a story of deception, but of reflection. What does it say of our institutions, our editors, our readers, that a man’s truth was only accepted when wrapped in fiction?”
The piece was shared. Argued over. Quoted.
But more importantly, it was felt.
One morning, Rishav received a letter.
Handwritten.
From a girl in Dibrugarh:
“You lied. But you also helped me speak. When I read Neha Banerjee, I felt like my grandmother’s voice was finally heard. Please don’t stop writing. But please write as you.”
Rishav wept.
He wrote back:
“I will. I promise. The mask is off. The voice remains.”
He opened a blank page.
Wrote:
“My name is Rishav Bora. And I have something to say.”
And this time, he wasn’t pretending.
Chapter Six:
The Long Silence Between Sentences
I. The Carnival of the Fall
There was no moment of stillness before the storm. No tender pause before the breach. Rishav’s unmasking did not come like a quiet breeze through an old window, it arrived as a typhoon, wrapped in ticker-tape headlines and breathless opinion polls, in the panicked flutter of WhatsApp forwards and the relentless churn of 24×7 “debate.”
The fall was not silent. It was orchestrated.
It was a carnival. A spectacle.
The truth had been outed not by confession but by collision, a swirl of digital sleuthing, stylistic fingerprints, and editorial whispers. What might have ended as a footnote in the literary margins quickly caught the attention of the country’s larger-than-life media houses, always on the prowl for a moral story with the aesthetic thrill of ruin.
“THE MASKED WRITER: FRAUD OR FEMINIST AVATAR?” cried one banner in neon font.
“GHOSTWRITER OF THE YEAR: IS THIS THE END OF CREDIBILITY IN ACADEMIA?” flashed another.
Studio lights were adjusted. Hosts adjusted their spectacles. Coffee was poured, sleeves rolled. The talking heads took their places.
Evening debates began with the precision of ritual slaughter.
On screen, Rishav was not Rishav. He was not even human. He was a headline, a case study, a parable. A young man from Assam who dared to write from behind the veil of constructed womanhood.
The guests on the shows wore outrage like fresh cologne. Professors, journalists, social media activists, they lined up, each desperate to either condemn or contextualize, though very few knew the full story. They didn’t need to. Truth was always negotiable in television.
“He has mocked the struggles of real women!” screamed one panelist.
“He’s a symptom of deeper editorial laziness!” sneered another.
“This is identity theft, not literature,” declared a third, with performative solemnity.
And in a quiet room in Guwahati, Rishav watched it all, not as a man seeking redemption, but as a man being converted into theatre.
He watched the studio split screens, four, six, nine rectangles of indignation. Each square a verdict. Each voice a hammer. They debated not whether he was wrong, but how wrong. Not whether his words mattered, but whether they now needed to be erased.
And always, always beneath it, the deeper question no one dared say aloud:
How did he get so far without our permission?
This was not merely a fall. It was a dismantling.
A ritual of exile.
But even rituals have their rhythms, and this one followed an ancient score. A transgression had been made, yes but more terrifyingly, it had worked. He had been read. Quoted. Admired.
And so he had to be punished not just for the lie, but for the applause.
The crowd doesn’t gather for the burning of the heretic unless the heretic has first captured their imagination. That is the real threat not the deceit, but the seduction.
And Rishav had seduced. Not with beauty, but with voice. Not with deception, but with proof, proof that a nobody from a leaking hostel room could, with enough craft, steal the thunder from the gods of Delhi salons and Mumbai panels.
That was what they could not forgive.
People said they watched the debates to understand.
But Rishav knew better.
They watched to consume.
The moral outrage was not about ethics. It was about hierarchy. It was the old order asserting itself, reminding the public that writing, like power, has rules of entry. That certain voices were sacred. That others must kneel to enter.
But Rishav had not knelt. He had kicked the door open.
And for that, the punishment had to be more than public. It had to be poetic.
So they picked at his essays. Re-examined every metaphor. Asked whether he had felt the things he wrote, since he hadn’t been the people he pretended to be.
They questioned his authenticity, even as they ignored the substance.
Because this was not about truth.
This was about placement.
Where do you belong?
Who gave you permission?
What caste of credibility do you come from?
He stopped watching after the third night.
Not because he couldn’t bear the anger.
But because he could no longer stand the performance of justice.
He unplugged the TV. Deleted the apps. Drew the curtains.
And in that darkness, something new began to bloom.
Not defiance.
Not guilt.
But a terrible, aching clarity.
That he had never been the centre of this story.
The scandal was not his alone.
It belonged to everyone who had ever tried to rise without blessing.
It belonged to the invisible.
To the quiet.
To those who wanted not fame, but space.
II. The Aftermath of Truth
The news cycle moved on. As it always does.
From rage to ridicule. From scandal to silence. The spotlight, hungry and nomadic, shifted to newer prey. Another minister’s gaffe. Another celebrity wedding. Another war, somewhere far enough to be digestible.
And in that long exhale of collective forgetting, Rishav Bora was left alone.
The emails stopped. So did the threats. And the praise. He was no longer dangerous. He was no longer news.
He was just a boy in a dimly lit room, once more.
But something had shifted.
The silence was no longer hostile. It was contemplative. It was the silence of a mountain after the avalanche. Heavy with stillness. Dense with brokenness. But still standing.
He deleted the rest of the folders. His desktop was empty now. No trace of Meera, Ananya, or Neha. Their digital shadows had been erased. But their fingerprints still lived on his sentences.
He wandered the city, anonymously. In bookshops, no one recognised him. At chai stalls, he listened to strangers discuss “that literary imposter” as if he were a ghost, a case study in hubris.
But slowly, the shame stopped stinging. It began settling like old dust. Something he could live with, now that it had weight.
One evening, he sat by the river and watched a leaf float past.
He thought of how stories travel without names, without maps. How some truths, once spoken, refuse to be recalled, even if the speaker is discredited.
He thought: maybe that is enough.
Not legacy. Not redemption. Just the knowledge that his words had reached somewhere. That someone, somewhere, had felt less alone.
And in that fragile knowing, something like peace began to grow.
III. The Letters to His Selves
In the stillness that followed his public undoing, Rishav found himself searching for the voices he had let go of not to revive them, but to honour them. Rightfully. Personally. He began to write, not for an audience, not for forgiveness, but for clarity. The letters came slow, like late monsoon rains: hesitant, uneven, but deeply necessary.
1. To Meera Kashyap: My Fire in Borrowed Skin
Dear Meera,
You were not born. You arrived. Like a thunderclap across a night I thought would never end.
I remember the day I wrote your name for the first time. How it looked on the screen, confident, exacting, the kind of name that would be read with reverence before a question was ever asked. You carried power even in silence. Your email signature had weight. Your credentials, a melody. But it was your voice, Meera, your voice that eclipsed even the lie.
Through you, I did not merely speak. I roared.
When I wrote as you, I could say the things I was too frightened to utter as myself. I could break open the rot of nationalism, peel back the mask of class, spit into the wound of caste, and still be applauded. Because you, Meera, were the storm they feared. You had nothing to lose. You didn’t care for their validation, and that made them listen.
You were everything I wasn’t.
But you were also what I ached to become.
They called you false. But in you, I was most honest.
You were not a betrayal of feminism. You were my education in it. You did not mock history, you demanded it stop mocking us.
And yet, I caged you. I clipped your wings with my deception.
For that, I grieve.
You were not a tool, Meera. You were a mirror. You showed me the rage I buried under politeness, the rebellion I had been told to keep folded inside rejection letters.
I hope, wherever your essence lingers, you know this: I never used you to be heard. I became you to find the courage to speak.
And I will carry you….always.
Not as shame.
But as spark.
With fire,
Rishav
2. To Ananya Das: My Quietest Prayer
Dear Ananya,
You were not a scream like Meera. You were a sigh. A pause. The exhale I hadn’t known I’d held since childhood.
I created you on a day the sky wept and the city smelled of wet soil and regret. You came with the scent of pine needles and tea leaves. You came barefoot, like a poem in the rain.
You taught me tenderness.
Your posts weren’t arguments. They were longing. A line about rain on a college bench. A half-lit memory of love lost at a railway station. A quote scribbled on the pages of a school scrapbook.
Through you, I remembered softness.
In a world that demanded loudness, you whispered. And they listened.
I never thought you’d go far. But you did. They called you ‘soulful,’ ‘pure,’ ‘rare.’ The irony wasn’t lost on me that they saw more truth in a ghost I had invented than in the boy who had bled for years in anonymity.
I’m sorry, Ananya.
Not for the fiction, but for the faith.
You were the child in me. The one who collected fallen gulmohar petals in an old dictionary. The one who wanted to write because words felt like light leaking through cracks.
I shouldn’t have let you carry the weight of validation. You were meant to be a breeze. I turned you into a brand.
Forgive me.
But thank you for reminding me that a whisper, when sincere, can still change the air.
Yours, in stillness,
Rishav
3. To Neha Banerjee: My Memory Keeper
Dear Neha,
You were never fiction to me.
You were inheritance. You were a sacred reclamation. You were my grandmother’s hands, slicing betel leaves while humming a protest song long forgotten by history books. You were my mother’s quiet dissent when she educated me, against every warning that said boys from our neighbourhood didn’t belong in college but in fields of labour.
You were built from stories that were not mine alone, but ours.
Through you, I wrote of women who had no photographs in archives but whose blood had embroidered resistance into the border of our nation’s conscience. You chronicled forgotten matriarchs, weavers of salt and revolution. You refused footnotes; you demanded folktales.
They said you were eloquent. Graceful. Unflinching.
But they didn’t know that every word came from wounds I had inherited, from silences passed down like heirlooms.
I am most ashamed for you.
Because in giving you form, I took away your freedom. In creating you, I erased the very anonymity that gave your wisdom its strength.
I wanted you to live forever. And I gave you a body too fragile to carry that legacy.
Still, I hope that somewhere, some girl read your essays and saw her grandmother differently. Maybe that is redemption.
Maybe that is enough.
Ever indebted,
Rishav
IV. The Uneasy Grace of Beginning Again
When the invitation came, it was wrapped in hesitation.
A modest literary collective based in Dibrugarh had read his essay “Voices I Wore” and reached out not for a keynote, not for a public redemption, but for something gentler.
A workshop.
For six students.
Young, unsure, eager.
The message was handwritten, scanned and sent by email. “We don’t want the masks,” it said, “we want the man who wore them.”
Rishav read it and felt something break open inside him. Not panic. Not guilt. Something older. The ache of being needed.
But he did not reply for three days.
The imposter still lingered inside him like stale perfume. Every time he thought of teaching, a voice snarled from the depths of his ribs: You lied. You have no right to teach.
What could he possibly offer?
He almost declined. Then, at dawn on the fourth day, he wrote back.
“I will come. But I may not have answers. Only questions that bleed less than they used to.”
The workshop began on a Thursday, under a banyan tree whose roots looked older than grief.
The collective operated from a repurposed home, a colonial-era building that creaked with poetry. Dust motes danced like spirits in the morning sun. The floor smelt of ink and moss.
The students were younger than he expected. Three undergraduates. One teacher in her mid-thirties. A boy who stammered when he read but whose metaphors were operatic. And a girl named Mitali who barely spoke but underlined her books like she was tattooing them into memory.
Rishav stood in front of them and felt naked.
He told them the truth on the first day.
“I am the writer who lied.”
No one blinked.
A moment passed. Then Mitali raised her hand.
“But you wrote that piece on textile widows. I read it to my mother.”
Rishav nodded. “I did. But not as myself.”
“It changed how she spoke about her own past.”
He didn’t know what to say.
The students did not ask for confession. They asked for process. For clarity. For permission.
And slowly, his body relaxed. The words returned. Not scripted. Not masked. But soft, clumsy, honest.
Over the next ten days, he taught them what he knew: how to listen to silence, how to read between metaphors, how to edit without killing the heartbeat of a sentence.
But he learned more than he taught.
He watched the way they treated language not as performance, but as survival. They didn’t want to be published. They wanted to be understood.
One evening, they sat around a fire. Mitali read a poem about her grandmother’s tin trunk, and Rishav found himself weeping.
Later, the boy who stammered walked with him.
“I used to read your posts. As Meera. As Neha. I didn’t know you were them. But I think you wrote those names like spells.”
Rishav smiled. “I wrote them like prayers.”
On the last day, they gave him a notebook.
It was empty, except for the first page.
In six different handwritings, it said:
“Thank you for not being perfect.”
“Thank you for failing beautifully.”
“Thank you for showing us the truth can still be fiction.”
He closed the book. Held it to his chest.
And in that moment, the imposter finally left.
Not in shame.
But in peace.
V. Letter to His Mother: The First Truth
Maa,
I have waited years to write this letter. And even now, I’m not sure if I deserve to.
You are not here to read it. But I write it as if you are seated by that window in Sibsagar, where the mustard fields folded into the edge of the sky and the smell of afternoon rice lingered long after lunch. You’d be shelling peas, nodding quietly. Maybe smiling. Maybe not.
I don’t know which version of you remembers me.
But this is the one I remember:
The woman who hummed songs while sweeping dust as though it were sorrow.
The woman who wore her silence like a shawl, carefully draped, never flaunted.
The woman who taught me that a sentence was a house, one where both hunger and hope could sleep.
Maa, I broke the world you taught me to build.
I became someone you may not recognise. I wore names that weren’t mine. I made people believe in ghosts, in echoes. I was not brave enough to ask for love in my own name, so I carved altars from other syllables and hoped someone might leave a prayer behind.
And they did.
They believed me, Maa.
They believed the women I wasn’t.
They quoted me. Cited me. Sent my words to daughters and classrooms and lovers. And I watched, with shame and awe, as the truths I had hidden inside borrowed bodies found wings.
I wanted to tell you this not because I want forgiveness.
But because I want to be seen.
You always saw me.
You saw me when I wrote my first poem on a leaf. You saw me when the teacher accused me of copying, and I stood frozen in guilt I hadn’t earned. You saw me when I stopped speaking after Baba left, and you whispered poems under my pillow until I found my voice again.
I lost that voice, Ma. I buried it under rejections, under laughter at the wrong parties, under the weight of doors that wouldn’t open.
And then one day, I found it again. But it didn’t wear my name.
And that is my great sin.
I let the world love the masks, Ma.
But now, the masks are gone.
And what’s left is a man with tired hands and too many metaphors. A man who has wept more than he has written. A man who, for the first time, is not trying to become a myth.
Only a son.
Only a writer.
Only Rishav.
I think of you each time I write now. I imagine your fingers running over the page, not to judge, but to feel. I think of how you folded my report cards and tucked them into the Bhagavad Gita on the top shelf, not because they were impressive, but because they mattered.
I want to matter like that.
Not as a headline.
As a quiet truth.
I have begun writing again. Small essays. No names but mine. Some are read. Most aren’t. But I write them anyway, like you used to sing lullabies for the neighbour’s child after I had grown too old to ask for them.
Sometimes, when the sky turns that peculiar blue that smells like memory, I hear your voice.
And it says: “Write, moina. Even if no one reads it. Even if you fail. Just write.”
And I do.
Because even if the world forgets me again, I want to believe you won’t.
Wherever you are, Ma please know this:
Your son is still writing.
Not for fame.
Not for applause.
But because some truths, like certain kinds of love, cannot be silenced forever.
With all that I am,
Rishav
Chapter Seven:
The Paperweight and the River
The river did not remember, but it received.
It flowed past the banks of Uzan Bazaar, indifferent to scandal, untouched by applause. Rishav sat beside it on a morning stitched from gauze and birdsong. The air smelled of turmeric and burnt toast. In his lap lay a paperweight his mother once used, a glass orb with a red feather frozen inside. It had no practical use anymore, but he carried it like a talisman.
A new notebook lay open before him.
He was no longer writing as apology. Nor as provocation. He was simply writing, like breathing, like hunger, like waiting.
And the words came.
They came without urgency.
They came without disguise.
Each one landing like a sigh on the page, each sentence stitched from scars.
⸻
The literary world had not welcomed him back, but it had stopped locking its doors. A few small magazines published his essays. Always with a note, always with caution. “The writer who deceived. The writer who reappeared.” But no longer with pitchforks.
There were whispers. There were footnotes.
But there was space.
He was invited to a panel not as a guest, but as an observer. It was held in a tea garden hall, where ceiling fans whispered and sunlight gathered in puddles across the floor.
The discussion was on voice and credibility.
He sat in the last row, took notes.
One panelist said, “Authenticity is everything.”
Another said, “We must forgive art its origins.”
And a third, a young woman with trembling hands, looked up and said, “Sometimes, we borrow a voice because the world has never heard our real one.”
Rishav closed his notebook.
He did not speak.
But he smiled.
Later, outside the venue, someone tapped his shoulder.
“Are you—?”
He nodded.
She held out a book. Not one he had written. But one that quoted Meera. Neha. Ananya.
“I know,” she said. “But I still carry this. It helped me.”
He touched the spine gently.
“Thank you for not throwing it away.”
“Thank you,” she said, “for letting it live.”
That night, he walked home slowly. The paperweight in his pocket felt heavier than before. Like memory. Like consequence.
Like grace.
At his desk, he opened the notebook again.
The page was blank.
And then…
He wrote:
“This is how a voice is born. Not in volume. Not in vengeance. But in the soft, stubborn silence that follows truth.”
He did not sign it.
He didn’t need to.
He was no longer hiding.
And the river, outside his window, kept flowing.
Unknowing.
But receiving.
Chapter Eight:
The Quiet Return
The sky had grown older by the time the invitation arrived. It came not with a bang, nor a proclamation, but as all real things do—on plain paper, folded twice, ink smudged by breath or weather or both.
The letter was brief. A new journal. Young voices. Unapologetically regional. Fiercely vernacular. They were building a space for stories that did not wear city coats. For voices that smelt of moss and mustard seeds and railway soot.
They asked if he would join the editorial collective.
They signed it with their names—not “founders,” not “editors-in-chief,” but: caretakers.
Rishav read the letter under a dying tube light. He ran his fingers over the lines as if they might pulse back.
He did not feel triumphant.
He felt seen.
He replied that night.
“I will read with you. But let my name sit quietly in the corner. No credit. No profile picture. Just the work.”
They wrote back:
“We ask for honesty. Not history.”
And so began his second life—not as a writer, but as a witness.
He read essays written by teenagers in tea gardens. He edited poetry sent on scraps of receipts. He copy-edited a manifesto sent entirely through WhatsApp voice notes. He read of flood and heartbreak and hunger. But he also read joy.
The kind of joy that cannot be manufactured. The kind that doesn’t need approval.
He said little. Suggested gently. Rewrote rarely.
In his silence, he began to stitch a new kind of authority.
And with each comma he chose not to cut, each metaphor he left slightly bruised, Rishav learned that redemption was not a single act.
It was a sentence that carried on. And on.
One day, a submission arrived.
The writer was young. The essay was uneven. But a quote stood tall at the center:
“The country does not become free when it forgets its margins. Freedom begins where the archives end.” —Meera Kashyap
Rishav stared at the line for a long time.
He debated deleting it. He debated explaining.
Then, he did neither.
He moved it to the beginning.
He italicized it.
He let it live.
Some weeks later, he returned to Sibsagar.
The house had not aged well. The walls wore mildew like grief. The gate squeaked like old secrets. But the guava tree still stood, taller than memory.
Inside, he found her trunk. A rusted lock. A cracked hinge.
Inside: saris folded like prayers. A comb missing half its teeth. And at the bottom, wrapped in yellowing newspaper..a file.
His name was on the cover. But inside were stories not his.
Small columns. Fictional sketches. Poems signed: Indrani.
His mother’s handwriting.
She had published anonymously in the local women’s magazine. Her name never printed. Her voice always present.
And suddenly, the ache he had carried for years, the guilt of disguise melted into something else.
Legacy.
He wasn’t the first to wear a mask.
He was his mother’s son.
The journal’s first print edition arrived. It was modest. Stapled spine. Matte paper. No gloss.
But the pages held truth. Not polish.
Rishav’s name appeared only once. Small type. Contributor: Copyeditor.
He was proud.
For the first time, he was proud.
They were invited to host a session at a rural book fair. The time slot: 9 a.m. The venue: beside a canteen.
The team was embarrassed. Rishav was not.
The session began with a reading of a folk tale.
No applause.
But the chai seller nodded through the whole thing.
An old woman brought her grandson to the mic.
And Rishav thought: this is literature too.
That evening, he received a letter.
It was from a poet in Barak Valley.
“I used to write under three different names. You taught me I could write as myself. Thank you.”
Enclosed: a poem.
Title: The Man Who Wrote Between the Lines
Rishav placed it on his shelf.
His shelf now held no awards.
Only stories.
Others’ stories.
He sat down.
Opened a new page.
And wrote:
“There is no end to redemption. Only the rhythm of showing up. Of paying attention. Of editing the world until it says something true.”
He signed it.
Rishav Bora.
No pen name.
No disguise.
Just the name his mother gave him.
And the river, nearby, continued to flow.
Not because it was celebrated.
But because it must.
Epilogue:
The Echo in the Empty Room
There are stories that end with a door closing. And then there are stories that end with a door left ajar not because the author forgot to finish, but because some truths require space to breathe.
Rishav Bora’s story, if one must name it, did not conclude with vindication. It concluded with continuity.
His greatest lesson was not that masks must fall.
It was that voices, even when borrowed, carry something essential, a desire to be heard that transcends who is doing the speaking.
He no longer feared his name.
It was a name once associated with shame, with whispers in corners, with articles that ended in question marks: Is this the future of literature? Can we trust our writers? Does voice still matter when the face is false?
But names, like rivers, change course.
And now, when someone uttered “Rishav Bora,” it came not with scandal, but with curiosity. With a quiet nod, a half-smile. The way one might refer to an elder who made a mistake once, and then spent the rest of his days listening.
He became a listener.
In a world of declarations and loud opinion, that was the most radical thing he could do.
The journals he helped curate were now being cited in university bibliographies, in protest zines, in handwritten love letters. Students annotated his margins with questions. Farmers read his editorial notes aloud to each other over tea.
He was never invited to the big festivals. But the small ones wrote to him each year.
They didn’t want him to speak.
They wanted him to sit in the audience.
And somehow, that felt like grace.
The question, of course, never vanished.
What is truth in a world where masks are the only currency?
It is not a question with one answer.
Truth, Rishav believed, is not what survives scrutiny.
It is what survives silence.
It is what lingers after everyone has stopped clapping.
It is the line that someone rereads in the middle of a blackout, holding a candle, thinking: This feels like me.
He wrote slowly now.
No deadlines. No algorithms. No trending tags.
He wrote like one plants a tree whose fruit he will never taste.
He wrote not for readers, but for remembrance.
Not to be celebrated.
But to be useful.
He once believed that literature was performance.
Then he believed it was protest.
Now he believed it was presence.
To write was to say: I was here. I paid attention.
That, in the end, was enough.
He died many years later.
There was no obituary in the major papers. No tributes by literary greats.
But his funeral was attended by strangers who carried notebooks.
Some brought letters they had written but never sent.
Some recited lines he had once edited, gently.
Some just stood under the tree where his ashes were buried, listening.
In time, someone created an archive of his work.
Not the essays under false names.
The later ones.
The essays about shadows and mothers and memory.
The essays about rivers.
And in the archive’s welcome note, etched in delicate font, it read:
Here lies a man who learned how to speak by first becoming someone else. Here lies a writer who once wore voices like armor, but died wearing nothing but his name.
And far from this archive, somewhere near a village where stories are still told in whispers and songs, a young girl picked up a book he once edited.
She read a sentence and underlined it.
And for a moment, she felt understood.
And for a moment, Rishav lived again.
The End.