Empty Pockets vs. The Flow of Ink
In a forgotten corner of the city, the walls of a cheap, rented mess house were crumbling, the salt-crusted plaster peeling away in chunks. On the desk, the fan of an old laptop groaned with a mechanical wheeze, sounding every bit as exhausted as Ayan himself. Next to the laptop lay a diary and a pen—its ink nearly spent.
Ayan stared at the screen. The column for last month's earnings showed a cold, hard zero. He didn't even have enough in his pocket to buy groceries tomorrow morning. His mother was ill, his little sister's school fees were overdue—he was backed into a corner with nowhere to run. Meanwhile, outside, the glittering city laughed on.
Earlier that afternoon, while standing outside the mess house, Ayan had spotted a man the neighborhood knew simply as "The Vulture." A notorious moneylender. He was gripping an elderly man by the collar, screaming over a few measly coins. The old man's tears glistened under the flicker of a streetlamp. Ayan felt a surge of defiance, a desperate urge to protest, but the emptiness of his own pockets turned him to stone. His middle-class pride wouldn't let him beg, yet his poverty wouldn't let him sleep.
He returned to his room and flipped open the laptop. It felt as though in this dog-eat-dog world, there was no one left to speak for the common man. He began to type. No fairy tales this time. He wrote about the monsters who build mansions by bleeding people dry. He wrote about the nights when the worry of putting food on the table robs a person of the dignity of buying new clothes.
Every word erupted onto the screen like molten lava. As he wrote, Ayan's eyes blurred with tears. He whispered to himself, "I don't know if this Webnovel will ever put food on my plate. I don't know if I'll ever earn a cent from this. Or will the ink run dry while I'm still chasing this dream?"
Suddenly, a notification popped up. A comment appeared under his story: "This is my life's story too! Don't stop, author. You are the voice for people like us."
Ayan's fingers came alive on the keyboard once more. He realized then that his writing wasn't just a path to earn money; it was a scream for survival for thousands like him. Death alone would stay this pen. An author cannot die before the stories of the needy are told to the end.