शहर की छांव में आग
Chapter 1: Born in the Shadows
In the narrow alleys of a slum tucked away behind the city’s shining towers, Arjun took his first breath. His cries were drowned by the honking of rickshaws, the barking of stray dogs, and the endless chatter of survival. His home wasn’t a house but a fragile structure made of rusted tin sheets and patched plastic. When it rained, it wept with them. When it was cold, it shivered more than he did.
His mother, Sita, was both mother and father—strong yet tired, loving yet burdened. She cleaned other people’s homes, scrubbing marble floors with her bare hands, while her own child crawled on the mud floor of their hut. Life had never been kind to her, but when she looked at Arjun, her eyes held hope. He was her reason to keep going.
Arjun never knew what it meant to have a toy. His toys were old tins, broken shoes, and bottle caps that he imagined were coins. But he had something others didn’t—imagination. While other boys fought on the streets, Arjun sat under a dim streetlight reading books borrowed from a scrap dealer. Tattered pages, faded ink, missing covers—none of it mattered. To him, they were treasures.
His favorite book was a torn Hindi translation of Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore. He didn’t understand all the words, but he felt them. He memorized poems and recited them aloud, pretending he was on a stage, pretending someone was listening.
School was a luxury he couldn’t afford regularly. Fees came and went like the wind—mostly gone. But he sat outside classroom windows, listening in silence, copying whatever he saw on the board from a distance. Sometimes, a kind teacher gave him a chalk stub or a notebook half-used.
Despite all this, Arjun never complained. He smiled more than he cried. He had no reason to believe in miracles, but he believed anyway. He dreamed of becoming a writer, even though no one around him even knew what that meant. “Likhak banega?” his neighbors mocked. “Pehle pet to bhar le!”
But dreams don’t die easily in a heart like Arjun’s.
One evening, as the sun set behind concrete buildings, Arjun sat on a broken bench with his notebook. He wrote about pain, about hunger, about beauty hidden in poverty. His words were raw, honest, bleeding with truth. In that moment, he wasn’t poor. He was powerful. He was creating.
Unseen by the world, unloved by fate—Arjun was born in the shadows. But the fire in him was waiting to rise.
And rise it would.
no more