Sudhir Mehta stepped into the house like a stranger arriving at someone else’s success. The marble tiles were cold beneath his feet—imported, polished, flawless. Not a creak, not a crack. The air smelled faintly of lavender from the automated diffuser. Silence, soft and curated. The living room was a quiet museum of comfort: suede couches no one truly lounged on, décor picked by an interior designer, abstract art that said nothing but cost a ton. The kind of house you only whisper in. The car he once cut from magazines sat in the driveway. Sleek, black, dull —the thrill long gone.

It was the kind of life you earn through sheer consistency. Starting as a warehouse assistant, Sudhir founded a corporate logistics company—knowing the ground reality helped. The kind of business where every client wanted things done yesterday, and every city looked the same through bus, train, and airplane windows. Hard work, long hours, and hotel breakfasts that all started tasting like cardboard.

He remembered the sharp edge of monsoon air leaking through the broken window in his childhood home, the scratch of his father’s nylon towel drying on a hook, the way his mother wore her faded cotton saree with the loose pallu tucked over her shoulder as she stirred dal in the kitchen, humming. Neha, his wife, now wore oversized T-shirts that said ‘Not Today’ or ‘Let Me Sleep’. She was doing exactly that, behind a closed door.

The kids were in the other room, probably with their headphones on, fully immersed in their world. His son, Aarav, had turned gaming into his second language—strategy videos on YouTube, Twitch streams, joystick in hand like a natural extension of his fingers. Action figures lay next to a Lego set worth ten thousand rupees, the appeal of which he still didn’t understand. He had grown up with a single broken G.I. Joe passed down by his cousin. He looked around again. Everything here was what he thought he wanted. An 85 inch flat screen on the wall. Double-door fridge humming with groceries. Smart lights. White walls.

He walked slowly toward the study. Everything else in the house had been curated. This room remained his sanctuary—unfiltered, untouched, forbidden. It was 3:43 a.m. Outside, the city hadn't started buzzing yet. Inside, the silence had weight. He sat at the desk, opened the drawer, and pulled out the thing he’d hidden there for weeks—a torn page, neatly wrapped in an old cloth. The folds were worn thin from too many readings, but his fingers still trembled—like each touch unearthed something he'd tried to bury.
“Don’t be this guy when you hit thirty: No book, no name. Just another man with bills, bed, and a family who’ll forget him. If you are, it’s better to exit quietly.”

He was thirty-nine now—nine years past a deadline no one else remembered, but one he still couldn’t shake.

The bathtub in the study—his quiet tribute to Dalton Trumbo—was already filled with water. The sharpest knife in the house was in his pocket. The prescribed sleeping tablets were shoved into his bedside table drawer. The blue saree he always loved on her was draped across the high-ceiling fan in his study. He had stacked up all the resources that he could kill himself with in that luxurious home. He sat there, as if waiting for the silence to talk him out of it.
His eyes fell onto the remote near him.

**********************************

Fourteen-year-old Sudhir didn’t need words to know something was wrong. His house had its own way of screaming. He knew the sound before he saw anything—the sharp clatter of steel dishes being stacked louder than necessary. From the doorway, he saw his mother wiping her eyes with the edge of her pallu between mechanical motions in the kitchen. The pressure cooker hissed in the background, releasing steam into a room already too heavy.

In the living room, his father sat hunched in the worn armchair, switching channels every few seconds. Not watching—just pressing buttons like it gave him control over something. His slipper tapped against the floor in a steady, irritated rhythm. 'Something big!' Sudhir thought to himself as he slipped into the bathroom and locked the door behind him, quiet as a shadow. This skill he’d learned over the years—it was how he knew what was going on. As he took his sweet time in the bathroom, he’d overheard it: the job was gone. Again.

For the next week, he saw how it affected everything in the house. The usual harsh words from his dad: how he regretted getting married, how he wished there weren’t so many responsibilities upon him—hinting at their son. The occasional remote throwing at the wall. Often, after a night of fighting, his mother would find the TV remote on the floor in the morning, and fix it. His father’s nylon towel would land on the floor when he was angry, just like today.

“Don’t you see how many husbands hit their wives in our street? Compared to them, he’s a saint,” Sudhir overheard his mother taking dad’s side. He wished he could share with his mother, one of the first feelings he remembered. Around the age of 6, when something similar happened and all he could hear was his father yelling and cursing, he wished for a brother. Not for support or companionship but to team up and kill his father! He knew better not to bring this up. But wanted to do something for her. He pulled out his school notebook and wrote.

Not about his father. Not about the money, but about a woman in a kitchen with invisible strings tied to everything in the house—holding it together while no one noticed she was coming undone. In his story, she was part machine, part magician—able to fix broken bulbs, heal scraped knees, and stretch one meal into three. The world kept asking her for more until she vanished, and no one noticed until everything fell apart.

At the bottom of the page, he scribbled: “If she ever stopped moving, the whole house would forget how to stand.” It wasn’t neat. It wasn’t perfect. But it was the first time he wrote something that felt real.
The next morning, he picked up the TV remote, assembled it, and left his story underneath.

He came home to a reply: “Thank you for being my son!” That single line filled him more than a week of all his favorite foods that followed. It was at that moment he decided he wanted to be a writer. Whenever things got messy—silent dinners, slammed doors, that weight in his chest—his mind split in ten directions. Replays, reassessments, regrets—all crowding in at once, each louder than the last.

So he wrote. Not perfectly, just enough to trap the noise on paper. That’s how he learned to make sense of it—not just feel, but frame it. Not just a boy overwhelmed. A writer. One who could take the things no one noticed and give them volume.

**********************************

Sudhir’s gaze shifted from the remote to the bookshelf row filled with his writings. Over the past two decades, he had consistently written a book per year despite working full time, falling in love, starting a family, launching his own company, raising kids. The row was filled with novels ranging from romance, mystery, horror, comedy, magical realism, short story compilations, children’s stories and even self-help. He'd tried to make it. Seriously, obsessively. Each one went out into the world with hope. Each one came back quiet. 'Doesn’t stand out in a crowded market. Not the right fit for us. The market for this genre is currently saturated'. He stared at the spines—color-coded, clean, unopened.

Charging towards the bookshelf, he yanked the first book off the shelf, then the next, and the next—throwing them across the room. They hit walls, corners, the floor, and glass objects. Papers scattered. A photo frame fell with a sharp, final thunk. He stood there, breathing hard, chest rising with something like rage—or grief. Then he saw it. A certain leather-bound journal he used to have—from the year of his father’s demise. He flipped through pages of notes, memories, and clumsy parts of conversations.

Son, enjoy the new triple-bedroom flat but always be grounded enough to return to the single-bed house you grew up in.

He smiled at how even at 27, after buying his own house, he still clung to his father’s words.

Dad and I shared our first drink together. We both got emotional. I saw him cry for the second time after mother’s passing. While he was hugging me.

He remembered how they had gotten so close after the writing incident. The reason? His mother. About a week after the letter under the remote incident, she sat him down. “Write about your father too,” she said, applying oil to his hair, “He’s not good with words. But maybe you can help him say what he couldn’t.”

At first, he didn’t want to. Not about him. The man who used to slam doors, yell without warning, and throw remotes across the room. But when he started writing about him—really writing—something shifted. He began to see what his father had been up against. He had tagged along with him to his no-role, do-it-all job as a Warehouse Helper/ Stockroom Boy. Getting mistreated or yelled at by people half his age, all of whom his father addressed as ‘Sir’.

Unheard of things like mental health, working at a place where no one had even heard of the term HR—what else could you expect but misdirected rage? The young sirs getting yelled at by older sirs. They all took hits all day from their world and passed them down the line to the only people they could: their subordinates and families. That’s when he decided never to dish down and treat his employees nice.

He knew he’d lost most of those journals long ago and tried hard to recollect any memories of his mother going through cancer while telling him this. How selfless motherhood must feel, he wondered. She never showed any signs—until the signs became too obvious to ignore. He realized his father was also angry most times because he was scared—helpless about his wife’s health. It wasn’t anger. It was fear, disguised as volume.

The only way to understand fathers is to see them through your mother’s eyes.

He remembered now—how she said it after the diagnosis. Before she left. She had known, even then, that Sudhir didn’t understand people by talking to them. He understood them by writing them.
Maybe that’s what I need to do, he thought: write about myself.
He didn’t know where to start. But this time, he wasn’t writing to be seen. He was writing to see himself. He picked up a pen.

**********************************

Two years later—Sudhir, aged 41—the pen still sat on his now smaller desk, only now, it wasn’t collecting dust. His first draft of the memoir sat in a stack of papers beside him. The first page displayed the title of the manuscript: The Man in the Margins.

He had moved to a single-bedroom flat, telling himself—and everyone else—that he needed the isolation. Said he wanted to relight the fire. In reality, he just wanted to feel like he’d suffered enough to earn a story.

In the past two years, he’d gone through every journal he’d ever written—twenty-four years of ink, margins, and moments. From angsty teenage rants to cringey-but-cute love letters to Neha back when she was just his girlfriend, to half-written poems. Notes scribbled during client calls, late-night feedings, fragments of dreams that ended up being real, stray lines about his kids’ first words, and the occasional story idea he never followed through.

It was all there: love, guilt, resentment, regret. The memoir was honest. Too honest, perhaps. Publishers didn’t hate it. They just didn’t care.
'A bit too plain,' one reject said. 'The arc doesn’t feel dramatic. No big conflict. Just... life.'

No big conflict. He read that line again and again. So he started creating them—treating life like a novel that needed stakes.

He moved out and pushed Neha to return to work—not gently, but urgently. There were hundreds of pages for and about Aarav—paragraphs he wrote the day they were born, tiny stories about their first steps, their first lies, their first disappointments. Whenever he failed as a father, he’d write them long letters—apologies he never read aloud, advice he wasn’t sure he’d earned the right to give.

He told himself he’d give those journals to them on their eighteenth birthdays. A kind of delayed honesty. A full version of who their father was—flawed, tired, trying. Not always brave, but always watching. While reading these, he stopped picking them up from school. Pulled out of the Saturday breakfast ritual. He told himself it was for the book—the next one. He needed tension. He needed change.

He began writing everything that happened at home, as it happened. Dialogue. Moments. Arguments. Their lives became material. He had all the words, all the records—but somehow, none of the presence. He was both an author and an observer, but ceased being a father and a husband.
Until it all started fraying. Aarav had made it to the ESL Premiership finals in FIFA—a tournament with sponsors, press, and streaming deals on the line. The biggest day of his son’s life.

And Sudhir showed up late, half-drunk, in an old kurta that hung off him like a costume. He stood out. The kids whispered and the parents stared.
Back home, just when Sudhir was about to apologize, his phone beeped. A publisher had mailed him a rejection—his seventh—for another crime thriller he was working on.

He lashed out. At Neha, at Aarav, at the event, at the crowd. Said things he couldn’t unsay. Threw a remote at the wall, stunning no one but himself.

Months passed. Neha stopped calling. Aarav stopped replying.

The last thing Aarav told him was about the finals he lost—after being one of only two out of 1,200 players who made it that far.
"I never doubted I’d lose that finale. But right before the start, I glimpsed his father tapping his shoulder and handing him a water bottle. I didn’t see mine. And for the next twelve minutes, I couldn’t figure out why the things that mattered to me didn’t seem to matter to my own father—and if it even mattered at all."

Sudhir wrote one final draft of his memoir and submitted it. The reply came back days later: another no. But Sudhir wasn’t there to read it or write another version.
The last page of his memoir read: “If no one reads this, maybe I never existed at all.”

A local publisher did respond to Sudhir, but took the silence as a no—and moved on.