The beginning of the first chapter of my novel

I’m not writing this to create a sensation – my whole life I have stayed away from such unnecessary trivialities. Even when the pal of a remorseful conscience had not shadowed my literary existence, I stayed away from giving stir-arousing statements.

My primary objective is to leave the truth behind in my own words and through the only medium I can convey it with conviction – through this story. I want to leave (if I ever leave, that is) the truth for the posterity to ease the burden on my soul when I breathe my last breath, and to assuage the gradation of moral decay that makes me die spiritually, everyday, but makes me healthier physically, everyday. Only God knows when I’ll breathe my last breath. I’m as sound in body and soul as I was sixty years ago. Can you say if this is my damnation or a blessing?

If you ask for my opinion – I assume you do purely for the sake of discussion – it’s a damnation of an immeasurable depth, believe me. To live with guilt is worse than to die a thousand deaths in a well of molten lava. The guilt burns your individual atoms with microscopic ambers. They are not visible to the outside world. Not even you can see them incinerating your body, but you can feel them, every second of your life.

You must be thinking what I’m gabbing about. After forty years – is it? After all that sanctification, after all that deification, what am I up to?

Oh! Has it been forty years since that cursed book got published? Has it been forty years since it totally changed the way the world looked at itself?

It changed the world not for the worse that much I’m sure of. Perhaps that book was the best thing that could have ever happened to the deviltry-ridden world. So why this crushing guilt? Shouldn’t I be happy to be the cause of that book? Shouldn’t have I let the world put me at the highest pedestal along with the book? Let me come to that part at the opportune moment. I can’t help being a writer, even after not writing for forty years, and not even after being the incumbent of the greatest guilt of the world. Without putting you off, I want to make the truth as tantalizing as possible.

…I have written more; I’ll see whether I should continue posting it here or not.