Please find here some of Anahita's writings that she has selected to share with you.

 

Alan meets Amy! A short story by Anahita inspired by Micheal Thomas Suggestions

Rate: U

Both hands in his trousers pockets, Alan knew that evening was going to be a very special one for him , as he longed to endure the moments ahead for many years.

He prepared himself for the reunion with Amy in the best style possible. His tall and masculine legs were covered with the formal , but skinny black trousers, which gave him a sense of purpose and aim. His steps were guided by a pair of organic looking pointy brown leather shoes which bestowed him plenty of determination and hope. He as habitual as it could be ironed his white formal cotton shirt to an absolute perfection like it was a major achievement. This was to grant a modern, but unique appearance when he paired it with the finely knitted brown designer cardigan. He made sure that the white end of the shirt's sleeves were well shown as well as a light v shape that started from just under his diaphragm and stretched towards his neck. His finishing touch was a black slim silk tie, which he did not fastened very tight, but let louse around the collar of his shirt. That certainly made him feel fashionable, but comfortable. He thought that the image was not completed if his cardigan seam was not of a fiery orange to guide the viewers eyes up and down of his whole outfit, making the eyes wander from the face to the tip of the shoes and back.

Alan's hair also was done specially the day before to match the message he wanted to get across to Amy. Short and well groomed, with a few locks floating free in the fringe.

Five years ago when he last saw Amy, she looked away while saying goodbye, trying to hide her tears. Alan you are not really my type, she said after nine years of being together. His family were of course of the same wealthy status as Amy's family were, so there was no gap on that ground. What Amy could not stand was something else. It was a boy that did not care about how to dress up for the occasions that mattered for Amy. His hair was long, he had a beard and he wore the same torn denim trousers everywhere, matching it with the first t-shirt he could grab from the floor of his private flat!

Well, Amy was quick to find herself a suitable well groomed husband and tied the knot, but today, five years on, she was yet again single, with the history of a divorce as the result of discovering that her husband had a double life, living with another man!

Alan was nearly there, walking towards the canal, approaching the houseboat Amy asked her to meet her at. The sun was setting gloriously on that cold autumn dusk and the silhouette of the trees, reflected upon the river Thames, danced in the last few golden rays of the sun.

Alan's mobile phone rang, he took it from his pocket and checked the caller. It was Amy. She was checking if he was any near and Alan felt the tense in her voice. "As near as you can get," he replied as he saw the shadow of Amy sitting inside the cabin of a houseboat opposite to him. Amy opened the window and looked out saying that she could not spot him anywhere near. It was okay for Alan; he expected it. After all they departed he was four stones heavier!

"Alan?" she looked surprised as she faced the man she could not recognise. Alan entered the boat slowly, with style and a warm smile. Didn't get near her physically though as he tried hard to make himself come across as a callous man.

"Nice boat!" he replied without saying hello or intentionally paying any attention to Amy's perfect outfit for the occasion.

"Well, I designed it, I mean I decorated it myself," Amy replied before immediately expressing her amusement for what she was seeing, " You have changed!"

"It is just a shell Amy, nothing more," he replied as he looked at the artificial fire burning in the electric fireplace.

" You have to forgive me for being such an idiot," Amy said as she played with the cushions on the red velvet sofa.

"Don’t apologize Amy, I am here to thank you with a small gift. Well I decided to study fashion in Paris after we went our own ways. "Do you live here now?" he asked casually.

"Not really, it is just my get away place. Somewhere cosy and quiet I can run to. It is still near my house though, just ten minutes walk, " she blushed.

"Well, It is getting dark, so I better make a move. I parked the car a few minutes away and the ticket will run out soon. But here, I have two tickets for you and whoever you would like to invite, to attend my next fashion show at Earl Court," Alan just managed to finish the sentence before his mobile phone rang.

"I must dash, I hope to see you there," he said as he walked out the houseboat.

A woman opened a window and looked outside. A well dressed man slowly vanished from her view.

The Little Girl and The Thin Lady - Part 1 by Anahita

Rate: U

A lamp was shining in distance. The night was dark and cold. The little girl wrapped in a blue tatty rag was having her first bite into a half eaten sandwich. She was there on her own. Only moon was her company.

It was pickle and cheese today. She picked it from the park's dust bin. It was fresh as ever. A very lonely thin lady had her dinner on the bench every evening. She never finished her grab, and so the little girl fed herself from the luxurious left over. Sometimes there was half eaten banana for the pudding too.

Something moved from the far end of the park. The monster was approaching. The little girl sensed it. It always came with a shadow that moved away the silver blades of the blue moon. The little girl swallowed the remaining bite and took refuge under the root of the huge Oak tree. The long hands of the cold roots confined her like a protective mother.

Before she knew she was back into a world in which there was still hope to live. Life started to change for better when the thin lady moved to the neighbourhood. She lived in the park keeper’s shelter on her own. The shelter was empty as far as the little girl could remember. There was a huge lock on the gate which ended after a long path to a small wooded shelter in the far end of the park. No one ever passed the gate. No one was ever interested to discover what was in that shelter. It seemed like an old shed that kept lots of rusty gardening tools occupied by the ghosts of the past. There was a small lamp that burnt only a few minutes after the thin lady entered the shelter. From where the little girl hid under the oak tree, the lamp was the only artificial light seen at that end of the park.

Before the thin lady arrived, the little girl lived in more darkness and most of the nights she cried herself to sleep from hunger. Before the thin lady came to the little girl’s life, she never knew how warm it felt to stare at a lamp light coming from a shed window in distance. Before the thin lady came into the little girls life, she had no idea of how the creamy cheese melting into her mouth gave her the energy and warmth she never experienced before. Remaining of the stale bread crumbs thrown away for the birds by the children was her best experience of food.

The lamp in the distance went off. The shadows started to spread faster. Leaves embarked their nightly shiver and the wind began a symphony in G minor. The little girl closed her eyes and stayed still. A black horse popped into her mind as she fell to sleep.

When she opened her eyes for a second, the moon light was gone and so the shadows. She was lost in the void of the night riding a black horse, feeling the cold wind blowing her blue rag away. She rode her horse away from the charcoal faster and faster as she approached the city where the night gives away its hueless being to the indigo of a bleak icy morning, slowly and in a great pain. The dots of black ink started to spread across the indigo background as they began to give away their existence.

The little girl smiled as she recognised the silhouette of the trees with their fingers stretching towards the coming light. And for a lonely little girl another night came to an end and a new day started.

This is the first part of a short story by Anahita Saghafi - Art used in this story is created by Anahita and copyrighted. (There is a little girl in the graphics. Can yo spot her?)

Escape - A Poem by Anahita

Rate: U

I feel shapeless
You are in my mind
Bouncing up and down
On the surface of my contradictions

I try to forget you
To wipe you out of my head
To avoid my final tragic
Destruction

But you come back
Like hail in a hot summer day
To destroy the fruits of my escape
Unexpected

Ten Twenty Eight by Anahita - Anthology 2009 Two Hours Left Theme

Rate: 13+

Society always does not understand what goes in ones mind when they see unusual behaviour.

That morning Gill woke up to battle her own destiny. She knew that she was going to die that morning, exactly at 10:28. Gill looked at her alarm clock to see the dreaded 8:28 and the second hand ticking forward unbelievably slow.

Gill was going to die on the street that morning. She was going to be hit by a red car and her body was going to be thrown to the pavement while a young mother with a baby in a pram was on her way to shops.

Gill was going to look at the woman with open eyes trying to ask for help, but she had no power to talk. She was going to die with her eyes open and the woman was going to rush away from the scene as other started to make a crowd around her dead body.

It was two years ago on 28th of August when she woke up from the scariest nightmare of her life. She saw her twenty year old brother being attacked by eight dogs all at once. She saw her brother being torn and chopped to tens of pieces and each piece was taken away and eaten by hungry dogs. Her brother was backpacking in Germany that day. She saw the watch on her brother's wrist was thrown and got stock to a bush and stopped working. The time on the watch showed 10:28.

Two days later, the news arrived in an envelope with the remains of her brother's backpack and a watch that showed 10:28.

Gill decided she wanted to stop her destiny that morning. She decided that she was going to stay home and to forget about all the anxiety of waiting through the dreaded two hours, she decided that she was going to fall back to sleep with the aid of some sleeping pills.

Gill headed towards the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. On her way, she noticed that she had completely ignored the cat that morning. It was 8:48. She was up for 20 minutes repeating the nightmare in her head. In a normal day by that time she had already put the cat food out and had come out of shower, had a glass of strong bitter coffee and on her way to her desk to start writing.

Gill's last novel about the death of her brother hit top of the paperback charts one year after his death and made Gill a famous writer; something that Gill could not decide was good or bad. She started to write her second novel and to clear her own conscious she decided that this time she was going to die herself.

Yesterday she finished her novel, called "Gill's Destiny" and sent it off to her agent, feeling absolutely satisfied with herself, having the sensation that she had finally redeemed her lost dignity by becoming famous out of her brother's tragedy.

She went to bed early and decided to spend the entire of the following day shopping for a new black dress that she would put on her brother's second death anniversary, but as she was falling to sleep she saw herself in a red dress dancing in a dark room with dogs howling in the distance and as she started to hear the dogs louder and louder, she woke up with a terrible heartbeat, finding herself looking at the clock in the bedroom through most of the night.

"Meow," the cat started to look upset and really unappreciated as she saw Gill staring at herself in the bathroom mirror.

"Oh my god, sorry kitty, I am going to get your breakfast now," Gill took the bottle of sleeping pills from the cabinet and headed towards the kitchen while still in her bed gown.

"Today kitty, I am going to change my destiny. I have written it myself, so I should be able to change it, shouldn't I kitty?" Gill said as she tried to find the last can of the cat food she had in the cabinet.

"Although I decided to go today previously, but now I am going to stay, do you understand? Even though there is no more food left for you you dear, so you have to just drink some milk for today, but I promise to buy the best cat food one can ever get, but that'll be tomorrow kitty, tomorrow, where I live to laugh at death." She filled the cat's food container with some fresh milk from the fridge.

Gill looked at the familiar road outside her kitchen window. It was next to the window where she sat everyday to write her story. From that window she saw the four seasons come to life and die. She knew that nature was a game about life and death. The roses in her little garden knew well about this game and the old apple tree that dropped her half red apples to where they all gradually turned brown and disintegrated into the soil. Their wholesome roundness destroyed underneath the same rays of sunshine that gave colour to their skin once.

"I may be destined to die today, or I may skip it, but the game of nature will go on to be sure," Gill murmured to herself as she viewed the road from her kitchen window.

The cuckoo clock on the kitchen wall brought Gill's back to the reality of how slowly the time passed when one was waiting to fight the known unknown!

Gill decided that it was time to put herself back in bed, where she could spend a while in sleep when time slowly ticked away forward to let her know whether she would live beyond 10:28 that morning. She filled a glass of water with a few drops of water, enough to wash her sleeping pill down before swallowing a couple of them, just to be sure she does fall to sleep faster. Gill then made herself comfortable on the old tatty sofa she kept in the corner of her kitchen. She used this sofa every afternoon to get a quick nap before getting back to her writing. Today she was going to use it much earlier than that.

The world around Gill started to lose colour and got paler and paler. She closed her eyes as she last watched the clock showing 9:08. "Why this darn two hours don't leave me alone, why, why, why?" she repeated to herself as a few drops of tears started to steam down her eyes and disappear into the green fabric of the sofa.

"Your dogs were fierce," she heard in distance. It was her brother's voice. She tried to explain. She even tried to walk towards the voice. But she could not feel her legs. Then she started to laugh which quickly turned to a very loud scream as she found herself surrounded by eight dogs.

"I want to die on the road," Gill shouted, "I want to be killed by a car and die with open eyes watching a new mother rushing away from me", she screamed even louder. I don’t want to die here, being eaten by these dogs, piece by piece." Gill’s voice passed through the half open window. "Somebody help me please, I want to go back, go back, go back. I want to wake up. I want to live my last two hours of life shopping for the clothes I am buying for George’s death anniversary. I want to to wake up."

Gill woke up in sweat and limped towards the front door. She tried to open it, but it was locked. "I want to get out of here, damn it," she swore as she looked around for her keys.

Then the phone rang in distance. At the beginning she thought it was the door bell, but then she rushed towards the handset that was hidden somewhere between the sofa and its cover. Just before she picked the phone, it went to answering machine and a voice told the caller that Gill was away and they should leave their name and a short message along with a contact number so that Gill could get back to them.

"Hi Gill, I just finished reading your new book. It is pure genius. I am coming to see you now. I will bring the bubbly. We should celebrate. This will be even a bigger success. See you my dear," the phone clicked.

"Who wants the bubbly after they died," Gill picked up the phone a second too late. "What do you care about, nothing, and nothing at all. You just want money, my money, my blood money. The price of my life, and my brother's life. You know nothing about humanity, love, belonging and life.. You know nothing at all, nothing at all,” Gill sobbed as she dropped the handset back on the sofa.

I am getting out from the back door. My destiny is to be out there at the right time. I will die with my body all in one piece. I will be hit by a car as it was written and as it was proved to be true in my nightmare. I will die my way, not your way George. You cannot force me, not after I killed you the way I wanted it to be. Nothing of you should have been left at all. That bloody watch should have been destroyed by the dogs too.

The dogs were getting closer and closer. "Hey kitty, where are you?", Gill looked around as she rushed towards the back door. A fragile small meow turned into a scratchy scream as Gill suddenly grabbed the cat’s tale and lifted it up in front of her chest. "Here is what you get from me. That is all you can expect to get you demon wolves," Gill dangled the cat in the air in an attempt to distract the dogs.

Gill opened the back door and ran to the road. For people who saw her last few minutes of life, she had a cat’s tail in her hand dangling it around in the air, talking to herself and running straight to the middle of the road.

A red car blew its horn before bashing to some unknown object. A dead woman watched another woman rushing away with a pram.

"Society always does not understand what goes in ones mind when they see unusual behaviour. " Gill added as the last sentence in her book.

“Hi George, guess what, I just finished my second book!” Gill left a message on the phone as she looked at herself in the mirror. I guess the next story would be about my unborn child!

The clock on the wall showed 10:28.

No Hay Banda - A view on Mullholland Drive by Anahita

Rate: 18+

Mulholland Drive, Directed by David Lynch - 2001 is a film to watch times and times. This is a mysterious thought provoking monster of a picture that takes the viewer to the deep hidden tunnels of human soul, desires, happiness and sorrow.

Success is the name of the game, and so the search for identity and the craving for love!

Contained within the original DVD release is a card titled "David Lynch's 10 Clues to Unlocking This Thriller". The clues are:

1. Pay particular attention in the beginning of the film: At least two clues are revealed before the credits.
2. Notice appearances of the red lampshade.
3. Can you hear the title of the film that Adam Kesher is auditioning actresses for? Is it mentioned again?
4. An accident is a terrible event — notice the location of the accident.
5. Who gives a key, and why?
6. Notice the robe, the ashtray, the coffee cup.
7. What is felt, realized, and gathered at the Club Silencio?
8. Did talent alone help Camilla?
9. Note the occurrences surrounding the man behind Winkie's.
10. Where is Aunt Ruth?

The film is starred by Naomi Watts and Luara Harring and yet another of David Lynch's films with characters playing in parallel universes of the same physical location.

Here is my piece of writing on the film. It is not a review as it is impossible to review this movie, but only a view that cannot explain the vast topics of human psychology and universe together.

There has been an accident. Someone is in the search of her identity…. An accident is a symbol, symbol of destruction… something so shocking and unexpected, something that can mess your life, your stability, and even your identity.

An accident may want you think who you really are, and what is happening to you. An accident may be the start of a self search, or start of a dream, a dream that you preferred happened, something that puts you back in charge, in control; something that you wanted to be, you dreamt of being.

In reality, things may be absolutely different from what most people want, and so it was for so called Diane Sylwyn.

Diane auditioned for the lead part she wanted to have in the film “Sylvia North Story” and she did not get the part, instead Camilla Rhodes had the part. Camilla Rhodes was the one owning the dream Diane wanted to have and the irony was Diane loved Camilla, so deep inside she did not want to complain, although she knew perhaps she was the one who deserved the part, and she knew that the reason Camilla had the part was not just her talent.

An there comes the accident, the shock. Telephone rings, Diane’s phone, the black one with square buttons next to the ashtray. Diane is set to attend a party. She gets a lift which is supposed to get her to Mulholland Drive. The car stops somewhere that we sawthe accident happened in the beginning of the film.

This accident is really happening to Diane. It is the shock. She gets stopped at the point of accident and she finds out Camilla is coming down the road to get her out of the car. In her mind she wants this to be her moments to win Camilla’s love… after all she lost the fame and the glamour, so she wanted to keep the love….As they enter Mulholland Drive, she witnesses a party in Adam Kesher’s house.. a party for Camilla by Adam, instead of a party for Diane by Camilla. And the point when they are announcing their plans is the breaking point for Diane’s identity…

From then she is in a loop of messed up identities. Diane meets the hitman in the Winkies…. She has money in her black purse and a picture… she claims “This is the girl.” A blue key becomes the symbol here…. Blue perhaps for death, for coldness, for showing “THE END”. End of something precious, as precious as life itself…. Diane asks “What does it open?” There is a guy at Winkies that is standing at the cash point, looking at Diane… Is this Diane’s conscious? Or Diane associates it to her conscious? The key opens a box… A blue box… And Diane has lost this box… Diane want to find this box..

A girl at Winkies is serving Diane and the hitman. Her badge reads “Betty” and this is the place that Diane does not want to be Diane anymore.. She had done something that killed her conscious … Pay attention how that guy at Winkies shown scared in the beginning of the film.. trying to figure out that ugly face he saw twice in his dreams was not true….. But that ugly face was true.. and Diane conscious dies when she realises that the ugly face was not just a dream, but a monster in reality…

By now, reading my review, you may have just figured out that everything in the film, is part of Diane’s fears and hopes….But the beauty of the film lies with the fact that it loops back to itself and gets convoluted with people who lived in the past…. This is the spooky bit I enjoyed a lot.. The fact that in Adam’s party, we figure out that Aunt Ruth is actually dead (Point 10 in David Lynch clues), but she was not a glamorous actress… in fact she wanted to be, just like Rita in the film Gilde, as pictured in her apartment in the beginning of the film….

So perhaps Betty is Ruth and Rita is Camilla… So there are two versions which somehow identical here:

Version 1. This version is what Diane wanted to be in the reality.. This is Diane’s dreams and hopes …. Diane becomes Betty in this version and this is the name her sub conscious picked up from the badge of the waitress girl in Winkie.

Betty arrives at Los Angeles… To live in her Aunt Ruth house in one of Hollywood’s prime locations, Sunset Boulevard.

She says goodbye to Irene…. But who is Irene..

Irene seems to be the most complicated clue to this film for me… Irene appears in the following scenes:

In the beginning when there is a dance contest, we see Betty (the successful version of Diane) appears as the winner of the contest, surrounded in fog and smoke between Irene and partner. (Point 1 in David Lynch 10 clues)

We see Irene and partner in the back of a taxi, laughing in an unusual way, looking happy. Irene taps on her partner’s lap….

Irene and partner come back and get in as very tiny people to Diane house from under her door and haunt her. This seems to lead to Diane’s panic, and finally suicide. (See version 2, where the ghost of Aunt Ruth plays Diane/Betty).

Irene and partner get out of a trash packaging thrown to the floor by the bum guy in the back of Winkies, as tiny people again.

So what is Irene? What aspect of Diane she presents? And where does she appear when Diane is her successful version of herself, Betty.

A flight to a new place means a new beginning, start of a new hope, a longing for a dream change…. Irene is with Betty when this change happens…When she is scared of the unknown in front of her…But Irene leaves Betty on her arrival and wish her success.. So is we say, Irene is part of Diane who makes her dependent on the comfort of others to face the unknown, and Diane wants to let go of it, and so Betty the successful version departs from Irene, as she want her success to be her own, not her dependency on others … Her success in the dance contest in the fog, was dependent on Irene,,, she was there sharing this success… Betty the new version does not want to share success… She wants to be the person who gives comfort as opposed to be the person who gets comfort… And there Irene goes in the taxi… separated…. Gone….

Betty now in her pink cardigan faces the new independent herself in a new place. She has this big smile on her face as she tell the taxi driver her destination.

Adam Keshers’ mother becomes Coco the manager of the apartments Aunt Ruth lives in… And Aunt Roth is not dead in this version.. She is also a successful person, who is out to Canada for filming…

But right from the beginning, this new version, Betty has to face an old wound straight away….. And she is completely on her own….Betty finds Camilla who has been in an accident and lost her memory…. She is in the search to find out who she is .. And Betty, independent and successful, comes to rescue.. .Here she is the one in charge, she is the one with power….She has switched places and now the person in trouble is Rita..

Rita is not real and we can see that from the beginning of her appearance… She possesses a purse with no identity card, but with a huge amount of cash, and a key, a blue key, a wooden strange blue key. What does this key open? There is no box to go with the key in the beginning…. But this key has a hole in the shape of a triangle….

Triangles have come to serve many opposite meanings, depending on which whey you look at them. They may mean danger or safety… They come to represent fire and water both, while depending on how they stand in front of you, the ymay mean male or female…..Especially in female case, they may represent homosexuality….

Now we start to feel sympathy for Diane, now Betty, trying to help Rita to find the box that the blue key opens….Why blue… Doesn’t blue represent the presence of depression and sadness?

Rita is lost and depressed…. Betty is in charge now… So she gives Rita the red robe (Point 6 in David Lynch 10 clues), the one that Aunt Ruth specifically left for her … Betty supports Rita and tries to let her find her identity and in the process, they become lovers, while the film tries to show in fragmented pieces, what Diane wanted to be the reality.

Castigliane Brothers and whoever Diane assumed were involved in the unfairness of her not being taken for the lead part, get to be ridiculed and get into trouble all through the film. For example, Castigliane Brothers, who somehow supported the blonde Camilla Rhodes, were ridiculed by showing the spit of the espresso over the napkin. The cowboy is another example.

In the process of searching her identity, Rita and Betty visit Diane Sylvin’s house, where they found Diane’s body decaying after committing suicide. Rita seems to be somehow responsible for Diane’s suicide, and so she feels she is her killer, and this leads her to change her hair style and put on a wig, and this wig makes her to look like Diane. They sleep after this event and become lovers and as this unity happens, somehow an awakening makes Rita to take Betty to club Silencio, where Betty who was all smiling, all happy all the way, suddenly becomes depressed and cries, as she come to realise all this was a dream… a tape, no hay banda… And that is the point that a box appears in Diane’s purse…. A box that will lead to Rita’s identity. But when they get back to get the key and reveal the secret, the film folds back in time, as the box drops on the old carpet and Aunt Ruth comes in the room looking as she heard something…. But we all know that Ruth was dead.

And this all leads to the second version of story.

Version 2. This is exactly as the first version with a small difference… Diane is actually substitute for Ruth, who committed suicide and her spirit has come back in future. And Camilla is Rita, Ruth’s version of Camilla, all very convoluted as I explained in the beginning.

The film finishes with the appearance of the blue hair lady in club Silencio, to remind us again that: no hay banda… It was all a tape, all recorded, an illusion ….

The God of this World! A Short Prose on Childhood ...

Rate: U

The following is a small prose I wrote when watching my daughter playing with her dolls at the age of 8. As I am in the process of learning to write for children, I thought this piece is a good reminder that how different our childhood has become from our children's.

She had a little doll called Dot.

She fed Dot, she dressed up Dot, she brushed Dot’s hair and she put Dot to bed.

Then before she knew she married and had a little girl called Mary.

She fed Mary, she dressed up Mary, she brushed Mary’s hair and she put Mary to bed.

She looked at Mary and thought that what else could she possibly need. Every day, she tidied Mary’s room, made Mary’s food, washed Mary’s clothes, and made Mary’s bed.

One day she was sitting in the room sewing Mary’s clothes and ironing Mary’s shirt, when she overheard Mary talking while playing.

Mary had a little doll too. Her name was Magee.

She did not feed Magee. She did not dress her up. She did not brush her hair and she did not put her to bed.

Magee was a spy. She was sent to missions. She had to save lives. Lives of people and lives of dolls too! She did not have time to eat, or time to go on holidays. She was always working and she was having a nervous breakdown.

Then she started to think, think of the days of her childhood. The simple happy caring motherhood approach she had when playing with her dolls.

Now the dolls got to be heroes and heroines. They have missions. They are overworked and stressed….

She looked back at her daughter. She suddenly felt worried.

“What are you doing sweetie?” she asked.
"I am watching over Magee," Mary replied.
"Who are you in the game?" she asked.
"I am the God of this world." was Mary's answer.

She became silent, thinking how different she was to her daughter. She only wanted to a mother for her, not a God!

Happy Thoughts - A Short Review on “Finding Neverland” by Anahita

Rate: U

"When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies." J M Barrie in Peter Pan

"Every time a child says 'I don't believe in fairies' there is a little fairy somewhere that falls down dead." J M Barrie in Peter Pan

At “Finding Neverland” we view a film that tries to portray the life of J M Barrie (Johnny Depp), the writer of “Peter Pan”, 1904.

Neverland is where the time stops and boys remain boys. Neverland is where we all want to live in when we find out how difficult is to be a grown up, a person with responsibilities, and too much in our heads to enjoy simple things….

But “Peter Pan” the character who is said to be inspired by “Peter”, one of the Sylvia Llwelyn Davies (Kate Winslet) son’s, is in fact J M Barrie himself. “I am not Peter Pan. He is,” Peter says looking at uncle Jim.

This story clearly portrays the internal dreams of a grown up man, who regrets his boyhood days. Those fantastic times that he had no shadows and he could fly.

But who are fairies? Why J M Barrie had to bring fairies in this? Because fairies are children’s innocence and happiness. They are symbols of JM Barrie’s belief that those little pure smiles will die when we grow up, when we stop to believe in laughing and flying…. But there is one way to get back to Neverland ….To find our happy thoughts. Grown-ups have shadows and no happy thoughts.

As it goes for the J M Barrie’s life, we can picture a man in great anguish, struggling with his sorrow of an unhappy marriage and troubles of unsuccessful career. Here Johnny Depp gives a dark shadow to J M Barrie’s character. His coldness to women around him, and his obsession with his career, takes him to extremes of abandoning his home and spending his time playing with Sylvia Davies’ boys, concentrating on the one he thinks is growing up faster than others, Peter.

Barrie tries to teach the pleasures of writing to Peter, as a tool to escape from the anguish of losing his father and the fear of losing his mother.

Perhaps writing was Barrie’s Happy Thought.

Mashti - Part 1 - A Story by Anahita (RainStar)

Rate: PG

August was at its highest heat. The scent of walnut leaves filled the mature garden. Mashti was there, between the hushed trees, silently working. He worked on this garden all his life, working for Akbar.

Akbar owned the land. His granddad cultivated the walnuts on the relatively big land 100 years ago. The trees grew slowly but spread their branches higher and higher towards the sky. Their fruit provided wealth and prosperity to Akbar’s family.

Mashti worked in this garden as long as he remembered. When Akbar was younger, they used to play football with the cheap and hollow stripy red and white plastic ball. However, Akbar grew up to be an important man and Mashti remained to be only a gardener’s son.

Mashti followed his dad’s trade to be a gardener and stayed where his dad worked. He married and brought his bride to the little mud break hut at the end corner of garden. Soon after he married, he realised that his pregnant wife was ill. She gave birth to his only son Sina and didn’t get the chance to live much longer than a year after the birth.

Mashti wanted to bring up his son on his own and teach him to be an accomplished gardener. Therefore, he never re-married another woman. He woke up everyday, turned his small transmitter radio on to listen to the morning news, then performed his morning prayers before he started the exhausting daily labour of maintaining the garden. He baked his own bread, cultivated his own vegetables, and kept to himself.

For Sina, up to the time he learnt climbing trees, the world was inside the walls of the garden. There wasn’t anything outside. The life was how it was, him, Mashti, the garden, their donkey and of course God who Mashti prayed five times a day.

From the early age, Sina learnt to help Mashti with the cooking and cleaning too. He learnt how to fill up the oil in samovar and how to brew a pot of tea. He also learnt how to cook a hot vegetable stew over the cooking oil lamp.

Once a week Mashti put some of the stored walnut out on the back of their donkey, named Khar, and he came back with some other rations such as rice, a small portion of fresh meat, a sack of charcoal, a gallon of oil, and some pulses such as lentils and chick peas.

Sina sat and watched Mashti leaving the garden gate when he was tinier, but as he grew older, he wanted to know what happened to Mashti behind that wooden gate. It was then that Sina started to be a rebel.

“So where did you go Mashti?”

“Go and get on with your own business son. Have you performed your prayers yet?” he said harshly. Soon Sina learnt that there was no point in asking Mashti about it. There was no answer there.

Sina followed so many unwritten rules in his tiny world that consisted Mashti and him. He had never seen another human being. There was no TV, or he did not even know that TV existed, and there were no books, apart from the prayer book, no papers, and he was not even allowed to touch Mashti’s radio. Mashti only turned it on at morning, just before he prayed and quickly turned it off, took batteries off and carefully placed them in a cigarette box he always carried in his trousers pocket.

When Sina asked for the first time, at the age of five, that if he could have a go with a small black box, Mashti turned red from anger and told him that there was nothing interesting about that box. Sina never dared to even try when he was tinier and not still a rebel. Therefore, he kept playing with the walnuts, stones and ants in the garden.

The days of Sina being a good son, the same way that Mashti was to his father soon ended. Sina got himself into learning new skills, such as climbing trees. Mashti normally used a ladder to get to highest branches and used a long flexible stick to drop the fruits, but Sina was not strong enough to carry the ladder. He did not even have the key to the padlock on the storage to get the ladder out. The key was where the batteries and other Mashti’s valuable items were always kept, in the huge pocket of his work trousers.

So one day, when Mashti went out for his weekly visits to the world outside, Sina decided to see where Mashti disappeared to after carefully locking the wooden gate behind him.

He was exactly seven that day, but he had no idea what a birthday meant. He never had a kiss, a cuddle, or any gift. May be Mashti didn’t know it either. May be Mashti didn’t want to know it.

Sina didn’t know what birth was. He didn’t know the difference between a boy and a girl. He never saw any woman in his life! He didn’t know what young meant, what old meant. He knew he was changing taller as Mashti changed shorter. He noticed that he was getting stronger than Mashti.

“These trees you see my son, are here from hundred years ago,” Mashti once told Sina. “They are old and strong,” he said with pride and Sina immediately made a connection between getting stronger and becoming older. That gave him a very good feeling.

“We are like plants in this garden too, we are part of God’s creation, and we are here for a test. We have to prove we obey His way,” Mashti spoke to Sina mainly after his evening prayers.

When Mashti left the garden that morning, Sina was ready for his first real climb of the oldest walnut tree. It felt as the tree was talking to Sina, asking him for a pat on the shoulder, one of those that Mashti gave to Khar, every now and then.

He knew by instinct that he had to be quick, as he had no sense of time.

Sometimes when Mashti left, Sina got busy playing with his round walnuts, targeting random trees in the garden, and time passed ever so quickly as if Mashti went out and came back in a wink of an eye. Other times, especially on dark and grey winter days, when Sina had to stay inside their dark, damp and cold mud hut and look at the flock of ravens searching for food on snow, it took like infinity waiting for Mashti to appear from the end of the muddy path.

Sina grew to be a friend of the nature and part of its miraculous ways. He reached the tree, which was quite near to the gate and the wall to outside in a few springy steps. His bare feet felt dry over the hot soil. He had a pale pair of second handed jeans ,which was brought in by Mashti one day when he came back from one of his out the garden trips, no shirt, and certainly no hat.

He grabbed the trunk of the tree and pulled his tiny body up. The tree was rough and so Sina’s skin. He tried harder and harder as he felt the gravity under his feet. He felt Mashti’s presence a split second when he struggled to pull up. A cold sweat captured his sun-tanned skin. Nevertheless, in no time he forgot about all the dangers and consequences of his actions. If Mashti was beyond that wall, so he was to see him there on the Khar. He grabbed a thick branch and pulled himself over. He was there on his way to see the unseen, to experience the forbidden. A crow sat on the tree beside and screeched a nasal cry. Sina dried his sweaty face with his bare hands and looked above the wall.

The sun dazzled his eyes as he first looked out his cage. A strange looking creature was passing by, wrapped in a flowery patterned sheet. There were mud houses with their walls cracked under the hot sun. There were trees and gardens and there was someone else there playing with a huge round thing, a lot larger than Sina’s walnuts. “It must be a kind of fruit like watermelon,” Sina decided. But it was not green. It was stripy red and white, perhaps made of plastic.

The moment that Sina saw the world beyond the wall, he knew he would soon   get there no matter how impossible it seemed at the time.

Sina didn’t have a watch. There was a small clock in their room, but it was not to be moved around as Mashti once told Sina: “keep away from this son,” Sina remembered when he first was tall enough to see and touch the decoration over the window seal.

As well as the clock next to the window pane, there was a mirror in the middle of two candle holders, a vase, which was always empty, and the prayer book wrapped in a very old green velvet cloth. The candles in the candle holders were burnt half way down, but Mashti never used them. One was a bit taller than the other, both a creamy colour with layers of dust and oil over their tops.

With nothing to measure the time, Sina sat on the old tree and watched the new world outside the walls. The sun shone brighter out there, as there were fewer trees and the muddy roads around the garden were occasionally used by people not known to Sina.

A beautiful person with very long hair passed by quickly carrying a yellow basket of fruits. Sina could see grapes and apples. He immediately thought of angels as described in the prayer book. Could it be a way to heaven from that gate? Did Mashti know how to get to heaven? Sina’s heart started to bit faster as he saw the angel walked back, but this time she passed slower and Sina could hear her singing some tunes.

The sun got a lot hotter and outside the garden was stand still and quiet when Sina heard the bells over Khar’s neck. Mashti was approaching. Sina felt something was freezing in his body, something that he never experience before. He wanted to get down the tree, but he was shivering and his limbs were shaking so badly that he could not control his next step. Sina decided to jump, but the tree was very tall and he was so small.

Mashti opened the gate and entered the garden. He went straight towards the storage, where they kept their rations and garden tools. He unlocked the door and took the first package from Khar’s back.

“Sina son, come here to help Mashti,” he shouted while unpacking the goods. Sina was frozen in place, unable to move. Mashti seemed to not mind about Sina not responding. He continued his unpacking, fastened the Khar inside the storage, and locked the door.

Then he started to walk towards their hut. In his way to the hut, Mashti stopped, looked around, and then went towards an old tree near the west of the garden. Sina forgot about his fears when he saw Mashti getting away from where he was. Sina waited until Mashti walked for five minutes. The garden was quite huge and Sina noticed that Mashti virtually was running towards an unknown direction. It was not their hut or any particular part of the garden that Sina knew. He stopped suddenly, looked around and then sat down. Sina could not see exactly what he was doing, and found himself down the tree and running towards the hut as fast as he could once he still had the chance.

Once he got to the hut, he quickly went to a corner and pretended that he was asleep. Time did not pass quickly afterwards. Sina opened his eyes after a while and stared at the old clock’s second hand moving forward, slower than usual, tick-tuck, tick-tuck, the sound that was fast in his ears started to stretch and got longer and longer. Tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiick-tuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuk, tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiick-tuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck……

When Mashti entered the room Sina was fast sleep. His cheeks were as red as fresh summer peaches. Mashti closed the door quietly and looked at the clock. It showed one. Mashti noticed a patch of sun over his son’s face. He approached the curtains and drew them half closed. He quickly washed his hands, and brought some fresh cheese, grapes, and bread out of his package and neatly placed them over the small table in the corner of the room. He then put the samovar on, changed into his pyjamas, and started his prayers.

The last seven years weren’t the hardest of the years that Mashti experienced in his life. Having Sina was a blessing and brought Mashti the happiness he never experienced before. When he married Farah, he was already 40 and considered himself an old man. He always thought of himself as very old. He felt very very tired and run down. The garden was his life in the sense that it gave him the opportunity to switch off from the past that he did not want to recall.

His solitude was considered madness from the eyes of villagers. His attitude to his son was not approved by the head of the village. But he wanted to do what he considered being the best for his son. He wanted to protect him from what happened to him. He wanted to provide him with food, shelter, and a carrier that was free from pain. Garden was peaceful. Trees could not hurt you. Flowers were friendly. There was tranquillity and life.

When Mashti finished his prayers, he brought out his prayer beads from his pocket and started to turn the beads around. Looking at them made him sad and initiated memories of his late dad. Mashti always thought about his dad and the love he left behind for him. He felt responsible to his spirit. Mashti remembered how he was always there for him all the time so much that he never felt the lack of having a mum. Mashti never saw his mum too. She left Mashti after the birth and disappeared form the village. Villagers did not say much about her and most of the time they kept quiet about it. But it was bitterness in the sentences Mashti heard from other children. “Oh, his mum was mad… She ran away…. She set fire to their house… She left the kid in the plastic dustbin… Mashti always felt depressed and confused. He could see how other children go home to have the warm supper made for them by their mums… Mashti also had warm supper ready, but it was made by his dad and did not taste as good as the ones he tasted when meeting his friends homes.

When Mashti was younger he often got in to trouble fighting with the kids who called names on his mother. Many days he got back home with a nose bleed or bruise made by elder kids. His dad was the only person who loved him and took care of him. Everybody else was enemy. But Mashti was not a rebel. He did not like riot and loud noises. He was a peaceful person who wanted his own space, his own corner. He loved the garden, because the atmosphere gave him just what he needed. The tranquillity, the calmness, and the feeling that came with taking care of those strong trees satisfied him.

Mashti kept turning his prayer beads round and round and with each round he felt more and more intoxicated with the spirit of God he obeyed. His head fell forward as his neck bent nearer to the soil he believed he came from. The soil that was going to accommodate him as it did for his father. He felt lighter and free. Words started to come louder from his hidden lips beyond the long black and white beard that covered most of his face. With each movement of the beads and each prayer he felt giddier and less conscious of his surrounding. God was all around him with his angels all queuing behind.

This status of being with the love of his life, the God, the Almighty, was a routine in Mashti’s afternoon prayer. He looked at his face in the mirror once he finished, and he definitely saw a shine in his eyes that was created by God’s attention to him. He felt satisfied and could not judge how the time fleet away. His vivacious eyes stared into the mirror adoring the man that lived original and inspired.

Immediately after the prayer he poured himself a cup of tea and lit a cigarette. The skin of his hands cracked and chapped from the heavy garden work, and some of his fingertips were orange from the continuous smoking. He started to hum a sad song he knew from his childhood whilst spreading the mattresses and duvets on the floor, making them ready for the afternoon sleep he much needed.

When he woke up, Sina was not around.

Sina woke up soon after Mashti fell to sleep. He grabbed a piece of bread, filled it with fresh feta cheese, and rolled it to a little sandwich. He took quick bites, swallowing each bite without chewing it, before he put a few grapes in his mouth.

The afternoon was hot and Mashti looked so peaceful in his sleep. Sina found himself outside in no time. Everything around him seemed so fuzzy and blurred getting away from one point in the garden, the gate.

Sina wanted to get out and discover the world outside, the universe that was taken away from him, perhaps a taste of the promised heaven. But he could face dangers as well. There was a possibility of that the devil tricked him.

“Devil is always there, ready to get you in trouble, pleased to guide you to hell” Mashti told Sina. He did not follow God’s wish and so was dumped out of the heaven. Devil was not happy and he wanted to revenge. “God put his spirit in human’s clay” Mashti thought Sina, “and Devil wanted to stain this spirit.”

As Sina strode towards the gate his trepidation increased. He felt something new in him that he never felt before, confusion. And for the first time in his life, he questioned himself. He did not know whether he should stay inside the gate or step outside. And what is inside was outside! What if the place that he was in now was the heaven. What if all the creatures he saw today on the other side of the gate, were not allowed to come in, as they did not have the key to the gate. What if Mashti is God and now it is Devil that is directing him to get away, to enter hell.

Sina stopped near the gate, his heart thumbing with pain. Some ants were queuing to get to an unknown destination under the ground. He sat there and watched them as they entered the dark hole and appeared from others. Something sparked in Sina’s head. They cannot be seen when they are under the ground. What if he made a way out the garden that was similar to ants subways.

Without knowing Sina started his first day in the school of nature. He decided that he could learn from these creature who did not communicate with him verbally, who were not of the same appearance as him, but they survived and lived around him.

If he made the secret subway, he could sneak out and come back in without any keys, and without being noticed by Mashti or any curious pair of eyes outside. He could evaluate the world that was unknown to him and decide how to face it. Sina smiled as he went over his subtle plan.

“What are you up to son?” Mashti’s voice clutched in to Sina’s thoughts and crushed them to death.

“I am just playing Mashti…” Sina rushed an answer.

“With what son?”

“Ants,” was Sina’s short answer.

Read more at part 2 coming soon ... in celebration of the novel writing month, November.

If you had the time to read to this point, please email me your feedback to anahita[at]boldwriters.co.uk

Blue Autumn - A Short Story by Anahita

Rate: PG

Autumn arrived with a different colour when I was twenty-seven. It was a blue autumn that year, with the shades of grey and dark purple hiding the leaves and the sky.

I remember stepping into the garden in my silk dress, trembling in the wind, saluting to the darkness of yet another night. The cold leaves crushed under my bare feet and turned to silvery ashes of dust, twinkling and dancing in the breeze.

My dark long black hair brushed the charcoal canvas of the surrounding garden. I stretched my hands towards the dark indigo sky in harmony with the longing of my body.

“Touch my face” I whispered to the ears of the wind, “with your cold hands”.The reply was an anguished howl.

Under the black velvet skin of the night, a heap of dust and smoke stood in front of me, portraying my broken dreams, my wasted youth. Nothing was left to pray and care for. Everything seemed to be gone forever.

Staring at the aged oak tree, I repeated, “love once; live once,” refreshing the memories of the day we carved our names together on the body of the old tree. That night I experienced my first real fall: falling in love.

He had cancer. He died. He was only twenty. I seventeen. When he died, I stayed away from love, and kept talking only with the night. The silence of the night taught me how to stay awake and repeat the memory of the first and the last kiss I have ever had. The only thing I hugged ever since was the oak tree and the only lips I kissed was the carving on the skin of the tree that was aged and cracked but was still full of life.

Ten years I went on with that memory, ten years of broken windows and ruined dreams. I was present there, out in the dark every night since; in the heat of the short summer nights and through the freezing snow of the bleak winter ice. I went on to keep the fire that burnt me once, and lived in my blood.

And then when I was twenty seven, I experienced my second fall. I started to cry covering my face with the tears that I held from bursting for ten years. I was in love again! In that blue autumn, I closed my eyes and I kissed the carving goodbye. The rain came to wash my tears; the wind carried my soul to him.

The night stayed dark, hugging the oak tree tight: love once, live once.

When God Fell to Sleep! A Short Sci-Fi Story by Anahita

Rate: 13+

*Happiness is not something found in science labs or even the heaven. Happiness is when we unlock closed doors and create something extraordinary.*

On a clear starry night, a black hole was about to open its gateway to a timeless tick. The universe was at its quietest moment ever. God was sleep and didn’t know that one of his naughtiest children was about to find his way out of the eternity.
There was a gate and the key to open it was locked in the infinity of repeated mirrors.

“What is behind there?” Jack remembered asking his father.
“Nothingness,” He replied.

“What is nothingness?”
“Absolute void, my son.”
“Can I see it?”
“No.”
“Can I go there?
“No. It is forbidden.”
“Why?”
“Because of time.”
“Time?”
“Yes, my son. Time is a weapon. It will kill you.”
“Kill me. Then what happens.”
“Nothingness.”
“I want the key to there dad,” Jack said.
God smiled: “That gate is not an exit. It is an entrance.”
“You mean we can’t go outside?”
“No, because we are already outside living in infinity”
“Show me a way to there dad,” Jack begged his father.
“You see those two mountains in the distance facing each other my child?” God said in doubt.
“Yes….”
“They are made of mirrors…,” He continued.
“Yes…,” Jack said impatiently.
“The key to the gate is between them. No body can unlock the gate without that key.” God knew deep inside that Jack also would not be able to get the key.

But Jack did. When everybody was lost in the fake reflections, Jack reached the mountains and found millions of virtual keys floating in space. But which one was real? Jack covered the mountains and there it was, one key to his freedom.

Jack instantly was on Earth and soon he figured out that he was invisible within human world. Jack decided then to be a human!

Soon he met a lonely girl, called Lily. A small built, shy research fellow at the Central University, Lily seemed to live in her physics lab.

“Can I …..help …..?” Lily asked while shaking from the shock.

“Hello! My name is Jack.”
“How…. I mean how… did….”
“This is not the first time I pass the locked doors,” Jack smiled and looked into Lily’s eyes.

Lily looked down and blushed. Jack entered Lily’s world.

“Do you love me?”
“Of course I do,” Jack replied knowing it was very important for an Earthling woman to be loved.
“My mum always said that, somewhere out there in that starry sky, there is a star for you,” Lily whispered to Jack’s ears,” I became a cosmologist to find my star, never knowing that mine was actually so near to me,” she continued.
“Where you thought your star was?” Jack replied with his fake human voice.
“The universe is so vast. You never know, you could be living beyond time,” Lily joked.

One hot summer, when Jack and Lily were kissing each other under the umbrella of a starry night in the rose garden, Lily started to cry.

“Why you are crying?” Jack wanted to know.
“I am so lonely, even with you, even in my rose garden, even with all these stars twinkling their smiley little faces at me,” Lily murmured.

Instantly Jack realised that he never saw Lily so unhappy. With his absolute knowledge Jack was still a child of God and therefore lacking a sense… sense of feelings. Jack knew that he had to cry and he had to laugh, but he was just a player on Earth, nothing more. 

“I long for a child,” Lily said all of a sudden.
“I don’t understand,” Jack said in shock, but Lily was already asleep.
“Father… Help me if you can hear me, I want to live on Earth with Lily. She is mine and I am hers. But why? Why you do not let me? Why?” Jack found himself pondering around between the rose bushes and jasmine trees, not feeling what Lily always described as sweet smell of jasmines and soft petals of red roses. For Jack the garden was a frozen photo.

“Why did you leave me?” God answered.
“Because I hate closed doors,” Jack howled.
“You are behind one now….” God smiled in his absolute calmness, “find your way out.”

When the first rays of sunshine sparkled over an early morning dew of a distant rose bud, Jack knew he found his key. He picked a jasmine flower and rushed towards the glittering rose. Jack poured his invisible blood over the jasmine petals.

And there it was, a spark went from Jack’s finger to his heart and he felt butterflies in his stomach. Something started to beat inside his chest. His face started to warm up and before his eyes the whole garden was on a sudden bloom with jasmine petals snowing over the fiery roses. Jack inhaled the air. There was something there he never experienced before; the sweet scent of jasmines! For the first time he felt the rose’s soft velvety skin, when he kissed it.

“I am human,” he screamed from happiness, as he tasted the salty tear on his warm lips.

Over at the gateway to Jack’s world, a black hole disappeared forever. God was sleep again and did not see Jack unlocking the gate to Lily’s eternal happiness.

"Anahita RainStar"