By Izaan Hasan
Q. Write
the opening to a short story called "Fat". In your writing you should try to create a sense of mood and character.
He burst through the door, all four hundred and fifty pounds
of him. He scanned the room and its occupants, staring each one of them down to
the ground
“Who ate my chocolate?!” he screamed.
Instantly, thirty accusing fingers sprung into life and
pointed in the direction of a skinny twelve year old named Wong Ding Chi .The
scrawny child started quaking in his tattered boots, shaking so fiercely that
he fell down from his chair. In any other classroom, the children would have
burst out laughing, but not this classroom. Not when the Supreme Leader’s son
was in the room, that too all four hundred and fifty pounds of him.
“Give me back my chocolate!” the over-sized watermelon of a
child shouted.
“ I . . . I . . . I doesn’t gots its,” Wong Ding Chi
blurted, fumbling with his words. The colour had drained from his skin .He had
heard stories, stories of how the “great fat-one” would eat servants whole if
they did not please him. Wong Ding Chi did not want to be eaten alive.
“You don’t have it, eh? We’ll just see about that. Guards! ”
The word had barely left the child’s mouth when two
lanky, crew-cut uniformed men burst into the room. Their faces showed no
emotion, but they did tell a story , a story of war, of hardship, of sacrifice
and of separation.
“Take him away! Strip him down to his underwear if you
have to! I want that chocolate! “
The guards willfully obliged, dragging the wailing bag of
bones outside. The teacher stood aghast. He was helpless. He could do nothing
to save his star student who had once again become the victim of the class’s
jealousy.
A tear trickled down her left cheek. She wanted to do
something, to speak out, but she was powerless. She knew better than to
interfere in what had now become ‘a matter of the state.’
As a child, the teacher had never seen, much less tasted
a chocolate so she had no idea what the fuss was about. She sat down on her
chair with her head in her hands, whimpering softly, hiding her face from the
rest of the classroom.
The wails of Wong Ding Chi echoed throughout the school’s
corridors. No one could save him now. The students sat motionless, some cried,
some were shell-shocked at the events that had just unfolded, some were having
guilt pangs about pointing towards Wong Ding, others were trying to leave the
horrendous episode behind and move on. No use crying over spilt milk.
When the school children came out to recess, they saw a
bony child dangling by his underwear from a flag-post where the Korean flag was
fluttering just minutes ago.
At the base of this flag-post stood two guards, ever-vigilant
and ever-ready. Between these two men was a bench on which a child the size of
a mini-truck sat. The child was happily munching away at a bar of chocolate
that he held in his bucket-sized hands. Kim Jong Un was happy, all four hundred
and fifty pounds of him.
Twenty-five years and a loss of two hundred pounds later,
Kim Jong Un stood waving to his people from his bedroom’s balcony. His father
had died, Kim Jong the second was now the new Supreme Leader of the Communist
Republic of North Korea. His old man had taken far too long to die. But power
was finally his. It had had to happen eventually.
“You called, your Lordship?” inquired the defense minister.
“Ah yes, Defense Minister. I was wondering last night,
Father spent all his life building up the country’s nuclear arsenal. Why not
use it, let’s say, against our lovely neighbours , the South Koreans perhaps? “
“A . . . as . . . as you wish, your Supreme Lordship.”
“Excellent. Begin the assault next Tuesday. Not on Monday.
Mondays are always such unlucky days .But first things first. Could you hand me
that chocolate that’s on the dresser? “
