Short fiction: A young man worries about his mother while fantasising about a billboard model

For the past week, it had continuously been raining. Plumbaginous clouds would float like steam in the sky and the entire city would be drenched in the raindrops floating on the gusts of wind. Beneath the heavy trees, there was a special kind of dripping sound. The leaves, laden with rain, and the water falling from the branches would create a soft, murmuring clamour.

In the evening, it would suddenly become dark. In the distance, clouds shaded with strokes of black pencil and chalk began to gather, and raindrops falling from the sky would gleam in the headlights of cars racing in illusory light. Every drenched surface seemed to shimmer the moment it caught the light. If the drizzle stopped for a while, the still winds would start blowing frantically from somewhere, people's wet clothes would start flapping and the sound of wind brushing against the windows would be heard all around.

In this stormy weather, he had to walk about four kilometres to reach the office in the evening. After walking some distance from the house there was an old bridge. Its leaking bricks were covered with moss and grass. Even with the slightest bit of rain, the road under the bridge would be filled with ankle-deep dirty water.

Water kept dripping in droplets from above. When a train passed overhead, the countless droplets stuck to the sloping roof of the bridge would stir into motion. He was passing the stray dogs hidden near the coal flame, growling at every little thing. Nearby, labourers sat in a circle after a day's work. The steam rising from the tea cups, water streaming down tin slopes and the muddy lanes of the vegetable market. In some time, he would reach the highway.

By taking this highway he would save about one kilometre. In black and white, this highway is known as “NH 14”. A new life was sprouting around the area. Vehicles would race uncontrollably. Thousands of labourers could be seen carrying bricks and preparing mortar. Their settlements were far away from the road, near a river that looked like a meandering rivulet. Amidst these labourers, dressed in muddy and patched clothes, children played carelessly, right next to the roaring and speeding vehicles.

The city was changing. Before one's eyes, that wide, desolate road started glowing with street light. Their light reflected far on the wet road. The commotion of this city was actually a part of the huge din that was taking place just two hundred kilometres away. It was a town-like city on the outskirts of one of the world's largest metropolises, with the areas submerged in soot, smoke and commotion in its sediments. If someone in a distant galaxy looked at this city through a powerful telescope, it would appear to expand and contract like a beating heart, and the vehicles crawling on the roads would look like blood coursing through veins.

This rapidly changing city was about a thousand kilometres away from his own home. He was a thousand kilometres away from his sick mother, and a thousand kilometres away from the memories of his adolescence – filled with sadness and the trying days of youth.

He was so far removed from everything that he was almost silent. Very few people had seen him speak. The newspaper office where he worked was located in the industrial area on the outskirts of the city. The comings and goings of its employees were duly logged in a register. He would pass by uniformed guards and heavy rolls of paper covered with tarpaulins, climbing the stairs to a warehouse-like hall, the corners of which were stained with betel juice. Upstairs, in large partitioned rooms, computers were lined up, their keyboards and screens dull and cluttered with months-old dust.

As soon as he reached his seat, he would tear open the khaki envelopes, arrange the papers by folding them in the stand, and fix his eyes on the black and blue ink. A dozen keyboards kept rattling under the white light of the tubelight. His work would end after midnight. He often chose to walk home, taking a different route. Occasionally, a colleague would drop him off on his two-wheeler at the turn of the highway.

Those were the early days of the monsoon. Some say that this year’s rainfall has been good. Indeed!

The raindrops collided with each other, taking the form of very fine spray that floated in the strong wind, almost like steam. One such evening, when the clouds were floating very low in the sky like smoke and the winds were stormy, he saw that gigantic hoarding while shivering under the tree. He was stunned. Such a big hoarding had never been put up in the city before. It was at a spot where the highway intersected with another road. The headlights of the speeding vehicles created hundreds of reflections on the hoarding. There was something in that huge advertisement that made him feel completely dwarfed. It was a tall billboard for a mobile company. Most of it was blank. On the left side, a girl stood in a particular pose, smiling and looking straight ahead. In proportion to the massive hoarding, the girl standing in one corner appeared to be the actual size of a real young woman. He was astonished. She was, in fact, looking directly at him with a smile.

That day, he was running a slight fever. Waves of pain kept rising in his back, but to dismiss his doubt, he cautiously crossed the road. In the flickering white light of the petromax, he bought roasted chickpeas and turned back to look at the hoarding. The girl was still staring at him, without blinking. He wandered around the junction of three roads, amidst the scattered crowd, auto-rickshaws, horse carriages, and flustered people rushing towards the countryside. And he became certain. Her eyes were following him.

Now, there was more dauntlessness in the way the girl looked at him. Her entire presence radiated heat. A mild flame was slowly-slowly smoldering behind her eyes. Amidst her wavy hair, her cheeks glowed with a fiery radiance. Even her smile had a sultriness. It was a beauty akin to fire – forbidden, dangerous, and sweltering – mysterious like a forest fire. Staring at it for long felt as if the fire was spreading, the hoarding was burning, and its pillars glowed red with flames.

That night, those eyes followed him for a very long time. Was this some strange game of destiny? He spent many nights thinking about the girl in the advertisement. It was a truth that only he knew. Every time he passed by, the girl in the advertisement would be looking straight at him. He would glance around secretively. Everyone else would be busy with their own tasks, and she would continue to look at him – without hesitation, no beating around the bush.

Could it be that the dream he had been seeing since childhood was coming true? After all, there must be a world beyond this pain-filled life. Where people are truly as happy as they should be – an ideal life. In just a few days, the girl in the advertisement had entered his dreams. There were thousands of desires within those dreams he had seen since childhood. Those desires took birth during the long, scorching afternoons in the drowsy, monotonous days of the town, back when he was thirteen. Only two years had passed since his arrival in the town.

Two years since father’s death. He had been a clerk in a government department. Mother returned with him to the ancestral house that had been closed for years, with termite-infested wooden beams on the ceiling. Fine sawdust, leftover from the woodcutting at the neighbour's sawmill, would arrive. Mother would use that sawdust to fill the stove and cook meals. The pile of sawdust under the stairs always carried the fresh aroma of freshly cut wood.

His mother was an illiterate, quiet, and somewhat disoriented woman. Whenever she went to the court to collect her pension, she would place her thumb in the wrong spot and face scolding, sometimes from the clerk, sometimes from the peon. As soon as she received the money, she would hand it over to him and they would count it while passing through the corridor outside, crowded with lawyers and clients.

“Ma is now very far away – a thousand kilometres away!” he thought as he straightened his back at four in the morning. The rain, that had paused for an hour or two, suddenly picked up again, and the tin roof began to rattle. At three in the morning, when he would descend the stairs after finishing work, the noise from the printing press would drown out everything.

These days, he always takes the highway to return home, where the girl in the advertisement is waiting for him. Exactly the same way she had been the previous night, when he’d left. Her eyes were becoming more seductive by the day. Amidst the endless clattering of the keyboard under the harsh white light of the tubelight, his colleagues probably didn’t notice the changes in him during those days.

In that entire hall, suddenly the continuous clattering sound of one keyboard would stop. He would stare at the white Devanagari letters that appeared on the black MS-DOS screen for a long time, and sometimes he would start smiling. And with that, perhaps, out of the hundreds of people passing by on the highway within a minute, none would realise that the smile of that young girl on the billboard, drenched in the heavy rain, was also becoming deeper. Only he could recognise the changing smile of the girl in the advertisement, and the gleam in her eyes.

In the ancestral house where he’d lived with his mother, there was a cupboard with intricately toreutic doors, filled with old magazines. Magazines from 1958 to 1974 – their pages had turned yellow, and each magazine emitted a distinct fragrance of old paper. This was the collection of his uncle, who was much older than his father.

After returning home, he would often dust off those magazines and sit down with them. He found the advertisements most fascinating in those magazines. Every time he opened them, an inimitable world unfolded before him. There would be healthy little kids smiling in them. Slightly older kids always included a brother and a sister. The sister would always wear a floral-printed frock and had two braids. These children were always accompanied by their parents. Elderly grandfathers or maternal grandfathers would always be seen reading newspapers on chairs, while cheerful old women would sew or knit sweaters. Even in these old magazines, film actresses would attribute their beauty to a special soap. Their pictures were black and white.

Children’s magazines after 1962 often featured candy advertisements, alongside poems challenging China. Candy tins, both square and round, bore images of young women with British-style haircuts and frocks, or characters resembling a heroine from a Thomas Hardy novel. He’d get immersed in these advertisements for the entire day.

Since childhood, he frequently had fevers. During those fevers, those images would linger in his consciousness until he fell asleep. At night, when his mother would mumble something for a long time while holding the headrest of her bed before going to sleep, he would lie beside her, creating and erasing new images on the ceiling beams with the help of those advertisements. He often imagined himself grown up, wearing a printed shirt and bell-bottoms, riding a motorcycle, like the young man he had seen in a suiting and shirting advertisement. He would always see his Maa holding the aarti thaal near the temple in the house. She would smile and bless him – she had probably emerged out of some ghee advertisement.

The fresh, new magazines borrowed from the neighbour’s house were adding new colours to his dreams. Occasionally, on their glossy, colourful pages, there was a young woman wrapped in a towel, with much of her thighs exposed. Or the model peeking from behind the door in the geyser advertisement, whose shoulders and half of the waist were completely naked. He would gaze at these images for a long time, with an unexpressed thrill – his throat would go dry.

Many years ago, when he was travelling by train across Bihar with his father, while lying alone on the upper berth, flipping through a film magazine, he was stunned to see a full-page image of a woman in a bikini. He kept looking at her for a long time with a racing heartbeat. That day too, his throat had become dry in the same way. For the first time, he realised how many curves and contours a woman’s body could have.

The years passed by. Along with changing advertisements, his dreams also kept changing. Now, these advertisements no longer featured carefree young men and women riding Hero cycles, with butterflies of love fluttering around them. Instead, they were replaced by muscular young men in jeans, who were enthusiasts of adventurous journeys. They had bikes and sports shoes. In their rooms hung guitars, and their tables were scattered with binoculars, compasses, and road maps. In the world of advertisements, young women no longer admired modest attitudes and neatly worn clothes; they were now infatuated with well-built bodies and masculine styles.

As he grew older, his physique, face and entire personality were disappointingly different from the world of advertisements. He was growing up as a thin, sunken-eyed man lacking self-confidence. The world around him was becoming even more distorted. His mother had grown old and her anxiety had now turned into a self-absorbed indifference. The number of fat, muddy rats were increasing from somewhere inside the house. They had also started gnawing magazines by entering the carved cupboard every now and then.

After a long period of unemployment, Trika pills, and his mother’s despondency, he left his home to take up a job a few hundred kilometres away, close to the sprawling, cancerous metropolis. His maternal uncle had arranged the job for him. Here, he could no longer read magazines, but the world of advertisements was no longer confined to paper. Massive billboards bathed in milky light were rapidly spreading throughout the city. Sometimes, when he saw a new billboard, he would stare at it for a long time.

On television, too, he always liked watching advertisements more than the programs. Whether it was carefree youngsters drinking cold drinks, hands tying a necktie, playing tennis in a watch ad, or newlyweds joking on the pretext of soap, aromatic spices or condoms –he watched them all with keen interest. When doors opened in paint advertisements, and the camera moved forward with children running through the house, a shiver would run through his entire body.

All the happy and prosperous human images he had seen in advertisements since childhood would resurface as nostalgia. It felt as though there was a hidden secret in the past – something lost forever and never to be found again. He was searching for that other world. That was the truth. In that world, there was discipline; no one was bad. Everyone respected one another, everyone was happy, everyone believed in living life fully, everyone lived in the present. Thinking about it, his heart would grow heavy. Advertisements always made him sad, and slowly-slowly, his mother’s wrinkled face would surface in his mind.

Dinesh Shrinet is a writer, journalist, and editor. His published books include Pashchim aur Cinema (2012), Neend Kam, Khwab Jyada (2023), Shelf Mein Farishtey (2023), and Vijyaapan Wali Ladki (2025). As the Editor of The Economic Times Languages with nearly 24 years of experience in print and online journalism, he writes on economic development, economic policy, geopolitics, environment, industry, and startups.

Mayank Jain Parichha is a Hindi writer, essayist, screenwriter, and translator. Over the years, his work has been featured in several national and international publications, including Patriot, Outlook, Newslaundry, The Sunday Guardian, Al-Jazeera, Hindwi, and Asia Democracy Chronicles. His debut Hindi short story collection, Nietzsche ki Kutai, is scheduled to be published in 2025 by Unbound Scripts.

Excerpted with permission from ‘The Girl in the Advertisement’, by Dinesh Shrinet, translated from the Hindi by Mayank Jain Parichha, in The City: An Anthology of New Indian Writing, Hammock Magazine.