Struggle - A Short Story

I wrote this a couple of years ago. I would really appreciate your opinion on it. If it seems to end abruptly, that's because I am hoping to write a second part. It's a tad bit dramatic for my taste now, but whatever...

'Struggle' - A Short Story

By: Pallavi Datta.

Red brick upon red brick, a city of smoke, almost as if drawn with sooty hands and bits of charcoal. Gray skies, broken glass-windows, and rickety three-wheelers on dirt roads. Kilometers and kilometers of wires hanging on street poles, an ugly black jungle of burning rubber and there is still no electricity in my little room.
A yellow hue illuminates the rotting paper on the desk. The sound of a scratching fountain pen is what I wait for. A thought, a memory, an incident, the exciting, the mundane, something, anything… my pen almost scratches the surface of the paper once, pregnant with black fluid, waiting to set free that one drop of ink that would perhaps paint my future.
Old jute slippers next to sour milk on the floor, a cupboard with four shirts, two pants, they are all that I own in this city.
A sudden rap on the door makes me jump out of my skin, it makes my heart flutter, makes me spill the one cup of tea I had wrangled out of the gully-tea shop on a loan. I told him that I would pay him back. And with what, I asked myself. May be the money I don’t have to pay the pan-walla for all those smokes, or may be the money I don’t have to pay the rent the landlord is asking for now.
I never realized, exactly when it was that my struggle to become a published writer turned into a futile one for survival.
Food, a roof, to sleep I must have a bed; all protocols of society dictate that one must ‘have’. Have clothes, have water, have food, have knowledge, it all really boils down to having money. I see that if I am to write today, I cannot live tomorrow because tomorrow has a cost in some rupees that must be had…
I call this, this room, these four walls, this moth eaten sheet, this tainted mirror, the foster home of my lost hopes. When they first read my work, they told me to forget about it; apparently my work had nothing to offer. I created a world full of old ideals and virtues that are bought and sold today as cheap as a bar of soap. What was it that I hung around for then? It was over as sure as it had never begun. But, can an end have no beginning?
I look at the little steel Tiffin on the bed, a lid with “Prokash” etched on it in Bengali by my mother. Inside are some sweets, her ten odd dreams for me and her prayer to kali-ma for my safety. My home, that tiny steel box is a piece of my home, and as I open it, I go back there. The sweet taste melts in my mouth and I remember now, the kitchen smells of coils and Aunchi auntie’s sweat as she wrestled with the plates the in the washing area on the floor. With the taste gone, I am dully wretched back to this room. I am defeated, the words are lost. I see only these fragmented images, as fragmented as I am. Only a shadow of who I was lurks about the corners of my mind. Just a line today, it is a color without a picture to put it in. As I sit over the desk for hours, into the putrid night, the wind blows out the candle, I can still smell the burning wick. This room is a wound; it is the essence of my entire existence, four shirts, and two pants. This room is me.
I will go back home… may be another month, then I will go back home once again. Till then I exist, perhaps they will come back to me, my words, perhaps they will come back.