The Ink That Vanished

Rudra Ahuja

 Chapter 1: The Pen in the Attic

It was the last stall at the farthest corner of Daryaganj Sunday Book Bazaar—the kind of place where stories go to retire. Beneath yellowing tarpaulin sheets and towers of old files, Neil Das spotted a flicker of brass.

He had walked this market a hundred times before. But this morning, the damp October air had pulled him toward the stall like a tug on a forgotten thread.

A wrinkled shopkeeper sat cross-legged amidst dusty encyclopedias and cracked leather briefcases. Neil’s eyes drifted past the usual—old college yearbooks, British-era maps, a few dog-eared Hardy Boys—and landed on a wooden box half-buried in a pile of National Geographics.

The box opened with a click that felt too crisp for something so old.

Inside, resting like a secret, was a fountain pen—brass-trimmed, matte black, heavy in the hand. An inscription ran along the barrel in faint, swirling letters: “Scribo ergo sum non est.”

Neil’s Latin was rusty, but he caught enough: I write, therefore… I am not?

“How much for this?” Neil asked, brushing off cobwebs from the box.

The shopkeeper looked up for the first time, his eyes an unsettling cloudy grey. “It’s not for sale,” he said flatly.

Neil blinked. “But it’s here.”

“Because it keeps coming back.”

Something about the way he said it sent a chill through Neil’s fingertips. But the pen felt good. It felt… final.

“I’ll give you 500.”

The man shrugged. “It’s your fate.”

Neil paid in cash and didn’t ask for change. He didn’t even wait for a paper bag. He dropped the pen into his satchel and walked back toward the Old Delhi metro station, half-dreaming of a story that might finally get him noticed.

By the time he reached home, his phone had six new rejection emails.

Neil lived alone in a crumbling Lajpat Nagar flat with cracked ceilings and echoes that didn’t belong to him. A desk sat under the window—once his father’s study table, now covered in coffee stains and unfinished manuscripts.

He took out a fresh notebook, uncapped the pen, and wrote:

“The apartment smelled of rain, loneliness, and ambition.”

He paused. The ink was thick, black, and smooth. But the letters… they were fading.

Within seconds, the entire line disappeared from the page. Neil blinked, flipped the page, and tried again.

“A writer stared at a blank page, unsure if the blankness stared back.”

Again, the words vanished like invisible ink under heat.

He reached for another pen and scribbled beside it—nothing. Just blank white space where a sentence should have been.

Was the pen defective? A gimmick?

Frustrated but intrigued, Neil tried something different.

“There is no Hanuman Mandir at Lajpat Nagar signal anymore.”

He chuckled to himself. He passed by that landmark every day. No way anything would—wait.

The next morning, while heading to the metro, Neil stopped cold.

There was no temple.

The familiar clang of bells, the orange marigold garlands, the sadhu with mirrored sunglasses—all gone. Even the iron railing where people tied red threads had vanished.

He stood at the crossing, stunned, watching strangers walk past without confusion. Like it had never been there.

Back in his flat, Neil stared at the pen on his desk. It looked back, like a cat that had just brought in its first kill.

It wasn’t defective.

It wasn’t a gimmick.

It was erasure.

And it had begun.

Chapter 2: Ink Without a Trace

Neil didn’t sleep that night.

He sat on his bed, the pen on the desk across the room like a ticking bomb. He replayed the moment he wrote about the Hanuman Mandir, over and over. He double-checked old photos on his phone. In one of them—clicked a month ago—he stood in front of the temple, grinning with a kulfi in hand.

The photo was still there.

But when he zoomed in, the background was just a busy road. No temple. No bells. No crowd.

He opened Google Maps. Searched Hanuman Mandir, Lajpat Nagar. Nothing.

Not “permanently closed.” Not “under renovation.”

Nothing.

Heart racing, Neil searched his old chat history with Shruti, an ex who had once scolded him for making her wait too long at the same temple. That conversation was still there—but the location tag was missing.

It wasn’t just erased from space. It was erased from memory.

Everyone’s, except his.

Neil walked to the mirror and stared at himself for a long time. His beard was patchy, his eyes bloodshot, his shoulders hunched under months of rejection and self-doubt. But for the first time in years, he felt something cut through the fog: awe. And fear.

By morning, curiosity had outpaced panic.

He made tea, opened his journal, and uncapped the pen.

He wrote cautiously this time:

“The paan shop under my building has vanished.”

Then he looked out of the window.

Where there had always been a paanwala named Rakesh, leaning against his blue cart and gossiping with auto drivers, there was now just a wet patch of concrete. The wall behind was blank. Not even the usual red stains.

Neil stumbled back from the window.

He wrote again, testing the limits:

“In 2016, it never rained in Delhi.”

And then—he checked the Weather Archive on a website. All references to the July 2016 downpours were gone. News articles now mentioned an unusually dry monsoon. His own blogpost from that year—where he’d written a poetic piece about wading through puddles near Lodhi Garden—was empty. Just a blank screen with a title and date.

He tried to scream, but nothing came out.

The pen wasn’t just altering the present.

It rewrote the past.

Later that afternoon, Neil visited his friend Zafar, a struggling filmmaker who didn’t believe in much except old Monk rum and conspiracy theories.

They sat on Zafar’s terrace in Nizamuddin, chain-smoking beedis and debating whether history could be a shared hallucination.

“Suppose,” Neil began carefully, “you found something that could…edit the world.”

Zafar laughed. “Like a God-level CTRL+Z?”

“No. Not undo. More like…Delete Forever.”

Zafar grinned. “Bro, you’ve been reading too much Murakami.”

Neil didn’t push further.

He walked back home, the weight of the pen heavier in his bag than in his hand.

That night, he wrote a small detail:

“The crack on my ceiling has disappeared.”

And just like that, it did. The ugly water stain above his bed was gone. The peeling paint was now smooth.

He collapsed into bed and stared at the ceiling like it was the sky.

What was this thing?

A gift?

A curse?

Or just a mirror to his own madness?

The city outside roared with indifference. Metro trains screeched. Dogs barked. Lajpat Nagar carried on as if temples had never existed.

Neil lay still, the pen on his bedside table, pulsing with potential.

He had questions now.

Terrible, tempting questions.

What if he wrote about people?

Chapter 3: Testing the Truth

Neil stared at his journal as if it might bite him.

People. The word echoed in his head like a bell in an abandoned temple—ironic, considering he’d already made a temple disappear.

He told himself he wouldn’t. That this thing, this cursed pen, should never be used on a human being. That he wasn’t a monster.

But obsession is a whisper that grows louder at night.

So he chose someone harmless. Someone insignificant. A man he didn’t even know by name—just an old beggar who sat at the same corner near the Nehru Place metro station every evening, muttering to himself and smiling at pigeons.

He didn’t even have to write a full sentence.

“The man who sat at Nehru Place corner with a red shawl no longer exists.”

It vanished off the page.

Neil closed the journal and walked straight to the metro. Down the escalators. Through the gates. Across the road where the beggar usually sat.

Nothing.

Just an empty corner and a half-broken pipe leaking water.

Even the pigeons were gone.

He asked the flower seller next to the chai stall, “The old man with the shawl? Seen him today?”

“What old man?” she replied without looking up.

It hit Neil then. No one remembered. Again.

And yet, the world didn’t fall apart. Traffic didn’t stop. Earth didn’t crack open.

The world moved on.

Neil didn’t.

He spent the next two days in a fog, half-terrified, half-hungry to know more. He wrote small things. Made a street dog disappear. A cracked pavement. The nasty taste in his tap water.

It worked every time.

He kept a separate logbook: a list of everything he’d erased. Like a god keeping inventory.

But the real test came when he opened his email.

There it was—yet another rejection. The editor at Delhi Review Weekly, a man named Mr. Udayan Bose, had replied with a smirking dismissal: “Lack of originality. Try not to be another R.K. Narayan in a discount jacket.”

Neil didn’t even hesitate.

“Udayan Bose was never born.”

And the ink shimmered, disappeared.

The next day, Neil searched for him online. Nothing.

He looked through previous rejections. The one from Delhi Review Weekly was now signed by a different person.

He went further. Found an old YouTube panel discussion on Indian writing in English where Bose had been a guest.

The video now featured three speakers instead of four.

The camera occasionally flicked to an empty chair.

Neil didn’t feel triumphant.

He felt… unmoored.

It was one thing to erase objects. Even stray dogs. But to delete a man? From birth?

And what if—what if one day he woke up and found himself erased? Would he remember he ever existed?

Late that night, Neil tried writing his own name in the notebook.

“Neil Das was never—”

But the ink froze.

The pen jerked in his hand. Then bled a line of ink straight across the page—dark, angry, defiant.

He dropped it like it was hot iron.

And there it was again.

The same feeling he’d had in the bookshop when he first touched the pen.

Not a tool.

Not a curse.

But something alive.

Something that chose what to erase. And what not to.

Neil didn’t sleep. He sat at his desk, notebook open, pen sealed in the wooden box.

But even closed, it seemed to breathe.

Like it was waiting for him to write something else.

Or someone.

Chapter 4: When Names Fade

Neil didn’t touch the pen for three days.

He left it in the wooden box on the top shelf of his closet and avoided that side of the room altogether. But like an old song that creeps back into your mind when you least expect it, the thought of the pen hummed beneath everything—when he made coffee, when he brushed his teeth, even when he looked at strangers and wondered what forgetting them would feel like.

But obsession is patient.

On the fourth day, Neil got an email from Shruti.

Subject: You okay?

Body:
Hey.
Weird question—were we ever at a Hanuman temple together? I had the strangest dream and then couldn’t find anything about it online. Anyway. Hope you’re doing well.
—S.

His heart sank.

She was remembering. Not fully, but faintly.

A crack in the silence.

And that terrified him more than anything.

Was the pen’s effect…reversible? Could memories bleed back in?

He opened the closet.

The box sat there, ordinary and expectant.

He didn’t even realize when he’d opened it, when he’d sat down at the desk, when the nib touched paper.

His hands moved as if not his own.

“Shruti Sinha never met Neil Das.”

The words glowed faintly, then vanished.

He felt the world around him shift, like a quiet rearrangement of furniture in the dark.

Moments later, his inbox refreshed.

The email disappeared.

His phone contacts scrolled past S.

Shruti was gone.

He checked his gallery. Their photos together—Gulmarg trip, her birthday at Hauz Khas, that awful dinner with her parents—deleted.

No. Not deleted. Never taken.

He looked into the mirror and said her name out loud. It felt like biting into fog.

He wanted to throw up.

He walked out of the flat, down into the daylight, and tried to breathe. The market bustled like always—fruit sellers, honking rickshaws, posters for coaching centers.

Only one thing had changed: he was now completely alone.

No one would ask if he was okay.

No one would ever remember that they had.

That night, Neil tried to write again. Not with the vanishing pen, but with a ballpoint. He wrote three short stories in a single sitting. All terrible. All forced. The words fell flat on the page like broken promises.

Without Shruti, the ache inside him had no edge. Just a dull, spreading silence.

He stared at the pen lying beside the lamp.

“You’re not a pen,” he whispered.

No response, of course.

But the silence in the room thickened.

He went to bed and dreamed of people with blurred faces, standing in front of blank pages, screaming without sound. In the dream, the pen sat on a throne made of bones, scribbling names into darkness.

The next morning, Neil opened his logbook.

Vanished:

• Hanuman Mandir
• Paanwala Rakesh
• July 2016 Rain
• Editor Udayan Bose
• Shruti Sinha

He underlined the last name, hands trembling.

And then, just below, he added one more line:

“I think it’s remembering what it erases.”

Chapter 5: The Ink That Cries

Neil woke to find the pen had moved.

He hadn’t touched it the night before—he was certain—but there it was now, lying uncapped on the center of his desk, a long line of ink trailing across the page of his logbook. It wasn’t just spilled ink. It formed a word.

“Why?”

He stumbled back, knocking over his chair.

The room was locked from the inside.

The windows shut.

No one could’ve entered.

The pen sat innocently, its nib dry, like it hadn’t done anything at all.

He closed the notebook slowly. Hands shaking.

He wanted to run. But where?

To whom would he explain this? That his pen could erase people? Places? Rain? That it now asked questions?

Instead, he did the one thing he thought might make sense: he visited his parents’ old house in Saket.

They had died in a car crash when he was twenty-two. He hadn’t been back since.

The gate still creaked.

The mango tree in the courtyard had grown wild.

He stood in front of the locked door and whispered, “Would you remember me if I wrote you out?”

Back home, that night, something twisted inside him.

What if the pen was lying?

What if it hadn’t just erased Shruti? Or the editor? What if it had touched even more? Things he never meant to forget.

He yanked the pen out of its box, flipped open his journal, and scrawled:

“My parents died in a car crash on October 17, 2016.”

The ink shimmered, then slowly pulled itself into a tear-shaped blot.

Neil felt dizzy.

He checked his old medical records. The emergency contact section listed his parents’ names.

He called their old landline.

Someone answered.

“Hello?”

It was a man’s voice. Calm. Familiar.

“Dad?” Neil whispered.

A pause. “Yes? Who’s this?”

Neil dropped the phone.

He rushed to the window, struggling to breathe.

They were back.

Alive.

And yet, when he searched his own memories—flashes of their funeral, the condolences, the smell of hospital antiseptic—it all felt… distant. Disconnected. Like watching someone else’s sorrow.

Had he written their deaths into existence years ago?

Had he accidentally erased his own parents?

He sat down and looked at the pen.

It lay still, but something about the way it rested felt off—as if recoiling from its own ink.

And then, with a mindless twitch, Neil flipped back to the earlier page—the one where the ink had written “Why?”

Below it now was a new line, scrawled in thinner, paler ink:

“You wrote them first.”

He stood still for what felt like an hour.

The room seemed colder.

Was the pen trying to show him something?

Or accuse him?

Or worse… was it remembering him?

He locked the pen in its wooden box again, taped the lid shut, and shoved it under his bed.

Then he deleted his logbook. Burned the notebooks. Cleaned the desk.

He tried, for one week, to go back to normal.

He even started a new short story with an ordinary pen.

But the words came out flat.

Forced.

Dead.

And every time he wrote a new name, he hesitated—not because he feared deletion, but because he feared recognition.

Because what if someone out there remembered being erased?

What if they were waiting?

Chapter 6: The Archive of Absence

Neil took the first train to Kolkata without telling anyone. Not that there was anyone left to tell.

The pen was in his bag, still taped in its box. He hadn’t touched it in days, but he could feel its weight in his backpack like a pulse—steady, waiting.

His destination was the National Library of India, a place he remembered visiting once as a child. But this time, he wasn’t looking for books. He was looking for answers.

The kind that aren’t found in indexes.

The reading room smelled of old paper and dust, like a vault of dead thoughts. He approached the archive desk and asked, carefully, “Do you have any records about—unusual objects? Like cursed books or… writing instruments?”

The librarian, a spectacled woman in her sixties, gave him a look. Not dismissive. Curious.

She didn’t speak for a moment, then said softly, “Ask for Sub-Basement Three. Show this.”

She handed him a faded blue card with a seal he didn’t recognize. It simply read:

ARCHIVE OF ABSENCE – LEVEL R

Neil descended stairs that didn’t look like they’d been used in years. The corridor was narrow, walls lined with sealed glass cases. Each case held something strange—a burnt letter, a shattered mirror, a watch with no hands, a chessboard missing its white queen.

At the end of the hall was a heavy iron door.

He pushed it open.

Inside, the air was cold. The shelves were labelled not by subject, but by verbs: Forgotten, Unwritten, Erased, Lost.

In one corner, a file lay open under a glass dome.

Case File 143B: The Vanishing Ink Phenomenon.

Neil’s breath caught.

He read:

“Between 1927 and 1999, at least six verified instances of ‘vanishing pens’ have been recorded across Europe, Asia, and North America. The pens differ in appearance but share one trait: they erase written reality. Victims include towns, people, languages, even entire family lineages. Most writers using these instruments either disappeared or died under mysterious circumstances.”

One black-and-white photograph caught Neil’s eye. A man standing before a fireplace, pen in hand, face blurred.

The caption read:

“Adrian Vallon, last known possessor of the Paris pen. Declared non-existent, 1963.”

Non-existent.

Neil’s knees went weak.

He turned the page.

Another entry. An Indian one.

“1942, Banaras. A scholar writes out his grief after his wife’s death. She vanishes—not just physically but from all official records, photographs, and public memory. He burns his manuscripts in the Ganga, then vanishes himself. Locals say his pen wrote on water before sinking.”

And then, at the bottom of the page, in a different font:

“Caution: These pens are not merely tools. They evolve. They remember. They resist destruction. Do not attempt to outwrite them.”

Neil backed away from the file.

The room seemed to close in on him.

He understood now—his pen was not unique.

It was part of a pattern.

A cycle.

A curse with a signature.

And he had become the next chapter.

He left the library without checking out a single book.

Outside, the Kolkata sun beat down hard, but he shivered.

He wanted to throw the pen into the Hooghly. Burn it. Bury it.

But deep inside, he knew it wouldn’t end it.

Not really.

Because the pen was not just in his bag.

It was now in him.

A story half-written. And getting bolder.

Chapter 7: Writing Himself Away

The train ride back to Delhi was a blur.

Neil didn’t sleep. He didn’t read. He barely blinked. He sat by the window with the pen’s box clutched in his lap, sealed tight but whispering through the cardboard and tape.

He felt like he was carrying a sleeping serpent.

By the time he returned to his flat, he was hollow. His footsteps echoed louder. Even his reflection in the mirror looked slightly out of sync. There was a half-second lag, like his body remembered something his face did not.

The line from the Archive haunted him: Do not attempt to outwrite them.

But Neil had always been stubborn. And tired.

Tired of watching everything he loved disappear.

He lit a candle.

Sat at his desk.

And opened the box.

The pen gleamed faintly, nib sharp as guilt.

He turned to a fresh page in his journal—one of the last—and wrote:

“Neil Das was never born.”

Nothing happened.

The ink refused to vanish.

He tried again, slower:

“There never lived a man named Neil Das in Delhi or anywhere else.”

Still nothing.

The pen dragged, resisted, and then began leaking ink wildly—long trails of black spilling across the paper, staining his fingers, bleeding into the wood of the desk.

And then, it wrote on its own:

“Not yours to erase.”

Neil dropped the pen.

Backed away.

The letters formed a spiral on the page, looping inwards like a whirlpool.

Then, slowly, new words appeared, scrawled in that thin, unnatural handwriting:

“You are not the author. You are the story.”

Neil staggered, breath caught in his throat.

Was that it? Was he a creation? A narrative formed by someone else? Was he just a page in a book the pen had once written—and now refused to let go?

His mind reeled.

If he couldn’t erase himself, maybe he could erase the pen.

He grabbed a matchbox, set the corner of the journal aflame, and threw the pen into the fire.

The flame hissed.

Then exploded.

But not outward—inward.

In a single pulse, the fire vanished.

The paper was untouched.

The pen sat in the middle of the desk, cleaner than ever.

Alive.

Defiant.

And then—it wrote again.

“Write something better.”

Neil stared.

The rage that had twisted him into a lonely god now unraveled.

He was not in control.

He never had been.

The pen had never been a gift.

It was a dare.

He opened the journal, slowly, and began to write—not deletions, not corrections, but a story.

A boy with a lisp who loved to read out loud.

A street full of forgotten booksellers.

A girl named Shruti who loved broken things and fixed them without asking.

And as he wrote, something inside him softened.

He didn’t know if he was healing or simply surrendering.

But for the first time in weeks, the pen didn’t resist.

It wrote.

And didn’t vanish.

Chapter 8: The Final Rewrite

Neil wrote for hours. Not to erase, not to punish, but to remember.

Every sentence he once deleted found its way back in a new form. The café Shruti loved—the one he had unwritten in a fit of shame—reappeared on the page, this time with crooked fairy lights and the smell of cinnamon in the air. The paanwala Rakesh came back too, with a red transistor blaring old Kishore Kumar songs and a laugh that interrupted conversations.

He kept writing.

Notebooks filled up.

Ink flowed, but didn’t disappear.

For the first time, the pen behaved like a pen. Ordinary. Silent.

He didn’t know if the things he was writing would return in reality. If the temple at Lajpat Nagar would reappear, if his parents would remember the alternate version of history. But the silence inside him was changing—less hollow now, more like still water.

But then, just before dawn, he felt it.

The pen moved.

Not in his hand. On its own.

It wrote three words in the margin of his last page:

“You are free.”

Then it stopped.

And cracked.

A fine line split the barrel down its spine.

Neil stared.

Tried to write.

But the nib was dry.

The pen had used itself up.

He let it fall to the desk, quietly.

Later that morning, he stepped out for the first time in days. The sun was sharp, the city too bright—but something had shifted.

At the metro station, a familiar face caught his eye.

A girl at the vending machine, fumbling with coins.

It was her.

Shruti.

She looked… unchanged. But distant, like someone from a childhood photo.

She turned, their eyes met.

A pause.

And then, a tiny smile.

Faint. Confused. But there.

She walked away before he could speak.

Neil didn’t follow.

He just stood there, heart racing, knowing some memories cannot be rewritten—but they can return in pieces.

He returned home and did what he hadn’t done in months.

He submitted a new manuscript.

Title: The Ink That Vanished

Genre: Uncategorizable.

Summary: A story about memory, loss, guilt, and the seductive power of control.

He didn’t care if it got published.

He had finally written it.

And this time, it stayed.

 

THE END