A Villain’s Narrative
When the weekly mail arrived yesterday from Blogchatter’s Suchita, my imagination was tickled. Below is the prompt for the week’s blog hop which was what caught my fancy. I wrote back to clarify whether a story was required or a narrative about the intended story. Suchita responded promptly: “You can interpret the prompt any way you like….” So I take this liberty because a villain of this sort cannot be confined to a short story. The most frightening villains are not the ones who scream hatred from balconies. They are the ones who speak rhetorically and emotively on peace, order, unity, discipline, dharma, patriotism… They do not think they are destroying freedom; they believe freedom itself is the disease. My epic would have a villain as the King of a big nation, the largest democracy in the world maybe. He is an apparently benign villain. A king who is intelligent and crafty. The roots of his villainy lie in his traumatic childhood which was marked by poverty and hardships. T...
