Serendipity - My entry for the Get Published Contest

‘Serendipity’ is a lovely word. It creates hope where none exists.

My story is about two people- both in their late twenties. One had been in a relationship that had turned sour and the other had been in love that never got reciprocated. Both were fast approaching what we call the perfect ‘marriageable’ age in India. Extremely bored of their mundane city lives, they decided to give ‘it’ a try once.

One loved Electronic music; the other was a hardcore Bollywood fan. One never missed an opportunity to shake his booty; the other literally froze on a dance floor. One liked his things littered all over the place; the other was a cleanliness freak. There was absolutely nothing in common, or so they thought.

People say that love always happens…it can never be planned. But I feel ‘you’ can make it happen! For those of us who have grown up reading Mills & Boons and wonder why can’t it happen to them... this is a story to tell them that it can happen except for the fact that your Prince Charming might not come riding on a white horse but in a dishevelled state after a hard day’s work in office.  Are you ready to accept him then???

This is the story of how I fell in love with the person whom I call my ‘husband’ today- my bestest friend, my ‘agony uncle’, my ‘partner-in-crime’ and my companion for life !!!

"This is my entry for the HarperCollins–IndiBlogger Get Published contest, which is run with inputs from Yashodhara Lal and HarperCollins India."

The poet within me is lost…..

The poet within me is lost
He is groping for words
Fumbling at each doorstep
Knocking, asking for help…
Lost in a dark alley
Where what he can hear is him, only him!

My muse has left me and gone
Like the mistress who leaves her lover’s home
Ignored,neglected…her love defeated
Perhaps never to return again.

What is left is just a crumbling house
Falling apart into pieces
I stand in waiting for my muse
To help me build my castle again!

The Last Meeting

Those same lanes which she had crossed for four years looked so unfamiliar now. The tea shack had given way to a swanky restaurant. Outside was a red and white board listing all delicacies available- South Indian, North Indian, Fresh Fruit Juices, Continental- you name it and you can have it. The simple omelette-bun which she had enjoyed during her college days was given amiss though. The plastic stools had been removed and in its place were wooden tables and chairs, neatly arranged in groups of two and four.

Nilima sat on one of these chairs and waited for Ashok to come. None of them knew why they had chosen this place to meet yet this was the place which came to their mind when they had decided to meet.

Nilima and Ashok were classmates. During the four years they were together they had moved on from being mere acquaintances to friends to lovers to live-in partners and to acquaintances again. They never knew how they fell in love with each other and how they fell out of it. They were so different in their personalities- Nilima was outgoing , extrovert, a sexy girl while Ashok was the exact opposite of her- unassuming, introvert and ‘always lost in his own thoughts’ types. When they had announced that they were seeing each other, none of their friends could believe it the first time. Moreover when they had decided to move in together, their friends were more surprised than happy.

From sharing assignments to sharing beds, they had come a long way…and it was on that shared bed itself that Nilima had slept with Aakash nights after nights while Ashok spent his nights with Radhika. Neither of them knew what the other was doing. Each thought that he was the guilty one. Burdened by a guilt conscious they stopped seeing each other eye to eye until one fine day they decided to move out of each others’ lives. There were no questions to be asked, no answers expected, no matters to be sorted between the two of them.

Nilima went abroad to pursue her passion for photography while Ashok stayed back in Delhi and made a career out of advertising. No one knew what happened to the other. There were so many people entering and exiting their lives that the memory of this relationship was pushed to some corner of their minds like some out of fashion clothes in the wardrobe which are there but still not there.

That afternoon Nilima having finished her photo shoot in Delhi and having some time left to wile away was browsing through her facebook wall page. With nothing great to do and her flight delayed for ten hours due to fog, she took a movie compatibility test and bingo…he was back ; smiling there, sharing 100% movie compatibility with her. Why had she forgotten to ‘unfriend’ him and why has he not done that?...like the many questions which one asks oneself but cannot find an answer to, she was unable to find an answer to this too.

Suddenly the chat box popped up on her screen. Ashok said ‘Hi’. Nilima said ‘Hi’ too.

Somewhere deep down she felt something strange, something hitherto unknown; it was not grief, it was not happiness, it was not love- it was something inexplicable, an unknown, unexplored emotion.

After the initial pleasantries, he finally geared up the courage and asked for a meeting ‘may be near the college tea shack’. Nilima had four hours at her disposal excluding the time she would need to catch her flight on time.

***

The watch on her wrist showed six o’clock. She had already been sitting at the restaurant now for almost three and a half hours with Ashok nowhere in sight. Two cups of cappuccino and a chicken sandwich down her stomach she did not even have the appetite to stay any longer. Meanwhile she also had been averting the glances of the restaurant cashier, who in between changing channels on the large plasma television hung on the wall, gave her weird looks. She decided to pay the bill and leave.

***

Halfway through her check-in queue, the breaking news blared on the plasma television of the restaurant ‘Man killed in a car accident due to poor visibility on the road’.

Meeting her ...

The moment I asked people where do I find her, I got varied responses. Some said "I don't do such things", some said "are you mad !" , some said " You have to pay 5 grands to meet her", while some others just ignored my question.

When I took upon this task I didn't think it would be so difficult. Every person knew that she existed, but nobody was ready to accept her existence. So much for the pretentious world we are a part of !

But they say where there is a will, there is always a way and my way led me to a dark and dingy bylane cutting right through one of the posh areas of Bangalore. I was accompanied in my task by a friend whose name I would not like to give out here on request of "his identity and his actions thereof being kept a secret".

When we reached there we were greeted with strange looks. Afterall they don't get to see a girl in such a place everyday. My gender turned out to be more of a liability than an asset that day.

I was asked to wait outside while my friend was taken inside to choose from among the 'girls' there. 'Girls'; well my vocabulary fails me to find another word for them for they appeared to me to belong to the same species of which I was a part of but they had long ago been forsaken by this identity; so I was a girl , they were not, but what were they I still cannot figure out because my sameness to them was more overbearing than the difference.

On our way upstairs to our room, my friend said something which I wanted to avoid mentioning here but i just can't stop myself....' I have never seen a girl naked !'

These words were still echoing in my ears when Munni entered our room. 5 feet tall, slightly towards the heavier side, dressed in her denim capris and t-shirt, Munni was just like any other girl.

The situation was awkward. One guy , two girls locked up in a two bedroom apartment - each unsure about the other's motive of being there.

The conversation started with a Hi and Hello. We had to cook up some story to appear as genuine customers while Munni cooked up hers to appear as a genuine prostitute. Her narrative was straight out of a bollywood movie- poor family, inter caste marriage, husband's extra marital affair, her abandonment, her landing up in a dance bar in Mumbai and from there one brothel to another whenever the need arose, a one year child to support and a dream to have her own house one day- this was Munni to sum up!

What part of her narrative was truth and what part of it was fiction, it is very difficult to say. Perhaps Munni's narrative existed in that delicate zone where fiction and reality intermingle and co-exist.

For me as a writer and an actor, I still cannot figure out how choosing Munni as a subject was different from choosing any other girl from a small town. She was shy, liked to dress up, Hrithik Roshan was her favorite hero, was against girls smoking and drinking and liked to eat chicken.

The only thing that made her "the other", relegated her the status of a fringe element was her profession.

But the same society which gave her the status of this 'other', needed these same fringe elements in order to satisfy their desires "of seeing a girl naked" . And that is why all posh areas have these dark and dingy bylanes where people like Munni run a parallel world that keeps our world going. It is in this parallel world where many Alishas become Munnis and people like me study them as subjects so that we can proudly claim that we are trying to research the 'other'.

I see the world through misty eyes
the tears have frozen , they refuse to come out
Lurking somewhere I can still feel there presence
or is it their absence that strengthens their presence?


The dreams that I had seen are lost and gone
What is left is just a rhythm less song
no tune, no music, no harmony
Just a few words floating in my memory.


The glass is half empty or half full I can't decide
Its just sand slipping from half to half and then subside
My footprints are lost, blown by winds of time
Have lost all sense of me and mine.


The past is gone, the present here
Falling and groping I move towards the future
I do not know who or what awaits
Have decided to tread on come what may !

The Friend

Its been almost 20yrs. I no longer remember him. His hands groping me in the dark, that cellar where we used to play, his fingers counting the naked ribs of my body…they are all forgotten.

He was 18yrs old when he had come to our house to help granny with her household chores and he became such a good friend of mine. I could never imagine those summer afternoons without him. Granny sleeping in her armchair, mom and dad out for work and we, playing in the cellar. Our games nobody knew of since it was our own small world, our games, our little secret !

20yrs down the lane, he is just there in some amorphous form in my mind… lurking in some corner, my friend is long forgotten by the family but his memories still continue to linger on in my mind, no matter how hard I try to forget them.

P.S: this is my first attempt to write a story.

For the sake of the "Silent Noise" that resides in me...

It seems to be like ages since I had last written something. If I sit down and ponder I could probably think of 101 reasons for the same but sometimes, its futile to find the reasons behind a cause...
A lot has happened in both my macrocosmic and microcosmic world: Am almost in the middle of a new year; India has elected a "Stable" government hoping that it would bail her out of the present slowdown; an extragavanza called IPL 2 is over and won by the most unexpected team..etc.etc.etc: so much so for defining my macrocosmic co-ordinates.
As far as my microcosm goes, well it is difficult to put down the things in a),b),c) format. I was confused about the world and its people and am confused about it all the more now. The more I try to decipher the meaning of things, the more I feel I am getting lost in the labyrinth called LIFE. My sense of self has undergone a change. The self which I perceived as "me" has become volatile, amorphous; my earlier image in the mirror is getting blurred day by day and some new form is taking its place; the cacophony of the noises is growing louder and louder...their silences are turning more and more deafening...
...So I take my recourse back to the thing I enjoy doing the most; forget the 101 reasons of not sticking to it and go by the 1 reason which always makes me come back to it...