Pick And Choose

In the stories she wrote for them, there was a Malayalam song that played in the background. Through all their meals in the cheap university eatery and their sullen silences filled with cigarette smoke, the song played on.

In the stories she wrote for them, it was always windy, and it was always late winter. They would be in an auto-rickshaw, their hands wrapped up in her shawl, as the February wind blew through the city nights and whispered menacing jokes into the auto rickshaw driver’s ears.

In the stories she wrote for them, they planned journeys and went on them. She dreamt of the roads around hills as they wound up towards a Himalayan town. She dreamt of rocky beaches and standing upside down on them. She dreamt of pictures taken where both of them had the sun in their eyes.

In the stories she wrote for them, he read poetry aloud. His voice would vanish into the lamp-lit warmth of his room as he echoed Baudelaire. In these stories, on another day, he sang. He sang until she remembered no more what his voice sounded like when he spoke. And after she left his room, she felt his voice in the strains of his song hang around her shoulders.

In the stories she wrote for them, days were an endless market of books, and nights were the kisses under every street lamp on the road. Days were ice-creams in winter, and nights were shwarmas on his window-sill.

In the stories she wrote for them, he told her about his stories for them.

There were other stories, stories that she did not have to write because they were written by the eventuality of time when two people negotiate the terms of being together. These were stories of resentment, unattended phone calls, and blocked Instagram accounts. These were stories where they walked back alone to their homes and suddenly, everyone else seemed to be happy. These were also stories where every other story seemed improbable, and photos were destroyed and auto-rickshaws found their way to a zone where denial and indifference ruled. And yet, autorickshaw drives ended somewhere, and these stories too come to an end.

In the story that she wrote for them, the one of absolute truth, they were suspended in a vacant space. Perhaps there was a mural behind them, perhaps a fresco. Perhaps there were birdsongs and Sufjan Stevens. Perhaps there were snippets of movie dialogues or conversations about the tedium of academic research. Perhaps there was the unknowable happiness of others. Perhaps it was the knowable distress of aging parents. Perhaps the scene altered between the dusty streets of Chandni Chowk, or the second-hand book shop in the Cochin car-park.

The probabilities hung like mismatched threads, each with a potential story in them. ‘Pick and choose’, they said.

Pick. And. Choose.