Back To The Start

By Subhadip Chakraborty

Boy meets girl. Falls in love. Things work out fine until they don’t. Girl moves out. Fade out.

The classic break up scenario.

But the protagonist of this story, our kind, naïve, heart- broken guy would never give in to the usual stereotypes. He was not going to burn away his poetry, not going to flush all their pictures down the toilet, not look for her at every corner of the road or stalk her on instagram. He was not going to empty out the old apartment they had moved in together. He was not ready to be a victim like every sappy sad love story and he promised himself that on the cold sullen Delhi winter night as she walked out, the door left open.

So he sat down in the silence of the crime scene, amidst the chilly icy winds that crept in by the field across the porch, he drank some of the black coffee and he made a plan.

He joined a sketching class the next day, ordered an entire collection of foreign films and booked his tickets for every place around Delhi.

The two weeks that followed after was an exhilarating ride. Our hero travelled across purani dilli, the huts and small shops of a city lost in time, the parathe waali gali and across the vast empty roads that took you to India Gate. He would drive down to Fatehpur sikhri and would wonder at the glistening Taj by the moonlight. He would take random trains and meander across unknown places. He would get lost, get found, sweat it out in the scorching sun, search for bonfires in the freezing nights.

She would come back every other fleeting moment like an old song, like a billboard reminding him of the failure that their relationship had been, her memories would scar his smiles, would stir him awake at lone nights, he could hear her laughter amidst the static of strangers and the empty seat beside him would ache his heart. But he would always find that lone puppy to play along to, the mischievous school kid who was fleeing away from his school to share nasty plans of ruling the world one day with, the inebriated vagabond who would tell him how he once got himself saved by saying he was a godman or the old woman who would recount all her adventures back in those utopian days. He would meditate at the hills of McLeod ganj and trek across the valleys of kasol. He ran out of places after two months of extensive travelling, so he settled back and redecorated his room and went back to sketching.

He walked on her down by the café near their place one Sunday morning. She seemed to be waiting for somebody. They ordered a tall café hazelnut, they shared it like old times. She was surprised to find him almost glowing as he recounted the travel logs and he even boasted that he had shed weight as they burst out laughing. The conversation reminded her of the first time they had met, how he had cracked the wisest of jokes, how his humour and flamboyance and innocence had stopped her heartbeats, how in the middle of that conversation she realized she could spend her entire lifetime right with him at that cafe, and how it would end up with her walking up to his apartment as if transfixed by a spell and up the stairs and..She was in the drawing room like old times as he tiptoed to the kitchen to make her some French toast, her favourite dish!

She could not help but feel envious at how he had taken things. It was all so nostalgic, she could feel her heartbeats accelerating as she stared back at their safe haven, the apartment they once nurtured with love and some eccentric wild dreams. She glanced at the dvds of the foreign film collection he had been boasting about. ‘Amelie’ and ‘in the mood for love’, the corny romantic guy, she smiled. She found his sketchbook by the table and flipped through. A little gasp escaped as a tear trickled down and fell on her perfect portrait over the canvas, she flipped through dozens of her portraits, her porcelain face perfectly etched by the graphite, her hair left open and her perfect dimples as she would look at him through her small mischievous eyes in those lazy mornings. She could feel the neurons in her head tossing for a short circuit. Adrenaline rushed through her veins as she rifled through the accessories in his bag pack and out came his travel log. She read the first page. It was a romantic verse, every line had the initials of her name. All memories of them penned down with intricate beauty and an eternal sadness, there were no logs of places, but intricate and detailed stories of their love story. She ran across to the bedroom. The walls were filled with their pictures, the vase had fresh lilies, her favourite flowers, the guitar she had gifted him was kept beside the almirah and the showcase had all her teddy bears lined up. He had redecorated the room, and all it had was her in every corner, brick by brick.

‘French toast coming right up’, he whispered as she looked at him amidst tears.

“You’ve been waiting?”

“All this time.”

By Subhadip Chakraborty