Losing Track, Finding the Story
A COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES
Do you really believe that the universe gives us signs? Well, I didn’t for the longest time until it smacked me in the face, which I realised 27 years later.
Let me take you back to 1998 to the picturesque town of Guwahati, when romance was simpler, and Nokia 3310 was the most advanced piece of technology people knew, which the middle-class people in our tiny town did not have
Love was simple and sweet No Tinder swipes or WhatsApp fights just handwritten notes and the occasional landline call where your mom hovered nearby, pretending to look for a sari blouse And dates? Oh, those were legendary Forget cafes with overpriced lattes it was the age of dates in cycle rickshaws, dressed in our finest Yes, rickshaws! Ever tried holding hands on one of those? It’s like tiptoeing along a narrow ledge of affection and mayhem And believe me, I would know, because that’s exactly how my first date with Bablu started
It all started with a thin brown 18-year-old girl named Guddi, all dreamy-eyed and ridiculously naïve and a cute chubby guy of the same age Isn't that how most stories start? His name was Bablu Bablu was not a conventional boy Bablu was how should I put this? He was what you’d call... a Maharaja Burger. A little on the healthier side, thick round glasses to balance his cute face But, in my 18-year-old, lovestruck eyes, he was nothing short of Jack from Titanic
Of course, Naturally, Jack came with striking blue eyes and a heartbreaking past Bablu had the most beautiful lazy eyes and a cousin in my English Lit class
I was the typical romantic girl, obsessed with Titanic and Leonardo DiCaprio I mean, Leo was it for me Jack Dawson! The romance, the innocent love story, the 'I’ll never let go, Jack!' nonsense were all real to me So, when Bablu, the cousin of my classmate, asked me out, my brain did this wild thing: I squinted really hard and somehow saw my Jack in him
We'd been seeing each other for a few days Well, when I say “seeing each other” in 90’s, it literally meant seeing each other on the road standing on opposite sides, seeing each other while grocery shopping with our parents, and might have exchanged a few letters oh yes, handwritten letters If you wanted to impress a girl back then, you didn't slide into her DMs, you folded a paper in half and slipped it into her notebook or sent it through a common friend Classic romance! Bablu’s letters weren’t exactly poetry; they were more like shopping lists But, oh, how I swooned over every one of them!
So, after a month of letter-writing and passing messages through friends, we decided to go on our first date And where did this epic love story begin? At a restaurant called UTurn U-Turn was exactly where it was supposed to be – at a U-Turn It was the most happening place those days in Guwahati, a two-story shack of a restaurant that served Momo, noodles, soup, etc
Since I was not allowed to go out of the house in the evenings, I told my mother that I was going with my best friend to study My best friend dropped me to the hangout point of every teenager in Guwahati in the 90’s Bablu was waiting at the hangout point wearing a blue check shirt (in fashion in 90s) and blue jeans. Though he often rode his dad’s scooter, I was surprised when he called a cycle rickshaw Yes, you heard me a cycle rickshaw None of the scooter business No, no It was old-school romance, people I was wearing this brown animal print churidar, which I had ironed for what felt like hours, my hair tied up in a high pony, and some lip gloss that made my lips shinier than Guwahati without a power cut
He flashed a nervous smile, making me feel like Rose, and it seemed he was ready to capture me like one of Jack’s French beauties But let’s be real, the only thing he was painting was his glasses every time they fogged up from the Guwahati humidity And my heart? It went thump thump every time he pushed them up his little blunt nose with that adorable little flick of his finger
I leaned back, looking dreamily into the distance
So, we hopped onto this cycle rickshaw, and off we go to U-Turn, the fanciest place we could think of And by ‘fancy,’ I mean the chairs weren’t broken, and they had real ketchup, not the kind made from tomato water I can’t remember what we ate, I guess we ordered chow mein because obviously, that’s what all the cool kids were eating and sat there awkwardly trying to make a conversation Bablu kept pushing his glasses up, and I was twirling my hair, trying to look like a Bollywood heroine, but mostly looking like someone who’d just discovered a mosquito bite.
That date was the beginning of our relationship, if you can call a handful of awkward meals and a lot of fumbling conversations a relationship But we were young, and in those days, all it took was shared chowmein and a cycle rickshaw ride to convince you that you’d found true love
We dated for a couple of years, mostly through phone calls and a few awkward letters until Jack found a French girl down South The heartbreak was like a terrible roadblock Well, they say love is a two-way street, but sometimes you gotta take that U-Turn and find a new lane.
27 years of wisdom finally made it clear. Turns out, the universe wasn’t playing hard to get; it just wanted me to take a U-Turn.
