Chapter 2 - Nostalgia tells its tales.

A Twenty Something's Monologue

“Goodness gracious, mother!” Tia exclaimed. It had taken T, an entirety of 10 minutes to regret calling her mother on her 57th birthday. “Do not take that tone with me young lady!” her mother was quick to admonish, “All I want is your happiness!” There it was again, the ‘treating me as a burden, you ungrateful offspring’ tone that Tia had gotten so familiar with.

“What did I say wrong? All I said was Sharmaji’s, Jinisha got married too last week, a lot of money was spent, although the bridegroom was a little on the balding side, who cares, he was an industrialist. What are physical characteristics any way when compared to money and status?”

Mrs Kapoor rambled on, totally oblivious to Tia’s loud, and mostly judgmental groans. “I want to see you happy, for which you must get married as early as possible! Look, you’re already 28, and still not married, how much longer do you want to wait? No one wants to marry an old, haggard spinster, you know?”

This was too much for Tia to take in. “Okay, mother, apart from getting over these old-world ideas of looks/money, you have to understand that 28, is the new 23 and secondly, I will get married when I find the right guy, and no, if you are suggesting I meet up with some mid-life crisis who wants a maid or assistant in the guise of a wife then, my answer is no! Please stop badgering me about this all the time! Why don’t you join a crocheting class or something like that? You know, it might put your time to good use.”

On hearing her mother’s dramatic gasp, Tia realized her jovial comment was ill-timed. Before she could smooth things over, her mother’s steely voice cut her apology, “Well, now it’s come to this! It’s true what they say then, today’s society is going to the dogs. Children not respecting their parents and behaving as if they know more than their own life-givers. Next thing I know, you will be dumping me in a dingy, old age home which has smelly sofas and not one tasteful painting in sight!”

Tia chuckled at this. Always the human version of ‘poise’, her mother would never be seen without a bottle of Bisleri and Sanitizer in her bag, much to the daughter’s dismay. The harshness in her voice ebbing away, her mother spoke gently, “Beta, you know I am no enemy of yours. I am just trying to look out for you. Your father would have wanted the same, to see you settled and happy.”

Her eyes suddenly glistening, Tia realized how far away she was from her mother and after about fifteen minutes more of a 25 point presentation on marriage and it benefits, she was a little sad to put the receiver down. She dearly missed her mother, her forever turmeric stained long flowing cotton kurtas, the way she smelled of scented oil and ponds talcum powder.

Tia would forever associate those fragrances with home. She missed her father the most, they lost him three years ago to a fatal heart attack, and the wounds of that loss were still fresh. She wasn’t one of those emotional types but, her father was, without a doubt her one true love.

She didn’t really share these things with Priyanka or Rachana, the former because of her overly motherly nature, and the latter because of her to-the-point approach to grief. Tia was much of a gatherer than a sharer anyway, so she wasn’t complaining.

Sometimes though, you tend to unconsciously take a stroll down the memory lane – a place where nostalgia strikes hard. The two things she missed the most were her childhood and her college days.

Those warm weekends, when the breeze played hide and seek with the banyan tree leaves, while her group of friends cycled uphill, as the sun beat on the backs of their necks. The beauty of living in a small harbour town, were the lazy, cool evenings when all of them took turns making smooth rocks fly over the pond near her childhood home.

Theirs’s was a weird bunch because they’d play pretend potluck parties with leaves and flowers one minute and have a heated spelling bee competition of the world’s capitals the next. The tanned skin that she had grown to love and those droning, hot, holiday afternoons with refreshing lemon juice at Vinod’s house, where his father tried hard, to introduce them to India’s history.

Tia chuckled at the last thought and was distracted by her alarmingly loud ring tone. Coincidently, it was Vinod’s name that flashed on her cellphone. “You know, I was just thinking about all the fun, we had at your place as kids, oh god who would have thought, time would pass by so quickly, more importantly, who’d imagine that you would lose all your baby weight!” She said cheekily.

Vinod guffawed, always a sport about T’s jokes, “Yeah, I definitely wouldn’t have thought back then, that I would actually become a fitness freak. It’s funny you know, listening to you talk about childhood and our weird group. We were all so different, economically and ethnically speaking. And, yet those boundaries blurred so easily!”

He’d followed in his father’s footsteps and was currently pursuing a PhD in South Asian ethnic groups and their lifestyles. “I hope that the last comment is not going to turn into a fascinating fact about how history is awesome and anthropology is amazing and how it all ties up and ruining my memories with logic”, Tia quipped waiting to hear more of his contagious laughter.

Tia sighed; Vinod had been her best friend since time immemorial. He was best at dispensing great advice was completely comfortable with the fact that he would forever remain the butt of all Tia’s fat jokes. Not that he never took digs at her. He had come to be a very essential part of her life, her only link to the sweet past, which Tia had no intentions of letting go. After an hour-long chat, about memories and a little about histories, she half-heartedly, had to get back to work.

That’s the thing about memories, she thought, they always make you see things from a different perspective. Like when you get mad at the fact that the coffee is really cold, and you remember your trainee days when you were so grateful to the uncle serving you coffee and getting you one more cup, on those extra-hard days.

Or remembering loud cricket matches played with enthusiasm, when you got irritated by the racket that the neighbourhood kids were up to. We, as humans live by our memories, it's true, maybe that memories maketh a man. Tia laughed at the ineffective effort at a good pun. She decided to suggest ‘memories’ as a concept idea to Priyanka, who was the creative manager at a fairly well-known advertising agency.

All things said and done, Tia did agree that memory lane was the most cherished lane of them all. And, she loved taking walks down it, with her father whenever she felt mildly melancholy.

Packing up her stuff, she realized she had done nothing productive today. She decided to check in with Rachana who had been completely MIA since the incident at the office, last week. She dearly hoped that Rachu might have found the silver lining or she might just rupture at her seams.

“Rupture” saying the word out loud, making it swirl in her mouth, suddenly remembering the words of her language teacher, “You are a word person, darling”. If only Tia could find a sentence person to string her words together now, it would be great.

She sniggered thinking she should definitely share her ‘word-ly’ thoughts with her best friend, once she was done fighting her way through her very own, memory marshland. Another bad pun my friend, a smile on her face, shook her head to her empty office, as she hit the lights, already drooling over the memory of the coffees at Petite Sweet.

Disclaimer:

A piece of the author’s monologue:

This novella started as an experiment when I was on the brink of turning 20 and was completely floored by Carrie Bradshaw and her thunderous trio of friends. This is the first time that I am making the novella public. As much as my present self wants to edit this and make it age and time appropriate, I am going to show some serious restraint. Some parts of this novella may be too childish, dewy-eyed or too naïve, but I’d request you to indulge me, every week for the next 15 odd weeks and let me know what you think about it. Think of this as my passion project, six years too late in the making.

Read the Third Chapter here.