M&M FF: Will-O'-the-Wisp - On hold indefinitely - Page 4

Ok...All of you will have to do a little bit better than just liking and reserving posts...

😊

This content was originally posted by: 6th.Element

Ok...All of you will have to do a little bit better than just liking and reserving posts...

😊

I have nothing intelligent to say...not that I do anyway 😆 And I am not about to say 'Brilliant update' and leave it at that because you deserve more.

The second I find something the least bit coherent, I'll surely post it - you know that.

I will just have to trust you on that boogles...😊

"Salim ke pehlun mein anarkali hisdustan ki mallika hogi"

He turned away from the stairs and stuffed his head into the pillow.

Now, Guru modulated his voice, softer and shrill, an unexpected mournful ring to it, "Paun ki khawb ko sar ka taaj na banayiye..."

Again, he shifted to a very male voice, commanding and contemplative, "Woh ban chuka anarkali...mein dekh raha hoon, akbhar-e-azam ka hisdustan, tumhare..."

"Abhey!...Are you going to be done with it or not?..." He couldn't help the screaming, "For the last one hour you have been going at it...Atleast make up your mind on which part you want to play...Anarkali or Salim?"

"You won't practice with me..and expect me to get in character by reciting Salim's lines alone?...Yeh...sheherzade-e-hisdutaan, kabhi bardaahast nahi karange"

"Uff!" He shook his head, "Its Bardasht, not bardaahast...You might want to first think of taking lessons in Urdu, before you dream of playing Salim in Amanat Saab's production"

Their old town stood for a few things: Kebabs, Biryani, their rationalized pride for Bara Imambara and Amanat Ali's production house. Amanat saab was the retired Head of the Department of Theater and play writing from Lucknow University. Though the production house put up plays only once a year, on Holi's eve with the stage going up on the outside gardens of Bara Imambara, the production house folks forever managed to hold an impression that they were always working towards it all year round, making it the grand central theme about which tea shop discussions or sunday afternoon lunches revolved. However this year, Amanant Saab had taken ill for most of the past six months and the buzz for this year's play had only begun abound in the last few weeks. So he heard, that there were still parts to be filled for the lead roles. And taking Amanat Saab's ill-health to having tempered his quest for perfection, every Katara of the town was auditioning for the play, not to forget his own utterly useless friend, who still succeeded to escape reality at thirty odd years of age. For all of Guru's efforts, there was only a mild discounting he was failing at: Why on earth would anyone forget Amanat Saab was more famous for his tantrums over even small imperfections, than his skill at directing a play?

That instant, he could almost imagine a slipper flying at Guru on the stage and Amanat Saab being restrained to the seat by his assistants. He burst out laughing, slapping his hand at the sides of the cot, when his bandaged hand stuck the hard of the wood and he hissed loud for Guru to hear.

"It's all the karma catching up to you Mohan...You shouldn't be so driven to have them out of your room"

"I wasn't" He sounded hopelessly sullen to himself, "I was only there to get Papa's diaries out...and Ammi's picture...I just hope they haven't thrown it all out"

Guru, shifted on the stairs, pausing a bit to respond to the subject his friend rarely ever talked about.

There wasn't the dramatic air of tragedy like they had it in the movies. But Mohan had only been five when they had passed away in a car accident, too young to fully realize what had happened of them when they didn't return home after a three day conference at Calcutta. There after he'd known them in the stories his Chacha and the other town folks had told him, of their love, of their mutiny against the incomprehensible caste differences of the bygone days. His father had been a young Professor of hindu mythology and Sanskrit and had met his mother at the University when she'd only been a student of Language studies there, focusing on Urdu and Pali from Indo-Aryan times. His mom was a devout muslim, Azraa Meharunnisa Ali, who had desperately pushed his father, Anand Vajpayee, into taking Urdu lessons from her grandfather just to have one glance at her when she would be home, not concealed behind the heavy veil of the burkha.

When he'd been of a suitable age, Amanat saab had once sat with his hookah, after a production night, under the canopy of stars in Imambara garden and told him of the one production he would never forget for as long as he would live.

"I can't believe my play had been the one to clear all the rifts the families had between them. Nisa..." He'd turned and smiled at him, "That's how we used to call your mother. Nisa and Anand had played Anarkali and Salim with real tears and angst that we no longer thought we were in post-republic era. Their acting had been a teleportation device back to the days when Urdu and romance lived as two twisted divine beings on earth...These nalayak's, nowadays, won't know what Chemistry is even if it were to hit them on their faces..."

He'd dragged on the tobacco, the pipe gurgling from the frothing of air and water and said, "Agar dil gam se khali ho to jeene ka maza kya hai, Na ho khun-e-jigar to ashq peene ka maza kya hai...Mohbbat mein zara aansoo beha kar hum bhi dekhenge...Teri mehfil mein kismat azma kar hum bhi dekhenge"

They had sat in companionable silence for a few minuter later, only to have Amanat saab add as an after thought, "Perhaps I have been single all my life only because I have been waiting for that kind of love to find me...But now I know you have to go in search of it. Take risks my boy. Its worth it when it comes to love"

Yeah! Whatever...

"They wouldn't have..." Guru spoke sounding unsure, "Meghna doesn't seem to be the kind who would not value personal keepsakes..."

"Right..." He snapped, "And you know this because..."

"She has a daughter...and aren't women more ritualistically sentimental when it comes to things like that?...Moreover, its not like she knew that the so-called owner of all that junk and dismissed personal possessions would fall out of the skies and demand for it one fine day"

His eyes crinkled and he saw that Guru's eyes had a tinge of hidden mischief, "Nor that he was going to turn out of be Gengis khan and have a personal vendetta against her..."

"Dude!...where did that come from?" Seeing that he couldn't agree more, he left it at that.

"We don't need to have a degree in psychology to tell you that you hate her...If anything you detest her and sometimes it makes me think, that the problem is not with what she has done to you..." Guru paused to draw his attention and he turned in the sunken cot to face him "but with all that she could do to you..."

"I have to give it to you" He smiled wryly, "that you have picked up quite a bit of fancy theories since the time I left" He said, blatantly ignoring the obvious.

"What else did you expect? After all, I have the biggest chain of tea-cafe's in lucknow. Mind you...its cafe not Chai ka dukaan anymore"

Swallowing a laugh that pushed at his lips, he had his back to Guru again, "Surely dud...Cafe it is then"

It was granted that he wouldn't be within miles of this year's production house, given that it was Mughal-e-Azam again.

His parents hadn't been around much to influence him one way or another. He didn't have particular dislike for their religion and its extremities. But it was more like its existence or non-existence wouldn't matter to him, a passive indifference is what he carried to traditions and beliefs, with the exception for the drawing he felt for the language itself that had in someways brought his parents together. He loved reading his father's anecdotes, his failed attempts to write a poem for his mother in Urdu. His own mastery at Urdu, from having taken that as his second language in school, had helped him fill in some of the blanks his father had left there. It was unclear to him, what had inspired the stub of his pencil to move over the yellowed pages then, but it was just what he wanted to lay his hand on that night, when he'd gone in search of the store room.

He looked up to the skies, taking in the wisp of clouds that were playing hide and seek with the imaginary formation he was building with the stars that dotted the sky above him. After minutes, he found himself speaking again, "I was done with half the room...but that Chavanni just had to show up, picking every damn item in the room and shoving it in my face..."

He mimicked the little girl's thin, papery voice, "Is this what you are looking for AB Man?"

"Mohan..." Guru's voice edged with a warning.

"AB Man?" He scoffed, "She thinks she is too cute for us adults, with those pigtails, eyes like round velvet grapes all packaged underneath those nerdy glasses...And that mirchi madam...She is a bundle of secrets. Does she even look like the mother of a six year old?"

"Mohan..." Guru called out to him and began coughing violently.

"I swear...Had she been wearing a sari, I could have totally scanned her for those stretch marks, but whatever it is with her sack like kameez and salwars. Its a modern day burkha, in other words"

"Mohan...I would watch what you are talking about..." He could make out a tremble in Guru's voice, "I mean, I would really watch..."

"Its one thing asking me to politely get out because they were running out of time, and a whole another to jump in and start moving stuff around. Had it not been for Mirchi madam, I wouldn't have tripped on that box, fallen on my behind and cut my hand over that rusted cycle rim..."

"Excuse me..."

"I don't even know how long its been since injections and today, Madam... took care...of that...very justly..."

Ok! now that wasn't Guru at all. He didn't speak like full blown whispers were an injunction at night, neither could he sound composed and yet you could tell, if one were to focus that is, there was a certain aloofness to it.

His hand slapped at his forehead and he got to his feet, slow, his eyes scrunched at the impending embarrassment, picturing the imminent turn.

Guru coughed, perfectly positioned at the top of the stairs, when she was standing just to the right of the terrace wall, with a small box cradled in her arms.

Scratching the back of his head, his eyes looking away at anything but her, he took a few steps towards them.

"I think this is what you are looking for..." She turned in profile to place an old cardboard box on the wall, "If there is more, Nanhi will be home tomorrow after 3.00..."

With that, she didn't wait to finish what was already intended and left pushing  her sliding dupatta over her shoulder.

Standing just where Guru was seated, he studied her receding form, the measured step she took and how nothing about the way she moved, strangely conveyed that she had taken offense to anything he had said. It took him a full moment to realize he hadn't taken his eyes off the path she'd left, or that her presence in the air, her puzzling patience with him, had drifted far and wide with only their remnants dissolving in the new gust of air.

Guru cleared his throat, folding his script sheet and he looked down at him. "Saale..." He cried with mock vengeance and drew his leg well above his knees to thrust a painful kick to Guru's sorry behind.
Edited by 6th.Element - 11 years ago

Oh! dear it feels like I'm writing the story for myself. This thread is as dead as a doornail...

Shit! not again...

It was a useless system, outdated by all standards she'd seen in Delhi. But this was Lucknow and she couldn't help but be nice to the internet center owner and pass him the bundle of notes she'd rolled in her hand and walk out. Asking him to extend the session for another two minutes until she could clear all her browsing history was a request that would only be meted out with his routine, annoying response.

"Madam, we have the countdown clock on the left corner of the screen only for customers like you" He'd said in a grating voice the first time she'd visited them, "I can only extend sessions for half hour or one hour...and moreover now there is an extended queue for the system. This is rush hour, you see"

She'd didn't know why he'd called 3.30 PM in the late winter afternoon as the rush hour. Sure, she'd sighted a few scrawny, lightly bearded teenagers waiting outside, but that, to her,  didn't quite make up for an impressive clientele. It was much later, nearly two months after she moved into Lucknow, when she found out that she was habituated going to the internet center around the same time those sweet-talking, hormonally imbalanced teenagers had their girlfriends waiting for them in a chat room, before they went home after their so-called "special class".

During those times, her own vagrant, rebellious days would come back to her,  pressing down a thunder from her past into her chest, jerking her step back ever so slightly as she padded down to her new-found home on top of Chachaji's greying one. But these days, it was another kind of anticipation that rang in her nerves, an incessant hum of the blood she couldn't entirely come to embrace. At times, she could feel it in how her palms broke into a cold sweat, her eyes refusing to be on the look out for anything once she took that sharp left into her street.

The weekend had passed without so much of his appearance at their door. She'd heard from Chachaji that he'd caught a fever from the tetanus injection and was chained to his bed on Guru's terrace.

"Oh! he is a big cry baby when he is sick..." His Chacha had told her and laughed at their shared meal last afternoon.

Nanhi too had wandered about to go visit him. Of course, this detail, the little one thought that she could have no knowledge of. But then Nanhi was on her unending watch-list, sometimes making her picture herself with two eyes at the back of her head, hideous and utterly beast like.

Why Nanhi preferred him to all other men around her, she couldn't tell. Despite the annoyance that gnawed at her, in how he called the little angel Chavanni, she  thought he was in some part willingly ignorant in the way he wanted to appear spiteful and instead was bringing about a strange, crude intimacy between them.

Now, as she walked under the shade of the bright afternoon, confused as it was in the cool breeze that it whipped up at the turn of the season, she felt the remnants of that dead anger spark against her skin.

"...I could have totally scanned her for those stretch marks..."

It wasn't so much his intentions that brought about this effect in her as the fact that he'd already read much about her life. He was smart, she gave him that, smarter than most men she had met until then and he bore the kind of astuteness that was rugged, tempered and sharpened from working the streets. Well, it was expected of him when he had to run behind khabaris and manipulate people into trusting him with information that could cost their lives. However, there hadn't been any reason for him to pay her that curdling attention that she had seen him with, in those moments when it seemed there was a whirl of energy dissipating from her body, leaving her exposed and tiring. This and a throbbing personal curiosity had what taken her to the internet center that day. She'd tried a few key phrases from what she'd learnt of him from Chachaji and, "Mohan + Mumbai + newspaper" had given her most of his history.

What had knocked the air out of her lungs was the blog that he maintained, taking the role of a merciless and critical observer of Bollywood movies to a biased, zealot when it came to politics and sports. There hadn't been any exorbitantly mainstream or critically acclaimed news write-ups from him and something about that plain mediocrity didn't sit with well with her, making her suspect he wrote under a much less obscure pseudonym. It struck her, in those vaguely meditate states, that when people wanted all their life's work, their precedented recognition - some even asked of their infamous demerits - to be gloriously carried over by their given names, Journalism was perhaps the only line of work which asked of those in that profession to indulge in anonymity.

More so like what life was asking of her...

She'd never been good at it, in seamlessly fading with a crowd as a ghost, but she had managed so far, hadn't she?

She allowed herself a small inconspicuous smile and as she made that inescapable left turn that would take her home, she heard a slowing rumble of a bike right behind her. In the wariness, with a prickling sense of imminent urgency tingling at her neck, she turned around to find him maneuver the handlebar in a zigzag way that was necessary to maintain a balance at those low accelerations. Her stomach hurtled some ten stories down, too far below to only leave in its wake a extending hollowness.

Her eyes widened in surprise, foolishly not having expected his move and she stepped back a little, when he came to stop right next to her.

"Well...Well...Well...who do we have here? If not for Mrs.Nancy Drew herself", he said, shoving two sheets of printed paper straight into her face.
Edited by 6th.Element - 11 years ago

hey 6th.Element, no need to worry..you aren't alone here. I just finished reading last 3 chapters and it's getting really addictive...superbly written, are you an author by profession as well, like do you have any published work etc?  Your writing is way too good man! 👏

This content was originally posted by: Fmani

hey 6th.Element, no need to worry..you aren't alone here. I just finished reading last 3 chapters and it's getting really addictive...superbly written,

 please do write the next 3 chapters soon!

Call me Hasini...or H.

Finally! someone to acknowledge my presence in the forum for the last few days!

Thanks! I'm a little slow with updates, but hoping to update it regularly going forward.

-H

Alright Hasini, I am Fariha.

Hi Hasini     Story seems to be getting more and more gripping with each update. Nice FF.