All Chapters of Cycle of Cliches: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

30 Chapters

Songs and Stories

Songs and Stories I write from a cremetorium and I swear by my origins that this story conforms to the unwavering loyalty to clichés.I am aware that the cremetorium is the weirdest of places to write from, for that matter, anything, let alone a story, but I can’t be tardier than what I have been all this while.Eighteen years is a freakin', long time to stay on one story, isn’t it? I wish tardiness wasn’t in the list of my genetic inheritance.Here, at the cremetorium I become the famous singer who crooned his best number sitting by the bier of his dead sister. It wasn’t just a dirge for his sister, but a delicate and gradual unveiling of a story. A story of drawing rainbows, of playing under the sun, of a heart burning in sorrow and another entranced by indelible moments of joy. The famous singer’s song was his story.My story, by the way, is my song.And the tapping on this laptop keyboard is my beat. With each tap, I see the song shaping up as the dirge for the event.

Last Updated : 2021-07-12

Insomniac

Insomniac For one hundred and four hours I’ve lived like an insomniac. And then they became irksome. Insomnia as well as the clichés.Irksome to the extent that I felt compelled to pick up my laptop while sitting on the hearse van to this crematorium.You are not the white-robed in persona Christi on the other side of the confessional, and I’m not looking to get my sins absolved or my actions validated by telling you this story. I’m not trying to quench your stream of curiosity as well. I’m just trying to flush out the solidified lump of a yearning settled in the left corner of my brain. One hundred and four hours ago when I was sitting at the airport lounge in Kolkata, waiting for my flight to this city, Guwahati – my adopted hometown – this yearning wasn’t a lump. It was an acidic fluid running through my veins. It left a burning sensation wherever it passed through, like cheap whiskey leaves when it goes down your throat. All I was doing then was listening to Chester Be

Last Updated : 2021-07-12

Nico-Tar Urge

Nico-Tar Urge The small, six-by-four smoking room looked like Delhi in a winter morning.Smoggy.Smothering.If not for smoking, nobody would like to be there even for a minute! Worse still, there weren’t any chairs to sit. Trust me, with all the drowsiness and fatigue, I couldn’t stand more than a minute.Men drowned in their smart phone screens, cigarettes tucked between their fingers, welcomed me with as much indifference as I sometimes show to people talking about binge-watching web-series. The only aberration in the room, was this woman, standing far opposite to the entrance, with her gaze fixed at the wall to her right. Holding a pack of Marlboro Gold and an iPhone in her right hand, she was staring at the wall-mounted electric lighter. Her Hamlet-like dilemma, I thought was: To light up the next one or not? Curse my stealthy, sluggish, perverted eyes! Wish I could stop them from measuring her up! I slid my left hand into the pocket of my jeans for the packet of

Last Updated : 2021-07-12

The Nineties’ Thing

The Nineties’ Thing Pehla nasha, pehla khumarNaya pyar hai naya intezarKar lu main kya apna haal, aye dil-e-beqararMere dil-e-beqarar, tu hi bata… The first tipsiness, the first hangoverThis is new love, new waitWhat do I make of myself, O restless heart!My restless heart, you tell me this. Do you remember the tragic heart-break scene which followed this song in the movie Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar? The scene, when Anjali finds her beloved Sanju engaged in a celestial lip-lock in the aesthetic privacy of a derelict hill-top fortress? Do you remember, how many times you might have watched that same scene, each time, risking a scandal of a life-time? How many times you might have fanned your hidden desires of having such moments in your own life too? When I had watched this scene for the first time, I was in the eighth grade.By the time, I saw Junali for the first time, and that was two years later, the desire had already reached its zenith and the mo

Last Updated : 2021-07-12

Bohag

Bohag I should have put on the windcheater jacket before coming out of our apartment in Guwahati. A full-sleeve tee shirt wouldn’t have been bad either. The morning breeze in the terrace felt a little unsettling after the comfort under the blanket. It had been more than a month since winter was officially over. For those who wore sweaters in March were taunted as kaso – tortoise. Cold-blooded animal. Among my acquaintances in Guwahati, only Birinchi, the fast bowler in the local cricket team I had started playing for that year, wore sweaters in March. He would always be shivering while fielding.Now, it was April. It had rained the previous night – the first showers of the year – and the breeze carried with it the scent of petrichor. For the first time in a while, I wasn’t startled awake from sleep. It was a gradual waking-up. Someone was playing the Pepa – the buffalo hornpipe – and the tune was gleefully calling everyone around to join the merriment. As the drum-beats joine

Last Updated : 2021-07-12

Pursuit

Pursuit Summer brought in heat alongwith hope. The heat and humidity in the city cursed by recurring power-cuts was suffocating. In Tezpur, trees around our house offered shade and kept us cool with intermittent breeze even when the mercury soared as high as 40° Celsius. In the six hundred and fifty square feet railway quarter where Ma, Nisim and I had moved in Guwahati had no trees around. There was an adamant stillness in the air. The heat felt more with every passing day owing to a pursuit that I hadn’t chosen, but had been pushed into.That was the year when my intellectual prowess was to be tested against the best in the state, and in a broader sense, with each one of those in our country who either had chosen, or were prodded like me, into that pursuit. It was like war-time preparation. Everyone who knew me, wanted me to win it for them, and for my own self. The success of High School Leaving Certificate exams were to decide, as it appeared then, all our successes there

Last Updated : 2021-07-12

A Lot Can Happen Over Coffee

A Lot Can Happen Over Coffee In the airport smoking-room, the monochromatic images evaporated into the spiralling clouds of smoke just as Junali’s voice struck my eardrums, “Where are you lost? Hullo!”Her hazel eyes, almost popping out in wonder, her lips gaped like O.“Disbelief.” came out impromptu, after a long, deep breath. I didn’t have to care for my English pronunciation anymore. Courage had killed the inhibitions with my spoken English, long ago. From struggling with my sha and cha sounds to being a Voice and Accent Trainer before being promoted as a Training Manager in an international Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) company, for me, it’s been a worthwhile journey so far in terms of spoken English. “Disbelief?” she repeated after me.“Yes…a…world…of…disbelief.” I couldn’t resist the insane spurt of thoughts, uttering every word with a deliberate slow pace. Looking straight into her eyes! Without a blink! With a half-smile!“Hmm.” She said with a sigh and too

Last Updated : 2021-07-12

If a Writer Falls in Love with You, You Will Never Die

If a Writer Falls in Love with You, You Will Never Die We walked into the smoking room, lit our cigarettes and settled down beside each other, leaning against the wall. Conscious of the presence of other people in the room. Conscious that time was running away fast. The large display in the lounge in front of us shows the time: 04:12. She said she would leave for the departure gate in five minutes. She hated last moment boarding.“Next week I will head back home.” She said, taking a long drag from the cigarette she had lit up.“Next week? But you’ll reach today itself.” I assumed that Delhi is her new home.“Oh no, no. I don’t live in Delhi anymore. Just dropping in there to catch up with old friends.”“Oh ok. Then where do you…?”“On the other side of Luit,” she cut me off. I didn’t quite get her.“Just kidding…that line just popped up.”On the other side of Luit – it was the opening line of a poem I’d written thinking about her. It was a sad poem. Of hopelessness and

Last Updated : 2021-07-12

Rushdie in a Nightgown

Rushdie in a Nightgown I call out Biswa and a few others in the playground at the top of my voice, but it seems that they can’t hear what I’m saying.I’m saying that I don’t want to bat at number three anymore, and I don’t wish to play for the club too. I have made it to the national team, I have got the blue jersey with Number 4 and my first name embossed on it. I’m going to open the batting with Sachin. It’s, kind of, I want to say goodbye to all of my teammates before boarding the bus to the airport in the big city…but all of them vanish in thin air, leaving me with a trace of fear! I wonder if I have just seen ghosts. How can real people vanish?And then I run towards the bus stop. There’s a big tourist bus with huge glass windows and navy blue curtains waiting there – a video coach that’s going to play ‘Jigar’ once the bus starts moving. Halfway through our journey, the bus stops at a restaurant for refreshments, and I feel I can’t keep going all the way waking up other

Last Updated : 2021-07-12

Insights

Insights That night Nisim left me sleepless with a couple of insights. In his Bermuda-shorts and white vest, he lay by my side curled up like a cashew-nut under the quilt, snoring through the night. The first one was this:The greater your intelligence is, the louder you snore.In the other bedroom, there was our father, who snored louder than Nisim. And our father, as you might have guessed it by now, had far greater intelligence than Nisim. In fact, his intelligence soared so high that Ma had to make a makeshift bed in the kitchen every night to spare herself of his torturous, unconscious existence. Biswa also snored and I have experienced his torturous unconscious self, whenever he stayed over at our place in Tezpur. Although he always denied it, until recently when his childhood-sweetheart-turned-wife, Nitumoni busted it.Now see, I have three of the most intelligent people I have ever met in my life proving the universality of the first insight.But then, that night i

Last Updated : 2021-07-12

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