Summers of Lost & Found

Summer was never a season for me. It was everything but a season.


In my kiddish days, my parents were posted in a small town, away from the town where my grandparents stayed. How I missed them! So, every summer vacation we would cross a mighty river to come down to my grandparents' town.


The last day of class before summer vacation would be so painful, so full of expectation. There would be the tinge of sadness of not being able to see my friends for a complete month. At the same time, the happiness and anticipation of being with my grandparents for a month. 


Summer gently taught me that the very thing that gives us immense happiness can also sadden us at the very same moment. 


The high point of this summer pilgrimage to granny town was crossing the mighty Brahmaputra river. This dangerous sounding water trip was always exercised through a age haggard ferry.  Looking from the wooden seats of the ferry, the mighty river looked like a baby, gently crawling. Until that one summer trip, when our ferry got stuck in a heavy down pour. And I got a awe struck look at another face of the old river, gushing and roaring. I knew how true are the stories of hundreds destroyed by the river in its flood days and ways. From then on, summer also came to meant to me the floods, the deaths, the destructions. 


That summer gave me one quick lesson: circumstances can so drastically distort even a benign presence. 


And in my granny place, I was another Crusoe exploring the gardens. And also all those lovely dishes granny would be forcing on me.

But each summer was the season for stories. Grandpa, with his treasure trove of anecdotes and stories. And that impeccable narration.
May be he sold me on the art of story telling. Each and every one of those summer evenings, he enchanted me with the magic created by story telling. 


And it was one of these long away summer day which took my grandpa away. I lost my magical story teller.


But the stories remained. So, did the enchantment of story telling. 
Finally it was the coat I decided to wear myself. All because of all those summer evenings and those magical stories.  


Summer always gifted me so much yet robbed me blind too.

Jaane Tu...Ya Jaane Na Moment

Few days back, the movie Jaane Tu...Ya Jaane Na was coming on one of the TV channels. As I did not have anything really interesting on hand at the moment, watching the movie seemed a good idea.


I have an idea that most people in India, including me, have seen the movie at least once. Most people have a rough idea of  the story. I am not going to talk about it. Neither am I a critic to discuss the movie at length.


But somewhere in the movie occurs a scene that made me think, maybe even feel.


Now, if you have seen the movie, you may remember the scene where the character of the brother, played amazingly by Prateik Babbar, have a talk with his sister, the bubbly Genelia D'Souza, about her choice of a life partner. You may remember it, solely for the fact that it is like the Now-I-realize moment for Genelia's character. (As an aside-cum-confession, I don't remember clearly the names of the characters portrayed, but I think Genelia's was called Meow.)


But within the Now-I-realize moment, there was a small bit that struck me this time around.


During the conversation, Prateik almost casually makes a half comment, that puts his whole character into a deeper background. Till that moment, he is an eccentric character, taunting his sister's friends, keeping a mouse for a pet. Almost absurd.


And the few words he says now: my sister...who was my best friend...


Suddenly, he is no longer such an absurd existence. He is a brother who misses his sister. And because he misses her, he has made his room his fortress, not venturing out too much. And whenever he misses her too much, he comes out, taunts his sister's friends, so, that his sister would notice him, even though with anger. In a slightly mad way, he was just trying to spend a bit of time with his sister, who has moved away with her friends, away from him.


It could be a comment made by most brothers, who misses their sisters-who have grown and moved into their friends. Sisters, in a most elemental way, are a part of a brother's life: with their sharing, caring, simple demands, and in countless different ways.
But with growing, they completely move away. Friends become such an important part of their life. Things change. Brothers feel abandoned. But they cannot say that either. They too make their own escapes, in other ways.


Like Prateik's character, who just rolls up into his shell of a room, coming out only when the missing becomes unbearable. He has accepted it as inevitable. But at the same time he knows his sister so well, that he is the only one who understands her heart, and knows whom she really loves.


But does the character says all this? No. He uses only six simple words: my sister...who was my best friend... And with those six simple words, the whole character comes into a different light altogether. All his eccentricities becomes meaningful. He's just a brother missing his sister. Each of his activity till then becomes suffused by that meaning. Now, I don't want to go ahead and make an assertion that Genelia's character was also supposed to make the same realization, and she did. But I just could not help hoping that she did, that she got the meaning of her brother's half said, yet most telling confession in the whole of the movie. For me, that became the most important slice of an otherwise another routine love story. 


But the most amazing thing about that scene is its simplicity and effectiveness. So much telling, with so few words - six to be precise.


That's story telling.