This was never intended to be a travelogue. It was always meant to be an account of my constantly changing frames of mind in a country which is not mine, in a city which was a stranger to me. Three months after I first landed in Sydney, quite a few things have changed.
I am no longer a stranger to Sydney. Sydney is no longer a stranger to me.
With this letter, I am ending the series of letters I wrote to people back home who were worried about how I could cope up in the land down under, with no one by my side. There was a point where I was thinking if I was doing the right thing by leaving India at a time where my career was looking up.
On retrospection, I think Sydney is the best move I have made in my life.
Three months down the line, I am used to the city now and I am feeling increasingly at home, but, I do miss India and almost everything about it.
There are many more stories I have to tell, but then I would’ve respected Sachin Tendulkar more had he retired from the game at the right time.
“What’s the logic?” you may ask me, “You aren’t Sachin”.
That’s the whole point. I am not Sachin.
I was amazed to see 130-150 hits on the blog every week, and dumbfounded on seeing that atleast 50 people turned up on Saturdays. It’s both scary and satisfying when so many people display such ardent interest in your life.
I am grateful to everyone who read these letters and told me through numerous comments and emails about how they felt about it. I hope I gave everybody something with every letter.
I had a ball writing for you guys. Hope you enjoyed equally.
Here’s the eagerly anticipated and much talked about letter 8.
Thanks,
NM.
P.S: Please DO NOT leave anonymous comments on this particular post.
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A boy and a girl were sitting in a café one evening. She was dressed in pink, he was wearing white. Drawing a heart with a spoon in the froth of his cappuccino he looked at her. Her brown eyes were pointed towards the overcast sky.
“Do you believe in Love at first sight?” He asked her.
“I don’t believe in love in the first place… leave alone the first sight”, she said, quite matter of factly.
The heart in the cappuccino was now looking like a cloud. She was still looking up in the sky.
“Define love in one word.” He asked next, looking at her, hoping somewhere in his heart that she would look into his eyes.
“Illusion. Love is an illusion. We never love people, we just get used to them.” She answered, not looking at him, even once.
“What would you say if I tell you that I love you?”
She didn’t say a word. He knew she wouldn’t.
He had fallen in love with her. She had gotten used to him.
“You should try writing a novel, Nik. You would make a great novelist” My screenwriting professor said, looking up at me through his black rimmed pair of spectacles, “And this, no matter how beautifully written, doesn’t quite qualify as screenplay” he said, ruffling the piece of paper I had given with his index finger.
When people make complete sense while talking against something we do, our only defense mechanism is a smile, which is a better way of saying, “Yes, I know that I am stupid. Thanks for reaffirming my self-belief.”
I smiled and took back the piece of paper, thanked him and left his cabin only to bump into a visibly frustrated Hasse on the staircase.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her.
“Almost everything…” she said, without wasting even a second, “What’s wrong with you?” she asked.
A bit surprised at her question I just pointed my finger to the professor’s cabin.
Giggling incessantly she said, “Got fucked eh?”
“Kind of… Great way to start a day!” I confessed… “How did you know that something was wrong with me?” I couldn’t control the desire to ask the inevitable question which was the reason for the initial bit of surprise.
“Look at your face..! Listen to your voice!” she said, “Sit outside. I would make us some coffee…”
I didn’t know that my face could give out so much. Or maybe she had started to know me well enough to understand what’s going on in my mind just by looking at my face or by hearing my voice, something that only few people in the world can boast of being able to do. Diptee, Pavan, Niket, DJ, Amol, Amogh, Prasad, Anahita, Priyanka… That’s about it, I guess.
It was quite early in the morning, as we were sitting on the wooden boxes outside school, sipping coffee that she had just made for both of us.
Hasse asked me, “Nik, have you ever truly loved someone?” Now I knew what was wrong with her.
I smiled, looking straight in her blue eyes and I told her something that I hadn’t told, rather confessed to anyone in Sydney till that day. There was something about Hasse that made me trust her, instinctively. She reminded me of people like Pavan, Vivek, Amogh, Bodhi, Niket, Prasad, Sachin Bhai, Vijay Sir, DJ, Sandu, Amol, VD and Tejas… I could just look in her eyes and trust her.
I told her something that made her really, really worried. Hasse was the 7th person on earth to know about the Pretty Girl in Pink.
We studied in the same school, but never really spoke. 5 years after school, I never thought that something like what happened would happen.
One day I just saw a scrap in Pavan’s scrapbook. I recognized the girl instantly, my thoughts transporting me to the school days when Karanjgaokar had told me looking at her, “Fakt Brahman mulich evdhya cute asu shaktat…” (Only Brahmin girls can be this cute) A smile came to my face and I clicked on her profile.
Coincidentally she had checked my profile on the same day. We met online and then started talking. I am a person who chooses who I talk to and who I don’t and it generally takes me a long, long time to get really friendly with anybody.
But something about us just clicked. God bless Orkut.
What happened over the next 1 month is stuff great motion pictures are made of. The tragic part is that my life ended up being a movie.
Maybe the girl in my story was right. Love indeed is an illusion. It’s an illusion which saves us from experiencing the sore truths of realism. Love is surreal, but true.
Hasse listened intently as I spoke. It was one filmmaker listening to another filmmaker talking about a film which happened to be his life.
“Is she crazy?” she asked me, wide eyed and amused at the story she had just heard.
Smiling, I said, “Honey, that’s the way it goes. But every once in a while, it goes the other way too” not even one bit amused that I had put so much of trust in a person who I had hardly known for 5 days.
My first two months stay in Sydney taught me so much about everything. It taught me that I could live anywhere in the world where they make films, I could make friends anywhere. It taught me that there are people in this world who love me unconditionally. It taught me that I possibly have the best set of parents and grandparents in the whole wide world. It taught me that I have the best family anyone can possibly have, people like Anand Dada, Ravi Dada, Sarang, Kiran Dada who selflessly stood by my side, helping me in every possible way to help me reach my dream. It taught me to be humble, something that I had forgotten down the line. It taught me that I was lucky to get all these people who would do anything for me.
But most importantly it taught me that one person can change your life, forever.
“What would you say if I tell you that I love you?”
She didn’t say a word. He knew she wouldn’t.
It always happens, to all of us. Some questions do come like a jolt, when you least expect them to show up. But then, that’s what life does. It often throws weird questions at us. And then it throws people who give us answers, possibly weirder than the questions themselves.
No matter how weird the question or weirder the answers sound, the truth is that all of it does make sense… Some day… Some time.
I knew that my life had changed in three months because of one person. What I didn’t know then was that another life had also changed… because of me.
Friday, May 18, 2007
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Letters from Sydney: Episode 7
Hello All,
Here's letter 7.
And yes, its 7 days to go.
Have a rocking weekend!
Luv,
NM
-----------------------------------
It was almost 1:30 am and it was raining quite hard; my hair and clothes wet, I was looking out of the window. “Sydney weather and life… are both equally unpredictable”, I said to myself, smiling, taking a sip of the hot chocolate I had made for myself after standing alone in the rain for almost 15 minutes. The unpredictability of Sydney weather was bang in front of my eyes, with the thunderstorm which came literally out of nowhere. The unpredictability of life had been in front of my eyes for the past 4 years, with life taking absolutely erratic twists with alarming regularity and spiraling me onto a puzzle of paths of confusion, anguish and conflict which ultimately ended in a pristine road of self-discovery.
My cell-phone rang. I didn’t even have to look at the screen to see who was calling. There are only three people who call me regularly from India, my mom, my dad and well… the person who was calling me just then.
“Guess what..!” she said, sounding tremendously excited, “It’s raining in Pune! And all of us have stepped out of the office and are enjoying! And we plan to go in and have a mug of hot chocolate… Ok… I’ll call you later… was just very happy so thought I would give you a call…”
The conversation was effectively a monologue, the kind of monologues I love hearing to. Raining in Pune and Sydney at the same time can pass off as coincidence. Standing in the rain and hot chocolate was a bit too much to be just, mere coincidence. Coincidences are what have ruled my life so far; whether it was making a conscious decision to join Pune University for engineering; whether it was feeling like writing a script; whether it was asking Pavan and Tejas on one obscure day that I wanted to make a film and both of them agreeing whole heartedly; whether it was finding a boy with a handy cam called Vijay J who I had never even seen and he agreeing to shoot BLACK; whether it was meeting DJ, Nikhil K, Niket, Parag, Amol and all of them working with me with full trust in my capabilities without once thinking that they hadn’t seen my work ever; whether it was my reaching Factory on the same day when Sonal was looking for a writer, whether it was meeting Shin-Shin on Orkut and we striking on this idea of Karma and Konfessions and Sarang jumping in soon after; whether it was looking up on Google for film school and IFSS being the first and last film school I browsed; whether it was me and her looking up each other on the Holy Cross community on Orkut on the same day; both of us deciding to go to Aurangabad on the same day… it was all ruled by coincidences. All the major events in my life had been coincidences. Or were they part of Destiny’s bigger plan, I don’t know. We decided to meet on a Monday, but again, co-incidentally I had to meet the producer of SSV in the morning and she had to go to work in the evening so we decided to meet up on that weekend.
I still remember the day we had first met. I was late as usual and I reached Mc Donalds almost running. There she was, standing, wearing pink and looking extremely pretty. She was typing an sms before she turned back to look at me, smiling. For that one moment, it seemed like time froze.
Freezing in time is one of the most commonly used tools by efficient screenwriters. When we realize that a character is becoming redundant and extremely predictable we know that he is going to kill the script in his own way; sooner or later we decide to freeze the character in time, i.e. we pack him off under mysterious circumstances. This way, the character cannot kill the script but he does make it much more effective. Thinking about this and coincidences, I started typing, Norwik.
“This is a brilliant script”, my professor looked at me and said, “Why are you calling it Norwik though?” he continued glancing across the ten pages of story that I had handed over exactly 22 hours after I had first thought of it.
“Because”, I said, “The lead character is called Norwik”.
He laughed heartily and said, “Yeah, but you can have a much more effective title, don’t you think?”
“I don’t think so, Sir…” I said, in my trademark finishing style and very much to my expectation, he chucked the topic.
“Do you think you should ‘waste’ this script as a film school project..?” he said, not even looking at me.
I didn’t know what to say.
“This is a once in a lifetime script… Develop it… Let’s see where it goes…” He said, judging my confusion.
I knew it all way long that it was once-in-a-lifetime script. What I needed was someone to tell me that it was that damn good.
After all, not every time I write a script with Johhny Depp in mind.
After all, not every time I think that what I am writing can be better than Aparajita.
TO BE CONTINUED.
Here's letter 7.
And yes, its 7 days to go.
Have a rocking weekend!
Luv,
NM
-----------------------------------
It was almost 1:30 am and it was raining quite hard; my hair and clothes wet, I was looking out of the window. “Sydney weather and life… are both equally unpredictable”, I said to myself, smiling, taking a sip of the hot chocolate I had made for myself after standing alone in the rain for almost 15 minutes. The unpredictability of Sydney weather was bang in front of my eyes, with the thunderstorm which came literally out of nowhere. The unpredictability of life had been in front of my eyes for the past 4 years, with life taking absolutely erratic twists with alarming regularity and spiraling me onto a puzzle of paths of confusion, anguish and conflict which ultimately ended in a pristine road of self-discovery.
My cell-phone rang. I didn’t even have to look at the screen to see who was calling. There are only three people who call me regularly from India, my mom, my dad and well… the person who was calling me just then.
“Guess what..!” she said, sounding tremendously excited, “It’s raining in Pune! And all of us have stepped out of the office and are enjoying! And we plan to go in and have a mug of hot chocolate… Ok… I’ll call you later… was just very happy so thought I would give you a call…”
The conversation was effectively a monologue, the kind of monologues I love hearing to. Raining in Pune and Sydney at the same time can pass off as coincidence. Standing in the rain and hot chocolate was a bit too much to be just, mere coincidence. Coincidences are what have ruled my life so far; whether it was making a conscious decision to join Pune University for engineering; whether it was feeling like writing a script; whether it was asking Pavan and Tejas on one obscure day that I wanted to make a film and both of them agreeing whole heartedly; whether it was finding a boy with a handy cam called Vijay J who I had never even seen and he agreeing to shoot BLACK; whether it was meeting DJ, Nikhil K, Niket, Parag, Amol and all of them working with me with full trust in my capabilities without once thinking that they hadn’t seen my work ever; whether it was my reaching Factory on the same day when Sonal was looking for a writer, whether it was meeting Shin-Shin on Orkut and we striking on this idea of Karma and Konfessions and Sarang jumping in soon after; whether it was looking up on Google for film school and IFSS being the first and last film school I browsed; whether it was me and her looking up each other on the Holy Cross community on Orkut on the same day; both of us deciding to go to Aurangabad on the same day… it was all ruled by coincidences. All the major events in my life had been coincidences. Or were they part of Destiny’s bigger plan, I don’t know. We decided to meet on a Monday, but again, co-incidentally I had to meet the producer of SSV in the morning and she had to go to work in the evening so we decided to meet up on that weekend.
I still remember the day we had first met. I was late as usual and I reached Mc Donalds almost running. There she was, standing, wearing pink and looking extremely pretty. She was typing an sms before she turned back to look at me, smiling. For that one moment, it seemed like time froze.
Freezing in time is one of the most commonly used tools by efficient screenwriters. When we realize that a character is becoming redundant and extremely predictable we know that he is going to kill the script in his own way; sooner or later we decide to freeze the character in time, i.e. we pack him off under mysterious circumstances. This way, the character cannot kill the script but he does make it much more effective. Thinking about this and coincidences, I started typing, Norwik.
“This is a brilliant script”, my professor looked at me and said, “Why are you calling it Norwik though?” he continued glancing across the ten pages of story that I had handed over exactly 22 hours after I had first thought of it.
“Because”, I said, “The lead character is called Norwik”.
He laughed heartily and said, “Yeah, but you can have a much more effective title, don’t you think?”
“I don’t think so, Sir…” I said, in my trademark finishing style and very much to my expectation, he chucked the topic.
“Do you think you should ‘waste’ this script as a film school project..?” he said, not even looking at me.
I didn’t know what to say.
“This is a once in a lifetime script… Develop it… Let’s see where it goes…” He said, judging my confusion.
I knew it all way long that it was once-in-a-lifetime script. What I needed was someone to tell me that it was that damn good.
After all, not every time I write a script with Johhny Depp in mind.
After all, not every time I think that what I am writing can be better than Aparajita.
TO BE CONTINUED.
Friday, May 4, 2007
Letters from Sydney: Episode 6
Hello All,
Thank you for the overwhelming response to all the letters. I am touched, I really am. I would like to inform that letters 6 and 7 are quite long and simple in content. There'snot much happening in these letters except for the fact that I am just linking all the time frames which had gone haywire in the previous letters (On purpose, of course).
For those who sense a De Ja Vu while reading some paragraphs, dont worry, some of them were
in the previous letters. Its just linking it all up.
As for the content, its not much happening.
Lull, before the storm I guess.
Wait... For letter 8. I would also like you people to guess what's gonna be the revelation in letter 8. Who do you think is the pretty girl in pink... Tell me... I am eagerly awaiting your comments.
----------------------------------------------
“When the night falls asleep… When all the lights go dim…
When dreams take control of lives… When even saints sin…
Leaving behind a trail of unfinished chores, I keep walking…
Dreaming of another land… of another person… I keep walking…”
I don’t know what prompted me to scribble these lines in my notebook as I sat in the classroom one day. It was quite early and the professor was yet to come. Not many students had arrived either. It was unusually quiet by film school standards. A couple of classmates were listening to Eminem’s Stan, sharing a pair of earphones between them. Vinn, my friend from Malaysia was sketching an animated version of Jodie Foster in his book. It was raining outside, the skyline a shade of dark grey and the sound of water bouncing off the roofs of cars parked right outside the car room dominating the overall soundscape.
I read the lines again, thinking, possibly for the nth time what propelled me into writing them. It was Friday and we were in for a long weekend, with Monday being a public holiday. Heavy rainfall was predicted for the next 2 days. The Sydney weather forecast is quite accurate unlike the ones we have in India. It was possibly the first time in my fifteen days’ stay in Sydney that it was feeling gloomy. The overall ambience was dipped into dullness, nobody being in their best of spirits, everyone thinking of something personal, something sad. People started entering the class with mugs of piping hot coffee in their hands and loads of boredom written wide across their faces.
We all lazed around the classroom; Hasse and Nicolas were playing Tic-Tac-Toe sitting next to me, Vinn was so frustrated that Jodie Foster was now looking like Tom Hanks from Forrest Gump and I was still pondering about what made me write what I had just written. Hasse’s muffled scream broke my thought process; I looked at the two, who were punching each other because of an argument about the rules of Tic-Tac-Toe. Nicolas had supposedly made a three link using a right angle, which Hasse rightly thought, was wrong. As the two continued to abuse each other in Dutch and Spanish respectively, none understanding what the other was saying, our professor entered.
“Guys… you have an off today”, he said without even looking at the class. He, too, was perhaps bogged down by the strange gloom in the air. As everyone was about to jump in excitement and run towards their own houses to catch up on some sleep, he dropped a bomb, something that we least expected to happen on such a screwed up day. “You have to write three movie script ideas. They have to be in by 4:30.” Without even caring to wait to listen to our accusations and abuses, he left. We all looked at each other and the class was boomed with a tremendous echo of the F word.
I stepped out with my mug of coffee. The rain had subsided, the clouds were still there. Hasse and Nicolas were standing outside, arguing about the tic-tac-toe match that had gone painfully haywire. Much to my exasperation, the two were extremely happy and perhaps the only souls in vicinity to be unaffected by the intensely uninspiring weather. Looking at me, they stopped fighting and came near me. Hasse started talking about a black and white film she had seen on DVD the last night. How I was wishing that she hadn’t seen that film. I was so bored that I was actually praying that both of them turn mute for a day. Nicolas who was also not impressed by Hasse’s black and white movie talk changed the topic quickly.
“Nik, you know… I was coming in the train today, I saw this chick… very hot chick… talking to her boyfriend about India…” He said, desperately trying to make Hasse shut up as he continued to speak, “You know what she told him..?”
“How would I know Nic..?” I asked back, very, very, matter of factly.
“That’s true too, how would you know…” Nic said as if he had never heard of the word Sarcasm ever and continued, “She told him… That India is a beautiful country which is located in the middle-east…” Without even waiting for us to react he started rollicking with laughter. His laughter itself was so infectious, that both of us couldn’t stop laughing with him, less on his joke, more on the way he reacted to his own joke.
“And you know what… She was blonde…” He concluded.
On that moment, both Nic and I instinctively looked at Hasse, who adjusted her cap coincidentally just at that moment, making both of us laugh like there was no tomorrow. Embarrassed she looked away.
“I actually cracked a good joke after a long time…” Nicolas continued, making both of us erupt into peels of laughter once more.
“That makes it two good jokes in a line...” he said, I almost rolling on the floor laughing, Hasse laughing too, a bit of embarrassment still visible on her face.
Vinn came out and said, “Guys, up in the theatre in 5… Something important.”
Before we could react, Vinn was in and up the stairs.
“Must be something about the 5 character exercise” Hasse said.
“Maybe” Nic and I agreed in unison. The boredom had gone thanks to Nic’s antics.
Coffee break was over, Thinking about the 5 characters exercise, playing with Hasse’s cap, much to her annoyance, we walked in the lobby, Nicolas gleefully flashing his card at the door to let us in, the Sin City poster greeted us and we walked up the staircase towards the 100 capacity theatre, 15 days after we had first had entered it.
We sat in the theatre when our professor walked in visually worried. He looked at the class and threw the regular smile at us, albeit it didn’t seem genuine this time.
“There’s a problem, Class” he said, looking at all of us.
There was something about the whole of it which made us all get worried. We looked at him and then at each other. No one understanding what to say, how to react. He walked up to his desk, grabbed a glass of water and gulped it down.
“Is the school shutting down?” was the first thought that came to my mind and I realized that I was actually scared to bits at the thought. “Fuck… Fuck… Fuck…” I said to myself, trying to brush the imagination away. I looked around to see that almost everyone was extremely scared. That didn’t come as a surprise especially since all of us were equally imaginative.
The professor then kept down the glass of water and looked up.
“There’s a problem, Class… We have decided to give you guys a welcome party… and I am afraid that there aint enough beer… Who can go with Alex and get a couple of beer crates?” He said and started laughing.
We all joined him. Though I joined the laughter, the thought of the school getting shut down before I finished my course was worrying me. I was literally scared thinking what I would do if I had to go back to India without the degree. I couldn’t leave the degree unfinished; I was scared of such a day. But somewhere I felt nice about going back to India, going back to her. And all of a sudden the lines I had scribbled in the morning made sense to me.
[i]“When the night falls asleep… When all the lights go dim…
When dreams take control of lives… When even saints sin…
Leaving behind a trail of unfinished chores, I keep walking…
Dreaming of another land… of another person… I keep walking…”[/i]
I smiled at the strange bit of intuition I had experienced. I just thought that how would it be to actually see everything that’s going to happen. I just thought about how a person would feel if he comes to know that he’s going to die, and soon.
“I have a friend called Norwik…” I overheard Hasse telling Nic about a Russian friend of hers.
“Norwik…” The name boomed in my ears. “Norwik Dmitri” I said to myself, a smile appearing on my face. I knew I had got my first story idea. What I didn’t know then was that it was going to change my life, forever.
TO BE CONTINUED.
Thank you for the overwhelming response to all the letters. I am touched, I really am. I would like to inform that letters 6 and 7 are quite long and simple in content. There'snot much happening in these letters except for the fact that I am just linking all the time frames which had gone haywire in the previous letters (On purpose, of course).
For those who sense a De Ja Vu while reading some paragraphs, dont worry, some of them were
in the previous letters. Its just linking it all up.
As for the content, its not much happening.
Lull, before the storm I guess.
Wait... For letter 8. I would also like you people to guess what's gonna be the revelation in letter 8. Who do you think is the pretty girl in pink... Tell me... I am eagerly awaiting your comments.
----------------------------------------------
“When the night falls asleep… When all the lights go dim…
When dreams take control of lives… When even saints sin…
Leaving behind a trail of unfinished chores, I keep walking…
Dreaming of another land… of another person… I keep walking…”
I don’t know what prompted me to scribble these lines in my notebook as I sat in the classroom one day. It was quite early and the professor was yet to come. Not many students had arrived either. It was unusually quiet by film school standards. A couple of classmates were listening to Eminem’s Stan, sharing a pair of earphones between them. Vinn, my friend from Malaysia was sketching an animated version of Jodie Foster in his book. It was raining outside, the skyline a shade of dark grey and the sound of water bouncing off the roofs of cars parked right outside the car room dominating the overall soundscape.
I read the lines again, thinking, possibly for the nth time what propelled me into writing them. It was Friday and we were in for a long weekend, with Monday being a public holiday. Heavy rainfall was predicted for the next 2 days. The Sydney weather forecast is quite accurate unlike the ones we have in India. It was possibly the first time in my fifteen days’ stay in Sydney that it was feeling gloomy. The overall ambience was dipped into dullness, nobody being in their best of spirits, everyone thinking of something personal, something sad. People started entering the class with mugs of piping hot coffee in their hands and loads of boredom written wide across their faces.
We all lazed around the classroom; Hasse and Nicolas were playing Tic-Tac-Toe sitting next to me, Vinn was so frustrated that Jodie Foster was now looking like Tom Hanks from Forrest Gump and I was still pondering about what made me write what I had just written. Hasse’s muffled scream broke my thought process; I looked at the two, who were punching each other because of an argument about the rules of Tic-Tac-Toe. Nicolas had supposedly made a three link using a right angle, which Hasse rightly thought, was wrong. As the two continued to abuse each other in Dutch and Spanish respectively, none understanding what the other was saying, our professor entered.
“Guys… you have an off today”, he said without even looking at the class. He, too, was perhaps bogged down by the strange gloom in the air. As everyone was about to jump in excitement and run towards their own houses to catch up on some sleep, he dropped a bomb, something that we least expected to happen on such a screwed up day. “You have to write three movie script ideas. They have to be in by 4:30.” Without even caring to wait to listen to our accusations and abuses, he left. We all looked at each other and the class was boomed with a tremendous echo of the F word.
I stepped out with my mug of coffee. The rain had subsided, the clouds were still there. Hasse and Nicolas were standing outside, arguing about the tic-tac-toe match that had gone painfully haywire. Much to my exasperation, the two were extremely happy and perhaps the only souls in vicinity to be unaffected by the intensely uninspiring weather. Looking at me, they stopped fighting and came near me. Hasse started talking about a black and white film she had seen on DVD the last night. How I was wishing that she hadn’t seen that film. I was so bored that I was actually praying that both of them turn mute for a day. Nicolas who was also not impressed by Hasse’s black and white movie talk changed the topic quickly.
“Nik, you know… I was coming in the train today, I saw this chick… very hot chick… talking to her boyfriend about India…” He said, desperately trying to make Hasse shut up as he continued to speak, “You know what she told him..?”
“How would I know Nic..?” I asked back, very, very, matter of factly.
“That’s true too, how would you know…” Nic said as if he had never heard of the word Sarcasm ever and continued, “She told him… That India is a beautiful country which is located in the middle-east…” Without even waiting for us to react he started rollicking with laughter. His laughter itself was so infectious, that both of us couldn’t stop laughing with him, less on his joke, more on the way he reacted to his own joke.
“And you know what… She was blonde…” He concluded.
On that moment, both Nic and I instinctively looked at Hasse, who adjusted her cap coincidentally just at that moment, making both of us laugh like there was no tomorrow. Embarrassed she looked away.
“I actually cracked a good joke after a long time…” Nicolas continued, making both of us erupt into peels of laughter once more.
“That makes it two good jokes in a line...” he said, I almost rolling on the floor laughing, Hasse laughing too, a bit of embarrassment still visible on her face.
Vinn came out and said, “Guys, up in the theatre in 5… Something important.”
Before we could react, Vinn was in and up the stairs.
“Must be something about the 5 character exercise” Hasse said.
“Maybe” Nic and I agreed in unison. The boredom had gone thanks to Nic’s antics.
Coffee break was over, Thinking about the 5 characters exercise, playing with Hasse’s cap, much to her annoyance, we walked in the lobby, Nicolas gleefully flashing his card at the door to let us in, the Sin City poster greeted us and we walked up the staircase towards the 100 capacity theatre, 15 days after we had first had entered it.
We sat in the theatre when our professor walked in visually worried. He looked at the class and threw the regular smile at us, albeit it didn’t seem genuine this time.
“There’s a problem, Class” he said, looking at all of us.
There was something about the whole of it which made us all get worried. We looked at him and then at each other. No one understanding what to say, how to react. He walked up to his desk, grabbed a glass of water and gulped it down.
“Is the school shutting down?” was the first thought that came to my mind and I realized that I was actually scared to bits at the thought. “Fuck… Fuck… Fuck…” I said to myself, trying to brush the imagination away. I looked around to see that almost everyone was extremely scared. That didn’t come as a surprise especially since all of us were equally imaginative.
The professor then kept down the glass of water and looked up.
“There’s a problem, Class… We have decided to give you guys a welcome party… and I am afraid that there aint enough beer… Who can go with Alex and get a couple of beer crates?” He said and started laughing.
We all joined him. Though I joined the laughter, the thought of the school getting shut down before I finished my course was worrying me. I was literally scared thinking what I would do if I had to go back to India without the degree. I couldn’t leave the degree unfinished; I was scared of such a day. But somewhere I felt nice about going back to India, going back to her. And all of a sudden the lines I had scribbled in the morning made sense to me.
[i]“When the night falls asleep… When all the lights go dim…
When dreams take control of lives… When even saints sin…
Leaving behind a trail of unfinished chores, I keep walking…
Dreaming of another land… of another person… I keep walking…”[/i]
I smiled at the strange bit of intuition I had experienced. I just thought that how would it be to actually see everything that’s going to happen. I just thought about how a person would feel if he comes to know that he’s going to die, and soon.
“I have a friend called Norwik…” I overheard Hasse telling Nic about a Russian friend of hers.
“Norwik…” The name boomed in my ears. “Norwik Dmitri” I said to myself, a smile appearing on my face. I knew I had got my first story idea. What I didn’t know then was that it was going to change my life, forever.
TO BE CONTINUED.
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