For as long as I can remember, I have always imagined my life as a part of a larger narrative, chronicled in black and white, in still photographs and in film with a background score set to it. Perhaps it is just that I have always wanted to be a storyteller that I like to imagine my own life as scenes from a novel or movie.
Therefore, in my mind the following scenes are recapitulated with elaborate camera movements and soundtracks.
Setting: Guy waiting amidst barbed wires and telephone booths. Dimly lit scene in the part of night when the dawn in just about to set in.
As she becomes visible walking out from her hostel, the initial chords in The Sounds of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel begin to play. The song plays till she walks up to him.
"What have you put on your face?"
"On my face?!"
"Yeah. It looks different. More shiny."
And something changed.
******
Setting: Inside a BMTC bus. It is still before sunrise.
The camera follows them as they enter the bus and take a seat right at the back. As they sit, Aye Khuda Hafiz from Yuva starts. The camera angle keeps switches between shots of them sitting together and shots of her through his eyes beginning at her face and down to her hands. The song continues right till before Lucky Ali and Alisha Chenoy get into 'wo wos' at the end of the first verse and ends as they settle into a conversation about bus rides with the final long shot of the bus turning at crossing.
******
Setting: Walking up Brigade Road
Dream sequence as he watches her walk ahead and as the guitar starts strumming in the background, he breaks into You've really got a hold on me by the Beatles. They walk along a closed KFC, cigarette shops and the Nigiris which sells imported mangoes(or are they to be exported?) as he continues singing.
******
Setting: In Kaycee's, a small South Indian place, one of the least glamorous and memorable on Church Street which was the only place to be open at that hour.
Dev Chanda Theme 1 plays out as they throw probing questions about respective crushes and those others who had a crush on them.
******
Setting: A figure with a lit cigarette and smoke in a dark room.
A deep, impassive voice recites poetry with only the slight disturbance of the telephone line punctuating it.
What do I want of you?
To walk away with, from the rest.
As in privacy, you discard ceremony
Let your thoughts flow in front of me.
Lean on my shoulders, clasp my fingers.
My love, vouchsafe to me what you have vouchsafed to none.
What no brother, husband, friend and physician was privileged to know.
Talk of all and sundry, vacuities, the pain of existence, the pleasure of living.
Life's big despairs and small glories, what at this moment you lie thinking.
Tell me the whole story.
******
9 comments:
Sigh..so dramatized. It almost makes you imagine a smoky-hazy setting to the whole thing..very dream like.
But yeah, in retrospect, it was pretty dramtic :)
and where goes the film from here? filmic imagination....it echoes within most of us
@ Pinto: Sometimes life is like a story, sometimes stories are like life.
And I have a tendency to glamorise things, apparently.
@ Kanika: wait for the remaining part. An important ingredient in any good story is that it makes you curious.
I'll tell you the ending, Kanika. They got late for the class they had to attend at 8.50. She attended nevertheless, he didn't.
"Something" - The Beatles HAS to feature here somewhere!
I did tell you a lot I had told noone.
@ Anon: I have that effect on people and stop giving away spoilers. It's like breaking the fourth wall.
muhahahaha.. you make it all suspenseful, I feel bad for the readers :D
@ Anon: the trick of being a storyteller lies in leaving some questions unanswered
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