Name-Game

How do I introduce her? What do I endow her with? Damn the readers who are waiting. Through the year I have served them a platter, yet they refuse to be satiated. Thank God they don’t. No time to kill, even the damned yellow submarine packet has a story, and a beautiful one at that, around it. What have I – good girl, done; bad girl, overdone; crazy girl, somewhat covered; wicked woman, all over; creative woman, touched upon. How about the men? I guess I have thrown in a couple of rare, kind husbands and done good to do with what the mean ones deserved. The sub is really done well. I wish I had it in a cobbled-street-side café in one of the European countries instead. Poor Europe, to be reduced to roadside cafes. Long way from the romances one would anticipate instead. The coffee steam would wait to dissipate with the frozen bites the air would attack with. The eyes would wander to find a face that would yield a story. They all seen alike, don’t they? Fair-skinned, tight upper-lipped, fair haired in their black jackets over blue denims, sipping an overload of caffeine even as they are over the phone, rushing, always. Anyway, my character. So, who would it be today?

Firoza makes it so difficult for me. Each time I wish to tell a story, she peeps out of a curtain swaying in nowhere, smiles the smile that probably ruined the fate of many of her business associates and leaves. Character against author. Difficult.

Nayantara never quite got used to the commissioned writing she was now making a name in. Deadlines suited her best. All she ever wanted was to introduce a new kind of project in the newspapers – a column dedicated to an author for a fixed time, to keep writing whatever she wished to; no, not a columnist. She could write anything she wished to. She knew exactly what she would – letters on certain days, and flow of thought on others. On precious days of trapped rainy indoors, she would further the Firozas and Iravatis. Or give Shashank his chance to live the life of a patron. Sundays she would write about food. How many times in life does one get to do what one wishes though? Not Nayantara Bharadwaj, nor her characters.

Thirty five thousand feet below, worlds awaited her expertise. Yet, as she looked out, not for once concerned about what and how to deliver, the cottony clouds of desire pulled her. She was in Haroun-land. This was not a time for characters. She was one.

A quick brush through her hair, a rushed straightening of the hour long creases on her clothes, and her unmissable dab of lipstick – she was ready for the day. She would not be writing about food this Sunday, nor in the near Sundays that she could see. But some Sunday, she would. And she promised herself that people would eat, err, read.

Now that’s a character I hadn’t thought of before. Let me save her before she chooses to run out on me too. Control-S.