Half A Story

I sat at the table, wondering about all those formulas, and how I would use them the next day, hopefully I would, if I remembered them. The pictures of the question bank were haunting me, and I hoped I would just clear the paper the next morning, just 7 hours away. All of a sudden, my phone pinged, and my expectation of the solutions made me look instantly at the screen, which was still displaying the menacing circuits.

It was a friend I had never talked with, but I knew of, and so the conversation began.

“Hello, I have read your blog a lot. It is very nice,” she began.

“Thank you, I’m glad you liked it,” I replied, as I always did.

“I wanted to talk to you about something, can I?”

“Yeah of course, but I’m not sure if now is the right time. I have a couple of exams tomorrow, and I’m not sure if i’ll be passing them. So…”

“Karan please, I’m sure it will interest you, please. You could even write about it on your blog, really,” Sharon pleaded.

The latter half of the sentence peaked my attention, and I allowed her to go on.

“It’s a tale about a friend and me; a close friend,” she began. “We used to read you blog together, so that we could score better in English,” she went on.

Now you know where this is heading, I guess most of you do.

“Damn, then I hope you did score well, ‘cause i’ve never quite managed to get good scores in my English exams.”

“We did well enough. But that’s not what the issue is at the moment. It’s something else. There are some screenshots; I lost some of them when I changed my phone, but there are the others. And there’s a story, of my friend and me.”

We all live in a new world, full of technology, and journals are now too mainstream.

So, BEE and Physics slowly hopped off from the background of my phone into the nonexistence of the RAM, and my whole attention was now held by Sharon, and her account. As she went on, I messaged my friend that I wasn’t going to sleep at all, and not because of studies. I would need a wake-up call, if I did manage to get a chance to shut my eyes.

Her next message brought me back to her story, and I wondered what was going to be so special about this story.

The clock ticked on as she went on and on, and after a long hour of listening to her tale, I asked her, “So, what’s new in this?”

That was when she cut to the main part, and it all started happening.

Wow, that was such a new and innovative way of telling a story. I’ve used it more than once, several times, and I still wonder why I use it. Repetition adds to the effect they said; destroys effect after use in multiple books they never said.

It was my first day at college, and maybe his too. But he seemed just like them, bathed in their color, their mannerisms, unlike me. Here I was, from a different place, different circumstances, a different mentality, different ideals, and different ideas.

Damn, does all this matter? No, it does not. We all know that this guy and the girl will fall in love, or at least one of them will with the other, and then there will be drama. So rather than wasting 20 minutes and 2 songs of a movie, and around 50 pages of a book, i’ll just go to the problem.

And another thing, the style of saying stuff doesn’t change, there’s just this blank page which says, Scene 1 and the place. And no, I didn’t have to read it twice to get it.

I knew I liked him the moment I set my eyes on him, and we were best friends as well. But I wanted more. I was quite scared of telling him what I felt, but then my friend told me that I should go further. We hatched a plan, and…

It always works, and there’s always an outcome, and it’s always the same- plain old Bollywood.

“You know something, I like you,” I said to him.

“I know, I like you too.”

“Really? You know what, I think we should go further, and…”

“What? Are you nuts?”

“What? Why?”

“I like you as a friend and not in any other way.”

The typical angry guy who leaves the girl behind, distressed, mopping and moping. But she tries again, and again, and again, until…

He didn’t talk with me for a whole day when I asked him for the 2^nd time. We sat together, and spent the whole day with each other like we always did, but he didn’t say a word to me. The silence stabbed at my heart, and tears dripped down my cheeks, all of it going unseen to him. He apologized the next day, and made me laugh till my stomach ached; he made up for the sorrow with what he did best, make me smile.

And then, I asked him again. All thanks to my friend.

The main heroine never has a say in her own life. She does everything according to what the hero does, or as per her friends tell her. (Rahul Gandhi dislikes this. #NoWomenEmpowerment)

“I know I’ve hurt you with my replies, and my ignorance. And I’ve also thought on the lines you’ve been talking of. We really are always together, just like a couple, and we do everything like a couple,” he said.

My heart raced faster than the Ferrari he brought to college, as he went on.

“But, I don’t like you in that way. I like you very much as a friend, but I don’t think we should go all the way. Maybe I could be your half boyfriend.”

2 points. Number 1: the Ferrari. Such an open exhibition of the wealth of the rich spoilt brat, and yes, a Ferrari in India. We’ve seen loads roaming the roads, haven’t we? Number 2: Half boyfriend. I guess that’s quite an equivalent of a BFF. But we aren’t mainstream are we?

And then…it happened.

The beep sounded, and my phone shut down. I connected the charger, and waited for it to boot up again, but till then she was gone. I began writing this, till my friend called me and told me that it was time to leave.

I would have written about the present and what happens at the end, but as the book is so not mainstream, but then I was too bored to waste another 100 pages, with a wild goose chase in a foreign location, and etc etc.

Well, to be frank, the half boyfriend just deserved half a story, and nothing more. And yes, you haven’t read that before, especially not in another post of mine.

Copies from the self, because copying from others is too mainstream.

PS: All connections made to recent happenings and other manuscripts are incidental and have been used and placed strategically in order to allow you to make the connection. All in good humor though.