Ayon Banerjee Life

ing

(Stories)

Fifty five shades of love. They are not all love stories, but they’re all stories about love. Love, that keeps us going. And sometimes makes us pause.

Ayon Banerjee

(Bestselling Author of ‘As You Life It’ & ‘Life-ing it’)

Once upon a someone.. Fifty-Five shades of love. They are not all love stories, but they’re all stories about love. Love, that keeps us going. And sometimes makes us pause.

First published in 2022 by BecomeShakespeare.com Wordit Content Design & Editing Services Pvt Ltd, 123, Building J2, Shram Seva Premises, Wadala Truck Terminus, Wadala (E), Mumbai - 400037 T:+91 8080226699 Copyright © 2022 by Ayon Banerjee

All rights reserved. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author/publisher. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. ISBN: 978-93-5610-687-1

This book is a work of fiction, except for the references to the author’s own life. All other names, characters, businesses, events, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is strictly coincidental. The author does not mean disrespect towards any individual, community, event, relationship, profession, or generation depicted in this book. Further, the author requests that the stories here be read as standalone commentaries around the fragility of the human psyche & not be judged with a lens of strict morality. The author has merely imagined the characters in a certain way, and that doesn’t mean that the author supports the conduct of every character in this book, many of whom are deeply flawed & dysfunctional in their own way.

My mother, like your mother, and all mothers, was a remarkable woman.

(Rita Banerjee, 1948-2022)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ayon Banerjee, an Asia Pacific Leader of a Fortune 500 Organization, and the author of two much loved books, ‘As You Life It’ & “Life-ing It’, is a keen observer of human nature & someone who loves documenting his observations as he goes along by collecting & connecting ideas. Over the years, Ayon’s articles & short stories have garnered a steady and diverse readership from around the world. Ayon’s inspirations for his stories are scattered – from his own life to the lives of people he observes, the books he reads, the cinema he adores and the dots he loves to join in his spare time. Though these are all different stories written at different times, the only common theme that perhaps links them is an underlying sense of vacuum that life often leaves us with. These are not all love stories, but they are all stories about love – some kind of love. Love, that keeps us going. And sometimes makes us pause. ‘Once Upon a Someone’ is a collection of those pauses & conversations. Of course, none of the stories are perfect. Just like the author. Or like love, and like life itself. This book is dedicated to every heart that has loved, or wished it had. Or hadn’t.

1. The Fortune Teller

CONTENTS

2. Magic

15 22

3. Kafka

28

6. Forty-One Days

42

4. A brief encounter

5. The tall guy at the bookstore 7. Marshmallows 8. Pune

9. Wordsmith

10. The denim Jacket

11. Once upon a time 12. Chemistry 13. Pari -1

14. Pari – 2

15. It’s complex

16. The wrong town 17. Jazz

18. The incoherent girl

32 38 49 54 59 66 69 72 76 80 86 91 96 99

19. Emma

106

22. Only flowers

123

20. Pretty woman 21. Ahaan

111 117

23. Birds of a weather

127

26. Meanwhile, at the corner table

146

24. Finding ‘Jerry Pinto’ 25. Dominique

27. People you may know 28. Bloodline

29. Peanut butter 30. ‘Annie Hall’

31. Something about an age 32. From a distance 33. Lilian

34. Diet coke

135 142 151 154 157 160 170 173 177 179

35. Castaways

184

38. Relativity

194

36. Frozen

37. Moments

39. Friday nights with Anna 40. Retribution

41. The black bag 42. Passing by 43. Last rain

44. A Proud Man

45. The celebration

46. Turning back, one day 47. Ancient town

187 190 196 199 204 214 217 220 224 229 232

48. Friday evening blues

234

51. Asahi

245

49. Sushi

50. Annet’s house

52. The man-woman thing 53. Mr. & Mrs. Bose -

One for the road – The Storyteller The Beginning

Acknowledgments

Endorsements by prominent voices

Endorsements For ‘As You Life It’ By Prominent Industry Voices

237 240 252 256 263 271 274 278 282

PREFACE

It’s 1:30 AM, April 3rd, 2022. I am at Chennai airport, having crossed over from the international to the domestic terminal, pleasantly surprised at the absence of (expected) overdone protocols & hostility that’s become the new normal for the world during the past 2 years. The last time I was at Chennai airport, Ma was around. The last time I was anywhere, Ma was around.

It’s a strange absence. One that sucks away all the presence that made for my life this far.

Because, in the beginning – there was Ma. Even before there was me, there was Ma. So, it gets a little difficult to process this fact that she has passed over. Abruptly, quietly and without any fuss. Just like her. People often say you cannot choose which parent you love more. I think that this is more a qualitative rather than a quantitative statement. Indeed, you can never love both your parents the same way. And you cannot miss both your parents the same way. Each parent fills a groove. And they add up into the you who you are. And each leaves a void that stays. Till you do.

My mother, like your mother, and all mothers, was a remarkable woman. Today, let me write about her. Because, while she’s moved on to her next plane, her earthly entity still awaits closure. Obviously, this is not a eulogy. She would hate it if someone eulogized her and might have probably burst into laughter at the suggestion. She was someone who probably invented self-deprecating humour. Her ability to laugh at herself, and at life, was something that might have hit you first when (& if) you met her for the first time. Like Arunima (my wife) says – She was such an incorrigible dude! Quick flashback. It’s the swinging sixties. The era of drainpipe trousers & Shammi Kapoor. And a Naxalite Bengal. A 16-year-old girl faints during her board examination, much to her dismay (it’s her favourite paper - History). Tests reveal a brain thrombosis, a condition that automatically translated into a death warrant those days.

There were two problems though. She came from a tough family of immigrants held together by a cop dad, a stoic mom and ten siblings – five brothers (three by blood & two adopted orphaned children) & five sisters, the eldest of whom had taken over the reins of the family after the father’s premature passing. A double MA & a legend in their suburban small town, the elder one took it upon herself to get her little sister back from the dead, even if it meant a daily commute for twenty months between Asansol & Calcutta where she was hospitalized. She succeeded. Probably that was the fight that would go ahead & write Ma’s character. And destiny. She walked out of hospital & into life, unfazed. Absolutely freed of mortal fear. Maybe she encountered some divine whispers during those months in the hospital. Defying death so early in life can alter your entire identity.

Like I said at the start – If I observed & revered Baba for his relentless love for life & his passion to help others, I was in awe of Ma for her eerie calm, her maddening composure under stress & her (sometimes) irrational sense of humour. She was like someone who had won all her battles & laid down her arms. Or probably someone who had let go of all her battles, realizing the futility of human will against the Creator’s design. But if I must point that one thing about Ma that shaped me as a human being, it was her ability to make friends. With one & all. She was, as they say, a ‘friendly sort’ & a gold-standard conversationalist, someone you would go to confide your deepest secrets in & vent your angriest rant to. It did not matter if you were young or old, a Gujarati, a Marathi, a Parsi or a Punjabi. A teenaged girl or an octogenarian gentleman – everyone who knew her, instantly warmed up to her. Probably her self-assured & light-hearted demeanour put people at ease. Since my earliest memories of her to the most recent ones, she was always surrounded by friends, folks who would never cease to remind me how lucky I was to have a mother like her. I wish you could have seen her having groups of grown-up men & women in splits of uninhibited laughter with her anecdotes, throughout the memory-scape that I hold of her. I often use the phrase ‘People-Person’ to describe sociable personalities. My mother was the mother of all ‘People-Persons’. Someone who could win any election

just by virtue of being so popular, not out of fear or respect on demand, but out of sheer fondness & love that she could command.

(Once, when I was about six & we were returning from a Durga Puja Visarjan – an arrogant & drunk upstart started abusing a gentleman from our township & in no time we saw my mercurial Baba step in and get into a scuffle with this guy (that was my Baba – the Abdullah of Begaani Shaadis). And as Baba was pummelling this fellow, his wife coincidentally was seated next to my mother in the bus. As the agitated lady asked my mother who this ‘ruffian’ was who was roughing up her husband, my mother, with the straightest of faces on her face, shrugged & calmly stated that she had no idea! She added that she empathized with the lady & that such people are quite a nuisance to the society. Completely denying that she even KNEW my dad, let alone acknowledging that she was his wife! Seated on her lap, I was absorbing my first lessons in general management, like she told us later (much to Baba’s annoyance) – Now, your father has already picked up a fight for a silly reason and made an enemy. Why should both of us also enlist in an uncalled-for animosity? That was my Ma! 😊 ) Some time back I took a Hogan Assessment Test. If you’ve taken one, you might remember those repetitive trick questions that probe into your deepest corners & peel you layer by layer. It kept asking me in different forms, whether I was someone who is likely to hold a grudge or move on, someone who disbelieves that it’s something beyond science that runs this universe, someone who is scared of taking the path less trodden, someone who has a streak of ‘right rebellion’ in him & someone who did not need a title to step in, stand out and take lead when it comes to build a friendly consensus. Sitting alone in a near empty airport at a Godforsaken hour, the Hogan questions swim in the backyard of my mind as I strike a conversation with an elderly gentleman from Northeast India, waiting for the same flight as me. Soon, we are chatting like old friends. He tells me about the antics of his grandkids. I tell him about my daughter’s hilarious take on N95 face masks (‘dog-vibes’ as she says). And suddenly the world does not seem so deserted any more. There are two of us. There are stories. There is laughter. There is life.

Soon, we have a group of late-night airport staffers gather around us. I ask if anybody is in the mood for a cup of tea. They all say yes. I volunteer to sponsor. A young man goes to fetch the tea from the nearby stall, waking up the halfasleep attendant. The tea arrives. Soon we are all engrossed in a roaring adda. Soon, nobody is a stranger. Of course, tomorrow will be a tough day. As they say, you lose your mother only once in life. Letting go of your umbilical bondage is not easy. Tomorrow is going to wear me out. But for tonight, I will live, I will smile. And I will try to leave a smile on a few other faces. Because that’s my Ma who will live on in me. My dude. My superstar. My hero.

Go ahead Ma. Go shake up the heavens a bit. The Gods seem to have lost their sense of humour these days. I will miss you. Every minute. From here, till the finish line. Then we can have a hearty laugh on the other side of forever. Hence this book.

Some books get written over a period of time. Others write themselves when it’s time. Though these are stories written by me at different times, the only common theme that links them perhaps is a sense of vacuum that life often leaves us with.

This collection is my humble tribute to the storytellers I grew up on, from movie makers to fiction writers, from my salesmen colleagues to my bohemian friends. But above all, this is my send-off gift to my Ma, the greatest storyteller I have ever known and the greatest book lover I have ever seen. From as long as my conscious memory goes and right till her last journey from her flat to the hospital, we had never seen Ma without a book with her. Despite her failing health in her last hours, the only complaint she ever raised was that her fading eyesight that was not allowing her to read properly. I sincerely hope you enjoy this collection. Ayon Banerjee June 2022

ONE

THE FORTUNE TELLER

“Are you seriously able to read faces?”, I asked my somewhat weird looking companion.

We were standing near the door of the speeding train. The East Indian countryside sped in the reverse direction, bringing in brief glimpses of an occasional open cast coal mine, or a distant chimney of some small steel mill.

Arka cleared his throat and gave me a smile that defied any suggestion of pride or high handedness. He simply shrugged like a man who can’t help it if he possesses some quality that others don’t. It was difficult to guess Arka’s age. “Anything between fifty & sixty-five”, I had assumed. Endowed with a generous touch of grey on his scalp and chin, Arka was a moderately built man of about my own height, and someone who spoke slowly and deliberately, like …, I struggled with the word….. “Storyteller?” …… Not quite.

Yeah, a “Fortune teller!”.

We were smoking cigarettes. I noticed that Arka didn’t inhale the smoke, just like me. But he seemed to enjoy sending his smoke rings out of the open train door, where they would meet the tangential droplets of rain of the July morning and dissolve into the moist air.

In the past fifteen minutes Arka had told me things about myself that had stunned me. Some of the stuff that he whispered between puffs, were things that even I don’t like to think of anymore. Some deep secrets, unspoken desires, and unrealized dreams. Had it not been for the sceptic in me, I would have already become a crazy fan of his psychic powers. But somehow, I still 15

A mysterious fortune teller on a train across a timescape helps simplify the mysteries of life. Green leopards, flying whales, marshmallow wars & a quirky origin story of everything from gender equality to global warming. A cynical poet & an affluent socialite spend an evening together & empty each other’s hearts of all the unused melancholy in them. An incoherent girl helps simplify the life of the most sorted boy of her class. A reluctant purchase of a jar of peanut butter leads to a serendipitous discovery of a dead author. A fiction writer’s characters rise in revolt & refuse to obey his pen. A deserted town that has only unmanned flower stalls left in it. Two men from different generations cling on to each other with their last grip on a vanishing bloodline. Two hyper-competitive professionals become friends for life under the unlikeliest of circumstances. A voyeur and an exhibitionist discover one another, each unaware of the other’s version of reality. Two star-crossed lovers whose orbits keep colliding & drifting away from each other. A man misses his regular commute & walks into an alternate existence in a strange land. A queer old man shows up & intrudes young Kafka just as he is about to propose to his girlfriend. A man falls back in love with his wife the day after their divorce. An age ends & another begins when three destinies come together during a brief intermission for one violent collision before disintegrating forever, taking all the music with them. These are only a few of the routes by which Ayon Banerjee takes you on a roller-coaster ride of plots that cut through genres & weaves together an unputdownable collection of stories which seamlessly drift from the classical to modern style of telling short stories that narrate missed journeys & accidental destinations, archived conversations & clandestine confessions, love & loss, destiny & time. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ayon Banerjee, an Asia Pacific Leader of a Fortune 500 Organization, and the author of two much loved books, ‘As You Life It’ & “Life-ing It’, is a keen observer of human nature & someone who loves documenting his observations as he goes along by collecting & connecting ideas. Over the years, Ayon’s articles & short stories have garnered a steady and diverse readership from around the world. Ayon’s inspirations for his stories are scattered – from his own life to the lives of people he observes, the books he reads, the cinema he loves and the dots he loves to join in his spare time. Though these are all different stories written at different times, the only common theme that perhaps links them is an underlying sense of vacuum that life often leaves us with. These are not all love stories, but they are all stories about love – some kind of love. Love, that keeps us going. And sometimes pause. ‘Once Upon a Someone’ is a collection of those pauses & conversations. Of course, none of the stories are perfect. Just like the author. And like love, and like life. This book is dedicated to every heart that has loved, or wished it had. Or hadn’t.