As the kaali-peeli taxis sped across the Marine Drive and the heavy Bombay rains crashed clumsily against their thick window glass, Anya felt like she had her own ‘Aisha Banerjee’ moment in a very different way. There was no Sid Mehra to confess her fictional love to, she wasn’t in a job which allowed her to explore her inner writer on the side and she definitely didn’t have a handsome boss.
She stood cautiously on the soaking wet stone pavements which mirrored the raging clumpy dark grey skies, taking care to not slip off and bust her skull open on the tetrapods sitting leisurely along the edge of the Arabian Sea.
She often liked to mimic her favourite character, in her regular blue jeans and pure white cotton embroidered kurta, sporting big hoop earrings hiding shyly behind her thick dark brown hair.
She wasn’t big on the mainstream Bollywood movies which used very different colours on an expensive canvas because they fed stories to people and gave them false hope to cradle a dream which would die in this cruel world like a premature baby before it could even scream its birth. But they were her guilty pleasure because sometimes, when the sun went down and the navy blue and black ink spilled across the sky, the giant buildings started sporting tiny pinpricks of lights, and shadows started dancing and settling around, they egged her on with a quarter of Monk and some wishful thinking to paint her dreams on the canvas that was safe and untouched by the world.
She called herself a dry-humoured, ruthless realist like her favourite TV series character, Dr. Gregory House, but even the toughest humans have a tiny heart beating gingerly under the layers of rough muscles, right?
The Old School Milennial 