1:
She sat reading an article intently on the train when someone snatched the glasses in her hand. Shocked, she turned around to find a familiar face from an unfamiliar time – an uncle who was once a family friend. She was happy to meet him and offered to have a conversation near the train’s doors. What followed was enquiry about family members, boyfriends, health, gossip and career.
And then he said, “For your intelligence, you should have been born in a Brahmin family.”
The Dalit smiled and walked away.
2:
Everybody teased him for dozing off.
He would dose off in-between work, conversations, watching reels, sometimes even during a piss. You lose sight of him, and the next moment you know you’ve lost him to sleep so deep that it has instantly transported him to a different land of colors, and patterns, but mostly of silence.
“What do you do in the night bro?”
“Whose keeping you awake bro?”
“Why can’t you just fix a sleep schedule bro?”
Tantrums would come off like memes shared every day.
That evening, he would walk up to the medical store, more anxious than usual, to pop pills his psychiatrist prescribed for insomnia.
3: It always happens within the first three sentences of an acquaintance.
First: Hi, I’m so and so.
Second: So, what do you do?
Third: What are those cuts on your hand?
4:
Suchithra’s Instagram reel hadn’t reached 100K views, while her previous reel had reached 1M.
5: Ten colleagues gathered around a box of sweets because one of them had returned from their native place and was sweet enough to think of their workspace. An 11th latecomer enters to find a sweatbox lying alone on the table.
“So what’s the occasion?” he asks.
“Mr Daniel is having a baby.”, a colleague replies.
The room erupts in laughter.
Mr. Daniel works in silence, his mind consumed with the thoughts of his troubled wife and how they are doing everything in their power to have a baby.
6:
She watched her dearest friend suffer in silence while an air of helplessness surfaced over her because she couldn’t offer the only thing he had asked for – Be with me, this is beautiful.
7:
He wouldn’t live, he wouldn’t die. He wouldn’t let them live even when he was healthy, he wouldn’t let them live even on his deathbed. He was stubborn. He just wouldn’t go.
No, not yet.
The father was bedridden, the mother had given the last of her savings, blood was oozing, and the eldest son was afraid to enter the room, so his sister would step in, and that would be the defining moment of her life.
8:
Sanju’s grandfather wanted to upload what he thought was the happiest photo of his lifetime on Facebook. It had his three sons, two daughters, and five grandchildren caught between a loud laugh on a Diwali evening. Even his cat, Pepper, had posed like the queen she was.
He had forgotten to press the upload button.
9:
It was not their first pride march, nor would it be their last. They wore cute black T-shirts with text that only made sense when read together like their lives did only if they lived together.
Amrita’s read “trouble”.
Divya’s read “Wherever I go trouble follows.”
The drum beats grew louder, beautiful colours splashed on the road, love was in the air, and liberation in the heart.
But, Amrita weeped, and weeped as they walked entwined in each other’s arms. Divya said nothing for a long stretch until she did – “Someday our parents will come with us to pride.”
10:
Saturdays were working.