Mukherjee Musings

  I finished reading Saikat Majumdar's 'The Firebird' last night. There are books you finish in one go, and then there are stories you wish did not end. You are in no rush to reach the destination, as you have fallen in love with the journey. This story is like that chocolate bar in your refrigerator, which an uncle coming home for the holidays from abroad, gifted you in your childhood. You would take bite-sized chunks every day, wrap the rest of it carefully, and keep it back inside the refrigerator, your heart content with the assurance that, there was more to savour tomorrow.  This book plucked me off my everyday routine – familiar and often mundane – and took me on a journey to a world that lives now only in my moist memories. To lanes and bylanes of a Kolkata that I knew like the back of my hand, and my footprints on them have now been swept away by winds of change. To houses abuzz with warm voices, many of which have been silenced by time. To headlines in yellowed pag...

  Aarti was with Vikram in her one-bedroom flat. It had been raining for quite some time - the dirt washed away, street lights reflected on the wet roads. There were distant rumbles in the evening sky, sounding almost ominous. Very few cars sped down the empty road below. The room was half-lit by a single lamp on the study desk.   It was just the two of them inside the flat. They had returned a while back after dining at the Marriott in Juhu.   “I’ve been missing you for days, Vikram! I don’t remember when we met last,” Aarti’s voice rose a couple of notches, the resentment in her tone pronounced. “And when we met today after weeks, we ended up fighting.”   There were beads of sweat on Aarti’s temples and above her lips. She was visibly tense. There was a bad taste in her mouth, not the kind you carry home after a dinner at the Marriott. Vikram tried to pull her closer but Aarti freed herself and walked away towards the desk. She looked away, trying to hide the...

  The Sinners presents an eclectic mix of interesting characters.   Central to the story is Vikram Oberoi , the head of India Operations of NexGen, which manufactures smart devices and has stood up to competition from global players. He is handsome and charismatic, a ruthless go-getter, and notorious for his dalliances outside his marriage with Manvi Oberoi . Vikram gets into a relationship with Sonal Verma, a new intern in NexGen, much to the chagrin of his secretary Aarti Bansal , with whom he had a very public affair.   The suave Ashwin Saxena, Vikram’s subordinate in NexGen, was his classmate in Management school, who also used to be Manvi’s boyfriend. We also meet a mystery woman laying out honey-traps for vulnerable men in positions of authority or in the possession of confidential company information like Rakesh Behl, who heads Product Engineering, and Agastya, who works in the Networks and Systems Division of the company.   NexGen was set up by Devesh ...

  "Abani saw his mother working round the clock to make both the ends meet. She stitched dresses and made candles; when she found time from cooking in a working women’s hostel, travelling by train to Kolkata and back to their one-roomed rented house, every day of the year. There was never enough to eat at home, electricity was unheard of, the roof leaked in the monsoons and the creaking windows failed to keep the chill at bay during winters. Everything that had been worth anything in the household had already been sold. Abani was determined to make the most of the few opportunities his mother could afford for him. He never missed school, he coaxed his teachers into helping him with his studies, and he studied so hard that he never repeated a  class. Despite the circumstances, his mother never forgot to make his favourite paayesh on his birthday with milk, rice, and jaggery. That was, perhaps, the only happy memory of his childhood other than the movie nights. The nights everyo...

  "She knew she was not in the escort service for the money. She had tried to figure out, again and again, what was she in it for? She had failed to find an answer every time. As she sipped her coffee, she tried one more time. Was it her way of getting back at the man who had been ignoring her emotions and her desires for years? Or, was it her way of assuring herself that, close to thirty-six, she still had it in her to turn a man into an animal blinded by lust, ready to tear her apart? She needed that assurance even after the hours she spent at the gym, and in spite of the compliments that she regularly received from friends on her immaculately maintained shape. Or, was it her search? Her search for warmth, her search for words of love which these men faked in moments of ecstasy, her search for his smell that had not filled her senses for years now. The smell that she keeps looking for in their after-shave colognes, their deodorants, in their breath, or in their bare sweat-slicke...

  "He would love to live in a sleepy town in the hills teaching in a school. He dreamt of living in a small wooden house with a lawn in the front. He dreamt of idle evenings, watching the sun go down behind distant peaks laced with clouds, with the woman of his dreams in his arms, sharing his shawl. And I would love to start my own small coffee shop there. We imagined him teaching in the school at the hill-top. He would walk wearily down that hill to my coffee shop when classes got over every evening. I would keep his favourite cookies and black coffee ready and we would spend hours talking. We did not realize when the school of his dreams and the café of my dreams had, as if by some magic, found the same valley."

  Most of us have a glorified idea about love. I think it comes from the staple diet of Bollywood movies we are all brought up on. Couples strolling on the beach, watching the sunset together, whispering promises of eternity into each other’s ear, and making love on satin sheets in wooden cottages overlooking the Swiss Alps. But life does not play out like this. The movies do not show the truth, what happens backstage. The love fades. The promises lose meaning. And the lovemaking goes from being a passion to a duty, something a married couple ‘is supposed to do at bed time.’ Before long, you reach that stage, where you can count the number of times you do it every month on your fingers, with a couple of fingers to spare. And you surrender to the monotony. The husband and the wife start living separate lives under the same roof – all in the name of security, comfort, marital bliss and sometimes, the fear of what ‘everyone would say’. Abhishek and I are fast approaching that stage in...