An Elegy for My Lost Stories
When I was fifteen, a friend lent
me a book. I hadn’t asked her for it, I didn’t even know she had it, but she
lent it to me anyway because she had asked me if I had read it and I told her
no, but I wanted to. The book was called
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. To be honest, I didn’t really
know how big a deal this book was in late 2002. I had only passingly seen it
mentioned once in the weekly children’s page of the English newspaper I used to
read as one of those children’s books dismissed and criticized by adults as not
real literature. Some months later, there was a review of the film in the
Bengali newspaper which said the magic didn’t work because the lead character
couldn’t act. (Hey don’t throw stuff at me, okay? I mean, this isn’t even the
worst thing they had said about these films in subsequent reviews. I remember when
they reviewed the fifth film they actually made up their own plot for it). And then of course one of my other friends had
read the books (the first four, at that point) she would constantly talk about
Harry talking to a snake without knowing that he could talk to snakes and going
“how can I speak a language without knowing it?”
So long story short, I eventually
got my hands on the first book and was immediately hooked. In fact, that would
be an understatement. I was sucked into the story and I couldn’t stop reading.
When I finished the book in the course of an evening, it felt like a bit like
bereavement because it was all over. I
loved all the next books, and reread all seven a few hundred times, but in my heart of hearts I yearned for the
magic of that first read, that sense of being so overpowered by a fictional
world that you couldn’t bear to not read and couldn’t bear to leave when you
reached the end. I’ve never forgotten how that first reading devoured my being
and became my world in half a day, how I dreamt of the corridors at night and
how it left an emptiness that ached in its wake.
With Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, it was the slow-burn
of an impossible love, the enchantment of an impossible story, the hollowness you
feel when the show is over and you must return to the mundane. I wish I could
see that magic circus, just once. Keep time with its wonderful clock. Explore its
tents.
I’ve talked about reading Neil
Gaiman’s The Sandman before. How I
could see the end coming, how I knew how it would end and dreaded finding out,
but read on anyway. I hope to revisit that grief in Netflix seasons to come,
someday. We really do open ourselves to this suffering, don’t we? But then, as
the Doctor would say, the point of being happy now is that you will be sad
later. All the stories we love leave a vacuum in the wake of their farewell.
And what do choric bystanders do when the main characters have left the stage?
They carry on, with the pieces that are left.
Every book, series and movie I’ve
ever given my heart to has shaped me in intangible ways into who I am today.
Every story that has shaped me has taken pieces of my heart with them. What
happens to me when those stories end? When the Doctor regenerates, and the
Avengers retire and the Boy Who Lived finds his seventeen years later?
We love stories because they
shape our inner worlds. Stories give us the structure and meanings that we fail
to find in our shapeless, unwavering everydays, bringing us magic and comfort,
helping us trust in wild ideas like love and friendship and everything always
adding up in the end.
Lately, it seems, all my stories
are ending. Years and years ago, in what almost seems like a different age, I
finished reading the seventh Harry Potter
book. No more waiting. Far away as I had been from the madness of midnight
releases, there would be no more heart-stopping speculations about the future
of the people we loved. Yet the movies allowed us to hold on to the magic a
little longer, like a lingering goodbye at the doorstep. We bought our tickets-
ah those crazy, crazy phone calls of pre-WhatsApp group days, matching
schedules and cursing the perpetually late friend because you had all the paper
tickets and she couldn’t get in without you- those were fun. When Deathly Hallows Part I ended, we stayed
glued to our seats, till someone else from an equally dazed group said- Hey,
they won’t start playing Part II if we stayed here. In the summer of 2011, I
was travelling. And everywhere I went, there was one poster. Faces I knew and
loved, and words that I understood, even without knowing the language: It all ends
here.
How the world shifts and stories
change, leaving me bereft and longing for bygone times. But then, that’s the
charm of stories. They remind us of this fleeting, transitory quality of life
itself- often unnoticed in the moment: the coffee-break banters, the stupid
in-jokes and backstories known only to prehistoric buddy groups. There were
friendships that didn’t last, bitter and painful at the time, but the stories
remain etched in memory. They will always be there.
The other day, we went to watch
the new Thor film. Fun watch, we laughed, clapped, had all the expected
reactions. But after we left the theatre, my friend said she missed the
Avengers. And I knew I agreed. It had
not been the same since Endgame. And
as much as I love the new Avengers, I will forever miss the banter of the
original 6, like I will remember how young and adorable the cast of Stranger Things used to be. The past
flows into the present and leads us to the future, and sure, we do our
countdowns, we want it to happen. Nobody wants to stay in the past. But we’ll
always remember what it used to be, what is gone, and how you were happy when
the days were young. Still love it, still miss it, but you’d probably hate it
if it stayed too long.
*I’m attending a faculty training
programme while also navigating through invigilating exams, grading
answer-scripts and prepping for new semester classes, so this post took forever
to write. I’ll just leave you with some lovely playlists that you might like.*
Acoustic Reflections: Relaxing Melodies
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Image by Katie Moum via unsplash.com
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