Kartik Sharma's Blog

‘My boss was not supposed to bring her kids!’ Vidvaan apologized as he escorted us out of his house party. We were two too many for…

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Kabir and his wife, Rishta, moved half a world away from their families, to build a life in a new country. While it came with its…

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I stepped out looking for Happiness

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Hi Prateek. I wrote a post just now that’s about chasing happiness (not), and a common friend shared this post from you which uses similar tools to make a slightly different point. I look forward to reading more from you!

…and the role of labor and its fruit: outcomes

Previously on this show: I explored the theme that chasing happiness is a fool’s quest and so is true for its lesser cousin — joy, and that peace is not only the more attainable goal, but also the one we need (as opposed to the one we want).

A sine curve attempting to approximate the state of mind; degrees are perhaps days or weeks, but the graph surely not drawn to scale

However, I also believe in the cliche of to each, her own.

Hence, for the purpose of this post, I am going to call the holy grail as Peace, Happiness or Joy. Or PH&J, in short, carrying in it’s meaning a reference to a sandwich that I recently have grown to like.

I imagine PH&J as a continuum. There’s nothing at the time of one’s birth and we gradually start accumulating PH&J as we pass through this world. I also imagine this as intrinsically an internal possession of all who possess a prefrontal cortex.

That’s the preface. Or a preamble. I will digress for a bit here before I amble on to the point. For those in a hurry, or those who are pressed for time, or those for whom TL;DR might be a real risk, or the megalobibliophobes, please skip the next paragraph. For the hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobes, I apologize for using the word.

I believe that a preamble is a critical part of human speech, and more so in this current era where we are all readers with opinions. The function of a preamble is to make sure that the listeners and readers are on the same page as the speaker or the author — without which, much of what the speaker or the author has to say runs the risk of being lost in translation. Especially in absence of a viable brain machine interface when we are stuck with a rustic tool of language, that I for one am in no rush to feel nostalgic about.

Coming back to the purpose of writing this post. With the starting point established above, I recently came to realize that PH&J is akin to a rainbow. It’s something that is real as long as you can cherish it from afar. And it’s something that is unreal as soon as you start chasing it.

This isn’t meant to render us inactive, although there’s value in doing that too from time to time. We all have an intrinsic and internal base of PH&J and it’s important to cherish that. At the same time, it is natural and one could argue, almost essential, to seek a delta addition to this base and to attain a higher state on the PH&J continuum.

For that additional delta PH&J, we need to plan, work, put ourselves out there and sometimes also struggle or fight for something we believe in or fight against something we believe is wrong. And this entails being brave and vulnerable and putting yourself at the risk of being hurt. The times you succeed, the delta addition to the PH&J is apparent. But it also means that sometimes, you will fail. And when you fail, it’s possible to feel that you’ve lost your inner PH&J. But that’s the understandable theatrics, the drama, the heat of the moment. In the long run, it’s important that you are able to let go of the outcome and still find the base PH&J. And the best part of the quest of bravery and aspiration, and actually the drama that ensued as well, is that it adds to the PH&J automatically.

Then you get up and go again. Like Sisyphus, because that’s probably is the essence of being alive. We might not know how or if our actions carry a deeper meaning but we find meaning in the action itself and allow it to enrich our lives.

And that’s, quite literally, absurd. Footnote: absurdism is a school of though that is neither existential (all actions carry deep meaning and repeat in perpetuity) nor nihilistic (life has no meaning, nothing we do matters), but rather a shrug of not knowing, and being okay with the fact that we might never know, whether there’s any meaning. And for me, that makes it so wonderful!

Coming back to the metaphor, as you either drive on the highway of life or are driven, depending on where you stand on the free-will vs. destiny spectrum, don’t forget to look out of the window once in a while at the PH&J rainbow. Looking at it enriches it’s beauty as only gradually the colors become discernible. As you move along, the vantage point changes and hopefully the vista of lake and mountains will be visible soon in the background, adding to the PH&J rainbow’s beauty.

Victoria Falls, Zambia. Picture Credit: Rigveda Kadam

And another thing of emphasis here is that PH&J itself is basically outcome independent, even if that’s not always intuitive. Even if your new vantage point does not allow you to see the rainbow with a better background, the rainbow itself remains beautiful.

A nerdy way to look at it is that to introduce “outcomes” as an independent variable or a predictor in the PH&J function might seem to increase the coefficient of fit, or R-squared— but it is essentially overfitting the model and attempting to capture on the curve what is essentially just noise. The argument, then, is that the adjusted R-squared is lower than that of the function without “outcomes”.

Please don’t just hashtag this

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A poem

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The pressures of not being one and the perks of being one

Chapter 4: SriLax, man!

No congratulations to those of you who had already figured out their couple name. This one was fairly obvious: LaxSri makes no sense — literally or figuratively. LaSri might have worked if they were in France, even if it would have been disappointing for Laxman because he got only two letters in as opposed to Srishti’s three, but that’s a worry for a parallel universe, not very many quantum-probabilities-along-the-string-of-choices away.

At Mahabelly in Saket for breakfast, they are shown a table next to a family of three. The husband and wife are laughing as their seven year old kid is driving his toy truck over his appam. A crash with the bowl destabilizes the truck and it runs over the fish. The driver lands in the Sol Kadi.

‘We can wait,’ Srishti tells the waiter.

‘For?’

‘Another table.’

The waiter frowns. ‘We just opened and it’ll be at least an hour before any of the other tables become free.’

‘Let’s sit, Srish,’ Laxman says. Srish was inspired from the first Indian superhero Bollywood movie, Krrish in which a man calls an alien on Earth by playing below average music with extremely limited number of notes. The alien cures his mentally challenged kid and gives him super intelligence and super strength, why not, right? — since he was already at it, by placing a hand on his forehead. This apparently leads to DNA modification and elevation above the laws of physics, why not, right? — since the writer was already at it, because this kid’s kid is born with the ability to fly.

No wonder then that Srishti never approved of the nickname. The same way Laxman rejected being called Lucky. In hindsight, he should have accepted that, because she ended up calling him Laxu and there’s nothing he could do about it.

Srish and Laxu, while pretty stupid apart, were SriLax together.

They sit, but the waiter gives them a zingy look. Laxman can see that he is about to throw up some words. And before Laxman can warn him, the waiter’s physical container is unable to restrain his enthusiasm. Despite all the training.

‘Kids are god’s gift,’ he gyaans them, in a whisper so that the table next to theirs does not hear him. Also, he might have implied a capital g in god, but there’s no way to know that for sure.

‘Well said, brother,’ Laxman says, trying to diffuse the situation.

‘Let me note down that wisdom,’ Srishti says and actually writes it down on her Google Note. ‘Does this accurately capture your profound thought?’ she shows him her phone.

The waiter continues to frown and is unsure of his options.

‘Did you prepare this at home or was it spontaneous?’ she continues the relentless onslaught. ‘I am really curious.’

The waiter’s disbelief at her aggression coupled with the inability to say anything back given his situation lands him in a momentary stupor.

‘Ok then,’ she says. ‘That nugget of wisdom was the perfect appetizer. You’ve really made me hungry for more,’ Srishti says. ‘Please get the menu now.’

The waiter leaves shaking his head. There’s definitely going to be spit, if not worse, in their breakfast.

‘Calm down,’ Laxman says, holding her hand. ‘It’s not his fault.’

She glares at him in visible anger. He immediately regrets his poor choice of words.

She takes out her book and reads in silence. He looks around for a bit, counts his breathing to calm himself and to push away the dancing Xanax out of his mind, calling to him seductively to the bottom of the pacific.

The menu comes and they place their order. Her’s is specific, as always. She already knew what she wanted. Laxman takes his time. In the end, he copies her order and changes it just a bit to make it seem like he knows what he’s doing.

All this while, he tries to avoid looking at the kid but, perhaps because of that, it is all that he can focus on now.

He opens the book and tries to read, but is not able to make any sense of the sentence he is reading. It doesn’t help that he’s on page 329 of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

He channels all his in inner strength to get through the sentence and forget the reality that he is actually in. He doubles down…

A breeze that blows the mind

With his mind adequately blown, he comes back to the real world where the kid is nowhere to be seen. The parents are lost on their mobile phones with a look of disgust on their faces. Did they fight? Laxman thinks. Did he miss the fight? Or were they fighting on text messages right now to not make a scene? The furious typing from both of them seems to back the theory, but he’ll never know.

‘I am going to step out for a smoke,’ he says.

Srishti nods without looking up from her book. She’s still calming herself down. Laxman knows. He is familiar her process.

Outside, he sees the kid running around with his toy truck which now flies, apparently.

‘Get out of the way, uncle,’ he yells.

Laxman finds himself obeying, or was it indulging?, the kids command.

‘You got saved by this much, uncle,’ he says, eyes wide with the excitement of relief and thumb and index finger very close to each other to underscore the narrow escape.

‘Really? Thank you for saving my life,’ Laxman says.

‘Don’t thank me. Just be more careful in the future,’ the kid says. Laxman wonders if he’s mature beyond his years or repeating an adult’s warning made to him, complete with the gravitas. ‘You don’t want to be hit by a flying truck, ok? Trust me, uncle. Trust me.’

‘Ok, what would have happened if I was hit by it?’

‘Worst way to die, uncle.’

‘How come?’

‘No one gives a flying fuck if you are hit by a flying truck,’ he says.

Laxman blurts out a laughter, unwittingly. He knows he should not encourage the kid for cussing, but he was completely caught off guard.

‘That does sound like a lonely way to die. Who told you that?’

‘Mom.’

It was as if uttering those words rung something in his head. His eyes immediately widened. ‘Ok, bye uncle.’ He hugged his leg briefly, and what seemed like professionally, before running back inside.

Laxman walked over to the pan shop and bought a cigarette and lit it.

‘It’s not right what you wife said in there.’

Laxman hadn’t seen the waiter smoking there. He was probably trying to shake the incident off to calm himself. Laxman found himself hoping that he had at least passed their order on to the kitchen.

‘Ok,’ Laxman said. The only response he could think of.

‘What do people like you know about kids, huh? Sitting in your high horses and judging other people and their kids.’

‘No judgement, man. Ok? And I apologize on her behalf.’

‘Yeah, you can say what you want. I saw what I saw.’

Laxman ignored the man. Trying to still his mind and smoke his cigarette in peace.

‘You are disgusting.’

So now, this was a classic overreaction. Laxman was certain that the waiter had completely lost the plot on the original point. He was angry because Srishti had hurt his ego. Or worse still, his male ego. And there’s no outlet for that. In or after an argument with a man, you have options. Get in a shouting match, for example, or asking to step out and settle the argument man to man, as they say. If things calm down, you shake hands or even hug and move on.

But how does a man do any of that with a woman? There are no clear pathways to dealing with it. Yet. The options exercised by some, in absence of a healthy outlet, are criminal in nature. Fortunately, this waiter was not into crime. Or so Laxman hoped. At least that’s one way to explain how he’s struggling to move on from the argument in his own way. He doesn’t have a revenge plan in his head — because if he did he would have probably calmed down.

Does that mean we should be scared of the calm people around? Laxman thinks. Are the anxious ones actually so because they are thinking too much and trying to find ways to be OK with a world moving and changing faster than they can keep pace with?

The thought makes him feel a little empathy, even kindness perhaps, towards the waiter.

‘Look man,’ he says, trying to copy Obama’s voice and mannerisms so that he’s taken seriously, ‘it’s got nothing to do with you, OK? It’s deeply personal for us, so please don’t take it the wrong way.’

‘Just tell me one thing then,’ the waiter pauses as he exhales his smoke. ‘Do you guys hate kids? Or do you judge people who have kids? Be honest.’

Laxman’s head did a somersault. The shot had been fired and it was at point blank range. No way to dodge anymore. He closed his eyes to gather himself. Flashes. Memories. Things flying out uncontrollably from the exhumed chest of the past.

He opened his eyes. ‘Not at all, man. Quite the opposite.’

The waiter handed him a tissue, his training and instinct finally kicking in.

Order restored. Temporarily though. Before another chaos began.

By Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I googled and could not find this anywhere. So I sifted through the book to find a page without a full stop. About 45 minutes later, I found it. It is page 329 of the edition I have (cover above).

Then I sat and typed the whole 880 words of the sentence and 45 minutes later I had it.

Enjoy!

“Nor had they asked her, even out of courtesy, why she was so pale or why she awoke with purple rings under her eyes in spite of the fact that she expected it, of course, from a family that had always considered her a nuisance, an old rag, a booby painted on the wall, and who were always going around saying thing against her behind her back, calling her churchmouse, calling her Pharisee, calling her crafty, and even Amaranta, may she rest in peace, had said aloud that she was one of those people who could not tell their rectums from their ashes, God have mercy, such words, and she had tolerated everything with resignation because of the Holy Father, but she had not been able to tolerate it anymore when that evil Jose Arcadio Segundo said that the damnation of the family had come when it opened its doors to a stuck up highlander, just imagine, a bossy highlander, Lord save us, a highland daughter of evil spit of the same stripe as the highlanders the government sent to kill workers, you tell me, and he was referring to no one but her, the godchild of the Duke of Alba, a lady of such lineage that she made the liver of president’s wives quiver, a noble dame of fine blood like her, who had the right to sign eleven peninsular names and who was the only mortal creature in that town full of bastards who did not feel all confused at the site of sixteen pieces of silverware, so that her adulterous husband could die of laughter afterword and say that so many knives and forks and spoons were not meant for a human being but for a centipede, and the only one who could tell with her eyes closed when the white wine was served and on what side and in which glass and when the red wine and on what side and in which glass, and not the like the peasant of Amaranta, may she rest in peace, who thought that white wine was served in the day time and red wine at night and the only one on the whole coast who could take pride in the fact that she took care of her bodily needs only in golden chamberpots, so that colonel Aureliano Buendia, may he rest in peace, could have the effrontery to ask her with his Masonic ill humor where she had received that privilege and whether she did not shit shit but shat sweet basil, just imagine, with those very words, and so that Renata, her own daughter, who through an oversight had seen her stool in the bedroom, had answered that even if the pot was all gold and with the coat of arms, what was inside was pure shit, physical shit, and worse even than any other kind because it was stuck-up highland shit, just imagine, her own daughter, so that she never had any illusions about the rest of the family, but in case she had the right to expect a little more consideration from her husband because, for better or for worse, he was her consecrated spouse, her helpmate, her legal despoiler, who took upon himself of his own free and sovereign will the grave responsibility of taking her away from her paternal home, where she never wanted for or suffered from anything, where she wove funeral wreaths as a pastime, since her godfather had sent a letter with his signature and the stamp of his ring on the sealing wax simply to say that the hands of his goddaughter were not meant for tasks of this world except to play the clavichord, and, nevertheless, her insane husband had taken her from her home with all manner of admonitions and warnings and had brought her to that frying pan of hell where a person could not breathe because of the heat, and before she had completed her Pentecostal fast he had gone off with his wandering trunks and his wastrel’s accordion to loaf in adultery with the wretch of whom it was only enough to see her behind, well, that’s been said, to see her wiggle her mare’s behind in order to guess that she was a, that she was a, just the opposite of her, who was a lady in a palace or a pigsty, at the table or in bed, a lady of breeding, God-fearing, obeying His laws and submissive to His wishes, and with whom he could not perform, naturally, the acrobatics and trampish antics that he did with the other one, who, of course, was ready for anything, like the French matrons, and even worse, if one considers well, because they at least had the honesty to put a red light at their door, swinishness like that, just imagine, and that was all that was needed by the only and beloved daughter of Dona Renata Argot and Don Fernando del Carpio, and especially the letter, an upright man, a fine Christian, a Knight of the Order of the Holy Sepulcher, those who received direct from God, the privilege of remaining intact in their graves with their skin smooth like the cheeks of the bride and their eyes alive and clear like emeralds.”

The pressures of not being one and the perks of being one

You can read the Chapter 1 here, and Chapter 2 here before proceeding.

Chapter 3: The Wife Who Leads

This is her story too.

The account of Laxman’s life is incomplete without her. Who she was before she met him, who she became after she met him and who she is now is force far stronger than anything else that shapes Laxman.

‘I miss you,’ he says, as she stirs in bed because of the aroma of the coffee.

She smiles half a smile with her half open eyes communicating the struggle between balancing her sleepiness and Laxman’s expectation. His day starts, before he has had the first sip of his coffee.

She sits up, still under the sheets and they drink their coffee in a comfortable quiet, her still in bed under the covers and him sitting next to her on the edge of the bed. It has taken them several years of being together to understand that the quiet is their friend. It lets them enjoy the best of what they like about each other, without letting it be polluted by their words. This quiet is the stillness that lets their love rise up and engulf them.

‘Didn’t you say that you never want to half ass anything?’ she says, sleepily.

‘That was a long time ago,’ he says.

‘It still applies, so I would recommend that you move your ass over here. You don’t have to sit so uncomfortably.’ Her smile is full now.

Laxman smiles and obliges. His back touches her leg under the cover and sends a familiar warmth up his spine. He closes his eyes and imagines his heart being engulfed in the warmth and his anxiety submerged in it. ‘What do you want to do today?’

‘Read my book,’ she says without hesitating.

‘Ok, I’ll read too. We can go out and get breakfast too.’

‘And better coffee.’

‘A never ending quest,’ Laxman says. ‘Just accept that mine is the best.’

‘Instant coffee is the best?’

Laxman shrugs and they both laugh, soundlessly.

Her name is Srishti. As far as inheriting one’s name goes, she epitomizes the theory: she was his world. But that would be taking away from her agency. She is not because Laxman thinks, a corollary to Laxman thinks therefore she is. The descriptor of ‘Laxman’s wife’, while probably one of the most beautiful aspect of Laxman’s life, does not begin to explain her identity.

Wife is a simple enough word, if not for all the layers in enfolds. A cultural context, a meaning ascribed unthinkingly and unknowingly. A big part of her life and its struggle is about navigating these implied meanings and the context. It is then imperative to take a few words to understand Srishti.

Seemingly cold but incredibly warm probably begins to describe her nicely. Yes, let’s start like this. Srishti believes that people need to earn a place in your life and that it’s too valuable a spot to be given away just like that. When people meet her for the first time she opens an unconscious tab. As they spend time with her, there’s continuous unspoken debit and credit being managed in the tab. Hence the seemingly cold.

Once the balance in the tab becomes enough, she is open to explore investing in them. In Laxman’s case, it had earned him something like a date. In other cases, it can be personal conversations over drinks or dinner, or an evening spent dancing at a club.

If she has to go straight into a conversation with someone she has not had the time to gauge through the meticulous credit and debit process, she is a complete wreck. She is likely to come across as catatonic, that’s how disengaged she can be from the proceedings of such rendezvous.

In the normal course of events, however, and over the course of the evening she takes out time to consider investing in you, if you continue to build your credit, you might qualify as more than an acquaintance. And so things are given a chance to build further.

But an important thing here is to not confuse the process with an entrance exam. You can’t celebrate once you’ve cleared and gotten through. Ok fine, you can celebrate — as much as one celebrates a milestone, compared with the destination — but it’s not over. The debit and credit process from the tab will continue ad infinitum. But after clearing the initial hurdle, she lets people take loans: negative balances in the tab are allowed as long as there are time bound credits made back into the tab.

To be her friend is to be in her inner circle of people, a spot that is neither easily given nor easily maintained, but a spot that she cherishes and values more than most. Hence the incredibly warm.

Laxman to her was a superhero who could have done no wrong, not very many years ago. She chose him for the most valuable spot in her life, of which she knew there was ever going to be only one, not very many years ago.

They get ready in thirty minutes which entails bumping into each other several times.

Srishti is what one might call ‘successful’ in the conventional sense. She is doing well on her job and doing more than what most middle-aged people do. She is a Director at one of the biggest multinational consulting companies. But that’s just a title, if you asked Srishti. For her, every day is a challenge and a struggle. She doesn’t stop to consider even for a moment if she is successful. That’s a moot label, one that she doesn’t believe in. The world creates many binaries to understand others: successful or failure, being one such. These labels, however, don’t necessarily mean much to people these labels are meant for. Sure, they help simplify things from afar and for strangers, mostly — ones who don’t have the time or energy to invest in understanding the details of another’s circumstances. They help bring order to what could easily be chaotic in a world without labels. You look at someone or hear about them and they are already being shredded into bits that can neatly go into the buckets in your brain. And you can rarely reassemble the shreds to make the person whole again in your brain.

Simplification is the need of the hour when our lives are ‘rich’ with the thousands of people we get to ‘meet’ these days. Is that why people surprise us all the time? Wonder if they would still be able to surprise us if we didn’t expect them to follow the behavior trends we anticipate of them based on our limited understanding of them.

Have we finally chosen quantity over quality as a society? Superficial understanding of many things, many people, has become a virtue at the cost of understanding a few things, few people, really well. A few stupid people, however, don’t get it. At least not yet. The pressure of not being this brand of stupid however can lead to anxiety. The perks of being this brand of stupid allows you to have empathy and not be zingy.

But beyond that simplification associated convenience, or arguably a socially permissible laziness, the labels don’t have much value for the people to whom these labels are ascribed.

While brushing her teeth, she thinks about the client deliverable she has next week, the meeting on Tuesday to pitch new business to an old client, the internal funnel that she is working on for new clients and the update call with her boss on the same on Thursday. She considers getting out of the trip to South Africa on Wednesday for the conference but realizes that it would really help in getting a move on the funnel and is a great opportunity to meet new people, the potential clients. Plus the organizers have already put out the agenda. It would be unprofessional to back out given that she agreed to be the moderator on a panel discussion and a panelist for another, weeks ago. She nods to reaffirm that she can manage it all. She mentally revisits the gantt chart of the variety of moving pieces that the different teams are working on to ensure nothing slips through the cracks. She takes out her phone to check if she has any updates from her team. There’s only one team that has shared an updated and she drops a quick note to the others for the same.

She sees another request from a team lead on the Western Sands project to check and approve the client contract. She does that on the toilet.

While showering, she plays music and let’s her mind relax for 15 minutes when she cannot be doing anything else — lest she damage her phone or tablet or laptop. Thankfully, they are not provided waterproof gadgets at work yet.

A knock at the door. ‘Are you almost done?’

‘Another 5 minutes. Why?’ A tone that suggests struggle; the struggle of suppressing irritation.

‘No reason,’ Laxman says. ‘Just getting bored here. Come quickly!’

An unseen smile in the shower; the irritation being washed away.

She remembers how she met Laxman. She knows his version where he fell in love with her during the first dance class, but for her that was just the start of things. There was something apart from the obvious infatuation in his eyes, his shyness in holding her for the dance or his heart which was beating as if to jump out of his chest. It was his earnestness and the idealism of his unspoken dreams that had got her interested, not very many years ago.

She steps out of the shower and sees Laxman relieved. She kisses him on the cheek. ‘Not doing anything fancy. I’ll be ready in 5 minutes.’

‘Ok.’

As she gets dressed, she thinks about all the walks with him on campus; they had done that every day without fail after their classes, talking about sundry things. The role of dreams in religion and the role of religion in aspirations. The role of theory in the practical and the role of the practical in hypotheses. The role of belief in outcomes and that of outcomes of the past in one’s belief system…

In their ramblings she had found the little that she needed from another person to fall in love. His ability to respect her for who she was, his ability to listen patiently without imposing his perspective on her thinking was a superhuman quality that she had searched, but hitherto not found.

She checks out herself in the mirror, wondering if she has gotten fatter. Her weight has not changed in the last 6 months but she worries that she is losing muscles and they are getting converted to fat — maintaining the weight but not the right way to be doing things. She hasn’t been as regular at the gym as she would have liked to be.

‘How do I look?’

Laxman’s training kicks in as he says ‘Wonderful,’ even before he is able to turn to face her.

‘You said that without looking.’

‘No, I looked already. Just reassessed as well. All good.’ He gives her a thumbs up.

‘Not fat no?’

‘Not a bit.’

She is not convinced. She wonders if Laxman is being honest.

Laxman can see that. He wonders why she asks seventy thridiculous times if she doesn’t trust him? At this stage in their relationship, he wouldn’t mind if she just makes up her mind that she does not trust him on this particular issue and stops asking him.

She can see that. She cannot blame him, she realizes. The few occasions when he has taken his time to think and answer, she has suspected him of lying to make her feel good because he took too long to respond.

He can see that. He realizes that he never wants her to stop asking him.

There’s an unsaid apology in half a smile exchanged between the two. She picks up the car keys and leads the way out of the house.

‘Where are we going?’

‘I found a new place on Little Black Book. Supposed to have amazing coastal cuisine breakfast.’ Somewhere in between all the planning and emailing and reviewing, there had been a moment stolen unthinkingly, subconsciously to find a new restaurant recommendation.

‘What about the French place we always go to?’ Laxman is no longer surprised that Srishti does all that she does in the time it takes him to finish his coffee while reading the newspaper.

‘Always? You mean the last 3 times?’

‘Yes, I thought we had found our place. You know the one where we walk in and everyone knows us already and smiles and brings out the usual without us having to say anything.’

‘Oh,’ Srishti says, pausing to turn the key in the ignition. ‘You don’t remember the name of the restaurant, but you expect them to remember not just your name but also your order?’

Try hard as he may, Laxman cannot recall the name of the restaurant.

‘Bistro du Parc,’ she says.

‘It was just at the tip of my tongue,’ Laxman lies casually.

‘Yeah, right!’

He shows her the tip of his tongue, ‘See!’ he says. ‘I am not lying.’ He grins.

‘I’d really like to try this new place. But we can do it some other time, if you want to go to the Bistro.’

‘No,’ he says. ‘It’s not that I want to go to the Bistro. I like the idea of our place. It doesn’t matter if we go to the new place today or next time.’

‘What do you want to do then?’ she asks.

‘I just want to have a nice breakfast with you and read and talk about our books,’ he replies, honestly. ‘Let’s go to the new place.’

She nods as she starts the car, not wanting to complicate the simple decision further. In the list of all the worries that she is keeping at bay to have a Sunday morning to herself, she is determined to not let this be the first domino that falls.

Laxman works hard to let it go. His mind is fixated on the idea of having a regular place and he cannot understand how Srishti can not want it too. He starts thinking of the worst — how Srishti knows that he gets anxious in a new place and does not give a shit. How she can completely ignore his few simple wants that are only there to help them simplify things. He is paranoid that she is treating him like one her employees. He fears that her wants trump his needs most of the time.

They are silent, but there’s no quiet. This silence is worse than the pollution of the quiet by their words. But he realizes that it was the words that led them here. It’s just the wreckage after the storm.

Srishti turns on the radio, pulling the car out of the parking spot. La vie on rose is playing on 102.6. They share a brief look and smile. The silence fades away and the quiet gradually starts replacing it. She puts the car in drive and offers him her open hand. Laxman accepts the peace offering with the familiar warmth engulfing his heart. Under the wreckage, the storm does little damage to the foundations. Most of the time.

Some storms, however, can threaten destroy the foundations too. One nearly did, not very many years ago.