We Weren't Lovers Like That

The new millennium: a fortieth birthday, a lost telephone diary, a broken marriage, a Mont Blanc- Khadi-pink monogrammed shirt usurper, always ‘unable to do the right thing’…In short, the beginnings of Aftab’s ‘mid-life crisis’. Add to this, a safari- suited ex-babu attempting a ‘corporate type’ crossover for a boss.

He finds reality reduced to soulless details on the reservation chart of the Dehradun bound Shatabdi Express: Aftab Chandra, M-41, Wagon C-6, Seat-30-it says everything that is essential and nothing more. However, the journey (a ‘running away’) forces him to confront that ‘when it mattered. I failed’. There is also the baggage of nostalgic, sometimes wry reminiscences of happier times, prompting an exhaustive commentary on sprawling landscapes ‘swallowed’ by apartments with small balconies. He returns to the ‘young, green hills’, a ‘middle-aged runaway’, yet ‘all the questions (remain) unanswered.’ Finally, it is a love he betrayed that brings home to him his father’s ‘quiet conviction that even when the day is ending there are things to be looked forward to’. It is, as the blurb reads, "a poignant account of a life of missed opportunities".