The Magenta Diary: : My entry for the Get Published contest

A love story i grew up with, lived and breathed with the protagonist and grew apart as i moved into my own stories. A love story i relived  again as the dreams, feelings of an impossibly impractical eccentric at times , an early twenty something woman  unfurled through the pale yellow pages of an old magenta coloured diary.

If one ever asks me of a love story...leaving apart my own tryst with this thing called love.. it has to be the story of Ananyadi. The 'di'  in the name ( pronounced as in dee) is of course the endearing term for didi ( not to be confused with the ubiquitous ' didi' ruling the Bong state). Ananyadi was  five/six years elder to me, taught me Calculus and Physics before she became the 'Ananyadi' of my life.. intelligent, funny, silly at times with a haunting pair of eyes. I heard of her affair from her neighbour  my classmate before i  knew Ananyadi personally. The most striking thing  in that time in that small town was  a seemingly seedhi saadhi studious girl having an affair with a married man!! Bombshell really. Her boyfriend it seemed was at least fifteen years older to her, a top notch surgeon in some gulf country, married..

I was drawn  to her love story along with her Calculus lessons. Her boldness and her love miffed the teenage me. It happens.. love really happens across age across oceans..She loves him so much.. may be he is cheating on her, fooling her as Reshmi said but the spark in Ananyadi,s eyes dazzled me .
Then actually one fine day Dr Vinay Sengupta was in our little town.. to meet her.. yes out of chat windows and instant messages he was in real.. a victory for Ananyadi,s love.. her man  travelled 1000 miles to meet her..her eyes danced with joy..joy of love as she showed us Reshmi and me the gifts he got for her and it wasn,t those foreign gifts but the love they bore radiated in her elation.

Then.. did they get married..obviously  no. Life isn,t a Hndi film where loving a married man and getting married isn,t an impossibility, the  insecurity, the stigma parents, society..a different ball game altogether and if you get past through all these.. the reason for which you did all these get lost..love gets lost. What happened to them.. Ananyadi and Dr Vinay next four to five years they were together to the extent i also got gifts from the gulf country once year at least. Then Ananyadi moved out of our small town, national capital was beckoning her with a new career. And.. well i had an affair and forgot about them for sometime, as i broke up and then got married in the hurried attempt by parents to hide my affair and send me off to another city.

Then...they broke up .She told me when i met her in my wedding. By that time i was' eager to get married' type  and thought it was fine..Ananyadi should move on and get ' settled' like me. She is getting old.

And then.. the magenta diary.. you can sniff and live love even if  you think the writings carry no meaning..

Then.....

This is my entry for the HarperCollins–IndiBlogger Get Published contest, which is run with inputs fromYashodhara Lal and HarperCollins India.