A Day in the Life

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 5/5 

What form would thoughts take if we didn’t allow them words?

These words from the book couldn’t be more true and they tug at the chords of my heart both as a reader and a writer. The first story ‘stranger’ opens in an old British era hill town transporting me into the body of the protagonist and a mental debate.. and here is the crux of the debate… 

A part of me wants to lay back, move to a small town, hills or sea doesn’t matter. Read, meet strangers and listen to their stories and write books which people would love to read.

The other part wants to live a normal middle class life full of festivals, family events, travel, a good working career and a happy busy schedule. 

One needs patience and dealing with nothingness, other needs patience and dealing with so many things. One is like falling into the depths of an abyss, and the other is the wide stretch of a never ending road trip. It’s exciting either way but both ways lead to a certain kind of uncertainty, the uncertainty of happiness! 

If a book can make you feel all this, it’s a treasure and I for sure will cherish this. As each story progressed I felt my mind doing the works, finding a new piece of memory hidden under the layers of time. Reminding me of my memories as a child, as a resident of an apartment complex, as some one who has lived in a foreign country, life in my current abode Bengaluru. So many things I could relate to and also write about. 

If I do write, would my stories be able to touch the mind, the memories and the hearts of my readers. Now that’s something to aspire to! Clearly Anjum is a brilliant author and I didn’t want this book to ever end. I wish I could pick it any time and read one short story like those cherished pieces of candy at the back of your grandmother’s cupboard. 

As a serial reader I am currently also reading a historical fiction, a novel about a female protagonist finding her roots, but this short story collection is something I don’t want to finish. With every story I get to relive my own life, my imagination, cherish memories and also dream being a writer someday. Thank you Anjum for sharing your thoughts in words. May be some day my thoughts, dreams and memories will also find their way to the pages of a book and the words will be all mine. 

Some words and lines to keepsake: 

Retired? He asks. 

How did he guess? I must look greatly unburdened, if not prematurely old. 

People, no matter how amount, are always different, and that each family has its own secret recipe for existence. 

He was an ordinary bigot-familiar combination of right wing loyalty,free market compulsiveness, distaste for  poor & excitement at India’s economic ascendance. Like me,he holidayed in Europe & bragged online about it & had jumped 4 jobs in 10 years for money

Her youngest son is usual full of talk. It happens to children bored into a household of adults and much older siblings; they pick words to large for their small mouths and they chatter all day to keep the attention on themselves. 

Now it was online shopping, meme philosophizing and virtual consultations with therapists and accountants. 

Ask me about fears, not series. I am afraid, for instance, of running out of stories. 

I want to research the unacknowledged power of housewives. The women in their innocuous nighties, sweetly feeding cows and watering Tulsi plants - actually powerful enforcers of conformity. 

Her parents let this taboo subject, the eggs into the kitchen for the sake of their daughters, or as a concession to the times, or simply because they are somewhat weakened by the modern charge that to only eat vegetables is to miss out on some vital nutrition. 

There is no why to the wind. 

It was not anger he was feeling any more but something akin to a muted melancholy he hadn’t known he possessed. 

To him, the news is just politics, not apocalypse. 

We dwelt on remembered meals with the tenderness of starving jailbirds and the eagerness of gluttons. 

An article in the New Yorker informed me that American women have been buying and reading cookbooks voraciously since the eighteenth century because they left their mothers back in Europe and had no one to give them ‘the wisdom that is said to be passed spontaneously from generation to generation, like the gift of prophecy, in the family kitchen.’

I wrote verse about food and longed to both stuff myself and become thinner. 

P.s. this book is a gift from my pen friend. Now that I am back in India our exchange of letters and books has restarted. Guess what I found inside the book (not planned by her but Amazon). It may seem like a silly bookmark but it has a quote from Harry Potter. That is something we have bonded over forever. Is this what they call coincidence or serendipity!