Lunchbox. If there was a silver-screen analogy to the way my brother (S) narrates his tales of love, life and many things in between, it would be Lunchbox. The beauty is not solely in the plot or the performances or the characters but very specifically in the mundane scenes: she’s packing lunch, he’s going to the office in the train, the other he is doling out his history, he is out on the veranda, smoking…
Back in the days when we lived under the same roof, my brother and I would exchange thoughts, ideas and stories from our daily living — a practice that began several years back via email. As if writing a play, he would begin by narrating the setup, and building the story, inching meticulously towards the crux of the tale, but always meandering away from the plot half-a-dozen times for back-stories and character-build-ups. A few months of this, I was fed up. Not of the stories, of course, but of the overstretched narration. I wouldn’t have not wanted to listen, for his tales are always peppered with a sort of self-deprecating hilarity and some very interesting moments of human psychology and observation. But lengthy, nevertheless. Cut to the chase, I’d reprimand. On some days, he’d begin, “So there’s this guy I told you about…,” and I would stop him right then and declare, “I’ll give you 5 minutes to narrate the whole thing. That’s it.”
Of course, five minutes would stretch to fifteen. But it didn’t feel like fifteen anyway.
He would describe the darkness of the road he walked with his friend one night when the entire story was about something else and this walk was an extremely tiny part of it. Or spend 200 seconds talking about the ten-second pause in world’s affairs the moment he uttered words that would change a certain dynamic forever. Or describe the breeze — suddenly using an opportunity to let go of prose and hook onto poetry — on that eventful day. Or enact — in bashful animation out on the road we were walking on — the events unfurling as he closed the door of a cab.
To add to this milieu, his narratives would often jump timelines. Often, it would seem as if he was switching to an older story (older, time-wise) because he forgot to plug that in at the right time. Sometimes, it felt meticulously placed.
I’ve walked many of these stretches with him, heard many of these stories, mocked him (playfully of course) for his inability to cut to the chase. As much as I’d love to hear him narrate a crisp story — something antithetical to his entire being — I have realized that what I lose in time, I gain in a richer recollection. My interaction with people has reduced severely (by choice) but back when the frequency and volume was normal by my standards, I heard mundane stories of life in the fast lane, peppered artificially to somehow make it interesting. The attempt to do so only amplified the mundaneness (and the boring nature) of the stories I heard. With S, the stories were interesting on their own — perhaps because he’s my brother but I doubt that this was the reason. Yet, he would paint them in elaborate, pedestrian strokes to make them sound like an everyday event.
Or perhaps it is a testimony to his innate nature where he downplays almost everything that truly matters — to him and by virtue of that, to me.