About Matters of the Hurt: Love Stories – Round the Clock
Author
Sourabh Mukherjee
Author Bio
Sourabh Mukherjee works in a Senior Management position in one of the world’s leading management consulting and technology services firms. Born and brought up in Kolkata, India, Sourabh has several fictional and non-fictional publications in magazines, journals and websites –some of them date back to his early childhood. Sourabh loves traveling, and is a keen observer of human behaviour and cultural diversities. He is an avid reader of fiction, and is passionate about photography, movies and music.
Sourabh can be reached at thestoryteller1974@gmail.com
Description
I had two things which not many had—an impossible dream that made every tomorrow worth waiting for, and a pain that not everyone was blessed with.’
‘..a soulmate happens unannounced in some turn of the deliciously unpredictable journey called ‘life’..’
Author Sourabh Mukherjee’s “About Matters of the Hurt” (published by Partridge India) is a collection of love stories that go beyond conventional ‘happily ever after’ endings and offer realistic views of the variety of emotions one goes through when love comes calling.
The four stories in the book paint love in its various hues. They are aligned in mood and settings with the four parts of a day. The stories deal with human emotions that readers will relate to. Many have nurtured unprofessed love in their hearts for years, have struggled to cope with lost love, have allowed their inner devils to ruin relationships, and have found love when they least expected to.
In the ‘Afternoon Story,’ readers will get to know a woman who moves in and out of relationships over the years, and a man who remains a silent and distant witness to the course of her life, with unflinching faith in the honesty and sanctity of his feelings for her. The ‘Evening Story’ is about a young, successful entrepreneur nursing a broken heart. When the man in the ‘Night story’ finally finds love, he has to battle his inner devils. The protagonist in the ‘Morning Story’ has a highly romanticized vision of love that is often disengaged from reality.
A slice of life in the true sense, the book takes us on a soulful journey as we relive loves lost or found or nurtured unprofessed in the deepest recesses of our hearts.
Book excerpt
And then, from my first floor window, I saw the bus. That flash of yellow paint, worn out here and there revealing the rusty iron underneath, my eyes had been yearning for. I saw it turn the bend at the far end of the dusty road and then slowly make its way between rows of dreary old houses and then stop a few feet from where a small flight of stairs rising from the pavement led to our main door. I could not wait to inhale the smell of exhaust fumes from that rickety old school bus, which had seen better days. That was the bus of St. Mary’s Girls’ School. No one waited for that bus at that hour of the day all year like I did.
Because that was the time when I got to see Nargis. And even if I dozed off in the summer heat, the alarm would wake me up sharp at three. I never managed to wake up on time in the mornings to see her board that bus on her way to school. I had no idea where exactly she lived. There would often be those unexpected and hence all the more exhilarating glimpses of her on the road ahead, but one could not rely solely on chance in matters of the pining heart.
That explains my routine every afternoon.
Nargis was not her real name—I am quite sure about that. In fact, I don’t know her name even to this day. But she had a sharp, finely chiseled nose like Nargis—the great actress of yesteryears, who had, in a black-and-white movie that my Dad had bunked classes to watch, walked a lonely rain-washed street sharing an umbrella with her lover as the breeze played with her hair and her rain-soaked saree, asking, in a song, why we are afraid to fall in love.
I was fifteen then and she was pretty much the same age. Her face was a perfect oval with black eyes that talked. Her hair used to be meticulously tied back in a ponytail. Her crisp white shirt would be tucked neatly into her blue skirt that reached just below her knees. The white socks would reach just above her ankles. She would have a handkerchief clutched in her hand. There would be sweat glistening on her temples as she got down from the bus. She would say her ‘Bye’-s to boisterous boys and girls inside the bus, standing there with her satchel and waving at them till the bus groaned its way out of sight. And I would keep praying that she look back at me—just once. She would not. She never did.
And I lived my days and my nights with that one imaginary scene playing in my mind’s eyes like a videotape on loop. I spent hours every day, like I had been doing a while back, drawing pictures of Nargis on that dusty road with her satchel on her back, her head turned in my direction, her eyes catching my gaze. I imagined a wind out of nowhere on that dusty road playing with the strands of her hair on her face, as dirt circled up towards the heavens.
Author Website
http://www.aboutmattersofthehurt.com
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