The John Terry Goal

It’s early November. Delhi is not that cold. However, the lady was wearing a black sweater. She has a tendency of catching cold on flights. Hence, the attire. She comfortably took a seat near gate 4 of Terminal 3. Keeping her bag aside, she dialed a number on her cellphone, hushed some words and killed the call. She glanced at her wristwatch. There was still an hour and a half before her flight to Dubai would depart India. Then she opened her bag, took out a copy of Outlook and started reading.

She saw him 5 minutes later. She had just lifted her eyes off the magazine, without any particular reason, when she saw him. He was standing near the big flat screen TV showing a football match. He had donned the Manchester United jersey, his favorite no. 11 - Ryan Giggs. He was turning his back towards her, and she should not have seen him. However, he was disturbed by a call on his cellphone, and he started talking into it moving away from the TV -- that’s when she saw him. His hair was well kept and he was wearing a pair of khakis and loafers. Had a Manchester United backpack on his shoulders. The phone call ended in about 2 minutes and he walked towards the TV again.

Now, she noticed the TV. It was an English Premier League game between Chelsea and Sunderland being played at the Stamford Bridge. There was a corner for Chelsea. Oscar was taking it. She folded the Outlook and started paying attention to the game being played at London. Oscar swung the ball and a blue shirt standing in the crowd leapt to head it inside the goal. The Chelsea players started celebrating; she noticed the goalscorer was John Terry. Some of the Chelsea fans near the TV made some noise. Her eyes fixed at him. He was angry, cursing slowly and moving away from it towards a seat. She smiled. She knew he’d be angry, he’d curse. She knew how much he disliked Terry. She had heard him cursing on another John Terry goal couple of years back.

She adjusted her sweater and unfolded the Outlook. She could not read. She smiled again, thinking of herself, thinking of all those people who have to act strangers although they know everything about the other person.

Yatrik: A Review

Disclaimer: This is my first book review, so might not be a perfect one. I’ll try to do it my way.

Arnab Ray, the popular blogger greatbong, has delivered a story in which the protagonist realizes he is dead at the very beginning of the story. This comes as a shock! What follows is an extremely interesting cocktail of relationship surprises, human ideology and 90s Kolkata (Bengal in general). The hero, Anushtup, is given a boon of observing three events in his lifetime for which he still doesn’t have the answer. For example, how his test score ended up a 2 out of 100 in his board mathematics examination. Anushtup gets to observe all three incidents, which, then change his notion about respect, luck and life in general.

Out of the three stories written by Arnab, the first two are extremely intriguing and capture images of Kolkata in the 90s immaculately. They bring out the insecurities of middle-class bengali family during that period; how ideology is often prioritized over pragmatism, how protests become a part of the lifestyle and how ideas and the reality clash at times. Anushtup’s conversation with Ataluya Sir, I feel, is the best part of the story, where, if you were born during the 80s or 90s, can actually feel your own thoughts getting reverberated.

With such a gripping plot till almost 70% of the book, the remaining portion of the book is a big letdown. The third story is rather unconvincing, while the part which describes how Anushtup died is extremely cliched. Though, it was a surprise when the identity of the mysterious person whom he met after death is revealed. The final chapter was a big letdown. It seemed like the last portion of Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol”; when you don’t know why the story is not ending and characters are going on talking.

Arnab has the potential to be a good story-teller. He has imagined an unique concept here and tried to weave around it. If he had been more careful in penning the dialogues and let the conclusion of the book to be more precise and taut, this would have been a great read. Nevertheless, it’s a pretty decent effort, and I feel, people, specially Bengalis of our generation will like it.