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Treat Your S(h)elf: The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise Of The East India Company (2019)

It was not the British government that began seizing great chunks of India in the mid-eighteenth century, but a dangerously unregulated private company headquartered in one small office, five windows wide, in London, and managed in India by a violent, utterly ruthless and intermittently mentally unstable corporate predator – Clive.

William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise Of The East India Company

“One of the very first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder: loot. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this word was rarely heard outside the plains of north India until the late eighteenth century, when it became a common term across Britain.”

With these words, populist historian William Dalrymple, introduces his latest book The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company. It is a perfect companion piece to his previous book ‘The Last Mughal’ which I have also read avidly. I’m a big fan of William Dalrymple’s writings as I’ve followed his literary output closely.

And this review is harder to be objective when you actually know the author and like him and his family personally. Born a Scot he was schooled at Ampleforth and Cambridge before he wrote his first much lauded travel book (In Xanadu 1989) just after graduation about his trek through Iran and South Asia. Other highly regarded books followed on such subjects as Byzantium and Afghanistan but mostly about his central love, Delhi. He has won many literary awards for his writings and other honours. He slowly turned to writing histories and co-founding the Jaipur Literary Festival (one of the best I’ve ever been to). He has been living on and off outside Delhi on a farmhouse rasing his children and goats with his artist wife, Olivia. It’s delightfully charming.

Whatever he writes he never disappoints. This latest tome I enjoyed immensely even if I disagreed with some of his conclusions.

Dalrymple recounts the remarkable rise of the East India Company from its founding in 1599 to 1803 when it commanded an army twice the size of the British Army and ruled over the Indian subcontinent. Dalrymple targets the British East India Company for its questionable activities over two centuries in India. In the process, he unmasks a passel of crude, extravagant, feckless, greedy, reprobate rascals - the so-called indigenous rulers over whom the Company trampled to conquer India.

None of this is news to me as I’m already familiar with British imperial history but also speaking more personally. Like many other British families we had strong links to the British Empire, especially India, the jewel in its crown. Those links went all the way back to the East India Company. Typically the second or third sons of the landed gentry or others from the rising bourgeois classes with little financial prospects or advancement would seek their fortune overseas and the East India Company was the ticket to their success - or so they thought.

The East India Company tends to get swept under the carpet and instead everyone focuses on the British Empire. But the birth of British colonialism wasn’t engineered in the halls of Whitehall or the Foreign Office but by what Dalrymple calls, “handful of businessmen from a boardroom in the City of London”. There wasn’t any grand design to speak of, just the pursuit of profit. And it was this that opened a Pandora’s Box that defined the following two centuries of British imperialism of India and the rise of its colonial empire.

The 18th-century triumph and then fall of the Company, and its role in founding what became Queen Victoria’s Indian empire is an astonishing story, which has been recounted in books including The Honourable Company by John Keay (1991) and The Corporation that Changed the World by Nick Robins (2006). It is well-trodden territory but Dalrymple, a historian and author who lives in India and has written widely about the Mughal empire, brings to it erudition, deep insight and an entertaining style.

He also takes a different and topical twist on the question how did a joint stock company founded in Elizabethan England come to replace the glorious Mughal Empire of India, ruling that great land for a hundred years? The answer lies mainly in the title of the book. The Anarchy refers not to the period of British rule but to the period before that time. Dalrymple mentions his title is drawn from a remark attributed to Fakir Khair ud-Din Illahabadi, whose Book of Admonition provided the author with the source material and who said of the 18th century “the once peaceful realm of India became the abode of Anarchy.” But Dalrymple goes further and tells the story as a warning from history on the perils of corporate power. The American edition sports the provocative subtitle, “The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire” (compared with the neutral British subtitle, “The Relentless Rise of the East India Company”). However I think the story Dalrymple really tells is also of how government power corrupts commercial enterprise.

It’s an amazing story and Dalrymple tells it with verve and style drawing, as in his previous books, on underused Indian, Persian and French sources. Dalrymple has a wonderful eye for detail e.g. After the Company’s charter is approved in 1600 the merchant adventures scout for ships to undertake the India voyage: “They have been to Deptford to ‘view severall shippes,’ one of which, the May Flowre, was later famous for a voyage heading in the opposite direction”.

What a Game of Thrones styled tv series it would make, and what a tragedy it unfolded in reality. A preface begins with the foundation of the Company by “Customer Smythe” in 1599, who already had experience trading with the Levant. Certain merchants were little better than pirates and the British lagged behind the Dutch, the Portuguese, the French and even the Spanish in their global aspirations. It was with envious eyes that they saw how Spain had so effectively despoiled Central America. The book fast-forwards to 1756, with successive chapters, and a degree of flexibility in chronology, taking the reader up to 1799. What was supposed to be a few trading posts in India and an import/export agreement became, within a century, a geopolitical force in its own right with its own standing army larger than the British Army.

It is a story of Machiavels from both Britain and India, of pitched battles, vying factions, the use of technology in warfare, strange moments of mutual respect, parliamentary impeachment featuring two of the greatest orators of the day (Edmund Burke and Richard Sheridan), blindings, rapes, psychopaths on both sides, unimaginable wealth, avarice, plunder, famine and worse. It is, in particular – because of the feuding groups loyal to the Mughals, the Marathas, the Rohilla Afghans, the so-called “bankers of the world” the Jagat Seths, and local tribal warlords – a kind of Game Of Thrones with pepper, silk and saltpetre. And that is even before we get to the British, characters such as Robert Clive “of India”, victor at the Battle of Plassey and subsequent suicide; the problematic figure of the cultured Warren Hastings, the whistle-blower who became an unfair scapegoat for Company atrocities; and Richard Wellesley, older brother to the more famous Arthur who became the Duke of Wellington. Co-ordinating such a vast canvas requires a deft hand, and Dalrymple manages this (although the list of dramatis personae is useful). There is even a French mercenary who is described as a “pastry cook, pyrotechnic and poltroon”.

When the Red Dragon slipped anchor at Woolwich early in 1601 to exploit the new royal charter granted to the East India Company, the venture started inauspiciously. The ship lay becalmed off Dover for two months before reaching the Indonesian sultanate of Aceh and seizing pepper, cinnamon and cloves from a passing Portuguese vessel. The Company was a strange beast from the start “a joint stock company founded by a motley bunch of explorers and adventurers to trade the world’s riches. This was partly driven by Protestant England’s break with largely Catholic continental Europe. Isolated from their baffled neighbours, the English were forced to scour the globe for new markets and commercial openings further afield. This they did with piratical enthusiasm” William Dalrymple writes. From these Brexit-like roots, it grew into an enterprise that has never been replicated “a business with its own army that conquered swaths of India, seizing minerals, jewels and the wealth of Mughal emperors. This was mercenary globalisation, practised by what the philosopher Edmund Burke called “a state in the guise of a merchant””.

The East India Company’s charter began with an original sin - Elizabeth I granted the company a perpetual monopoly on trade with the East Indies. With its monopoly giving it enhanced access to credit and vast wealth from Indian trade, it’s no surprise that the company grew to control an eighth of all Britain’s imports by the 1750s. Yet it was still primarily a trading company, with some military capacity to defend its factories. That changed thanks to a well-known problem in institutional economics - opportunism by a company agent, in this case Robert Clive of India, who in time became the richest self-made man in the world in time.

Like many start-ups, it had to pivot in its early days, giving up on competing with the entrenched Dutch East India Company in the Spice Islands, and instead specialising in cotton and calico from India. It was an accidental strategy, but it introduced early officials including Sir Thomas Roe to “a world of almost unimaginable splendour” in India, run by the cultured Mughals.

The Nawab of Bengal called the English “a company of base, quarrelling people and foul dealers”, and one local had it that “they live like Englishmen and die like rotten sheep”. But the Company had on its side the adaptiveness and energy of capitalism. It also had a force of 260,000, which was decisive when it stopped negotiating with the Mughals and went to war. After the Battle of Buxar in 1764, “the English gentlemen took off their hats to clap the defeated Shuja ud-Daula, before reinstalling him as a tame ruler, backed by the Company’s Indian troops, and paying it a huge subsidy. “We have at last arrived at that critical Conjuncture, which I have long foreseen” wrote Robert Clive, the “curt, withdrawn and socially awkward young accountant” whose risk-taking and aggression secured crucial military victories for the Company. It was a high point for “the most opulent company in the world,” as Robert Clive described it.

So how was a humble group of British merchants able to take over one of the great empires of history? Under Aurangzeb, the fanatic and ruthless Mughal emperor (1658-1707), the empire grew to its largest geographic extent but only because of decades of continuous warfare and attendant taxing, pillaging, famine, misery and mass death. It was a classic case of the eventual fall of a great power through military over-extension.

At Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, a power struggle ensued but none could command. “Mughal succession disputes and a string of weak and powerless emperors exacerbated the sense of imperial crisis: three emperors were murdered (one was, in addition, first blinded with a hot needle); the mother of one ruler was strangled and the father of another forced off a precipice on his elephant. In the worst year of all, 1719, four different Emperors occupied the Peacock Throne in rapid succession. According to the Mughal historian Khair ud-Din Illahabadi … ‘Disorder and corruption no longer sought to hide themselves and the once peaceful realm of India became a lair of Anarchy’”.

Seeing the chaos at the top, local rulers stopped paying tribute and tried to establish their own power bases. The result was more warfare and a decline in trade as banditry made it unsafe to travel. The Empire appeared ripe to fall. “Delhi in 1737 had around 2 million inhabitants. Larger than London and Paris combined, it was still the most prosperous and magnificent city between Ottoman Istanbul and Imperial Edo (Tokyo). As the Empire fell apart around it, it hung like an overripe mango, huge and inviting, yet clearly in decay, ready to fall and disintegrate”.

In 1739 the mango was plucked by the Persian warlord Nader Shah. Using the latest military technology, horse-mounted cannon, Shah devastated a much larger force of Mughal troops and “managed to capture the Emperor himself by the simple ruse of inviting him to dinner, then refusing to let him leave.” In Delhi, Nader Shah massacred a hundred thousand people and then, after 57 days of pillaging and plundering, left with two hundred years’ worth of Mughal treasure carried on “700 elephants, 4,000 camels and 12,000 horses carrying wagons all laden with gold, silver and precious stones”.

At this time, the East India Company would have probably preferred a stable India but through a series of unforeseen events it gained in relative power as the rest of India crumbled. With the decline of the Mughals, the biggest military power in India was the Marathas and they attacked Bengal, the richest Indian province, looting, plundering, raping and killing as many as 400,000 civilians. Fearing the Maratha hordes, Bengalis fled to the only safe area in the region, the company stronghold in Calcutta. “What was a nightmare for Bengal turned out to be a major opportunity for the Company. Against artillery and cities defended by the trained musketeers of the European powers, the Maratha cavalry was ineffective. Calcutta in particular was protected by a deep defensive ditch especially dug by the Company to keep the Maratha cavalry at bay, and displaced Bengalis now poured over it into the town that they believed offered better protection than any other in the region, more than tripling the size of Calcutta in a decade. … But it was not just the protection of a fortification that was the attraction. Already Calcutta had become a haven of private enterprise, drawing in not just Bengali textile merchants and moneylenders, but also Parsis, Gujaratis and Marwari entrepreneurs and business houses who found it a safe and sheltered environment in which to make their fortunes”. In an early example of what might be called a “charter city,”

English commercial law also attracted entrepreneurs to Calcutta. The “city’s legal system and the availability of a framework of English commercial law and formal commercial contracts, enforceable by the state, all contributed to making it increasingly the destination of choice for merchants and bankers from across Asia”.

The Company benefited by another unforeseen circumstance, Siraj ud-Daula, the Nawab (ruler) of Bengal, was a psychotic rapist who got his kicks from sinking ferry boats in the Ganges and watching the travelers drown. Siraj was uniformly hated by everyone who knew him. “Not one of the many sources for the period — Persian, Bengali, Mughal, French, Dutch or English — has a good word to say about Siraj”. Despite his flaws, Siraj might have stayed in power had he not made the fatal mistake of striking his banker. The Jagat Seth bankers took their revenge when Siraj ud-Daula came into conflict with the Company under Robert Clive. Conspiring with Clive, the Seths arranged for the Nawab’s general to abandon him and thus the Battle of Plassey was won and the stage set for the East India Company.

In typical fashion, Dalrymple devotes half a dozen pages to the Company’s defeat at Pollidur in 1780 by Haider Ali and his son, Tipu, but a few paragraphs to its significance (Haider could have expelled the Company from much of southern India but failed to pursue his advantage). The reader is not spared the gory details.

“Such as were saved from immediate death,” reads a quote from a British survivor about his fellow troops, “were so crowded together…several were in a state of suffocation, while others from the weight of the dead bodies that had fallen upon them were fixed to the spot and therefore at the mercy of the enemy…Some were trampled under the feet of elephants, camels, and horses. Those who were stripped of their clothing lay exposed to the scorching sun, without water and died a lingering and miserable death, becoming prey to ravenous wild animals.”

Many further battles and adventures would ensue before the British were firmly ensconced by 1803 but the general outline of the story remained the same. The EIC prospered due to a combination of luck, disarray among the Company’s rivals and good financing.

The Mughal emperor Shah Alam, for example, had been forced to flee Delhi leaving it to be ruled by a succession of Persian, Afghani and Maratha warlords. But after wandering across eastern India for many years, he regathered his army, retook Delhi and almost restored Mughal power. At a key moment, however, he invited into the Red Fort with open arms his “adopted” son, Ghulam Qadir. Ghulam was the actual son of Zabita Khan who had been defeated by Shah Alam sixteen years earlier. Ghulam, at that time a young boy, had been taken hostage by Shah Alam and raised like a son, albeit a son whom Alam probably used as a catamite. Expecting gratitude, Shah Alam instead found Ghulam driven mad. Ghulam Qadir, a psychopath, ordered a minion to blind Shah Alam: “With his Afghan knife….Qandahari Khan first cut one of Shah Alam’s eyes out of its socket; then, the other eye was wrenched out…Shah Alam flopped on the ground like a chicken with its neck cut.” Ghulam took over the Red Fort and after cutting out the eyes of the Mughal emperor, immediately calling for a painter to immortalise the event.

A few pages on, Ghulam Qadir gets his just dessert. Captured by an ally of the emperor, he is hung in a cage, his ears, nose, tongue, and upper lip cut off, his eyes scooped out, then his hands cut off, followed by his genitals and head. Dalrymple out-grosses himself with the description of Ahmad Shah Durrani, the Afghan invader of India, dying of leprosy with “maggots….dropping from the upper part of his putrefying nose into his mouth and food as he ate.”

By 1803, the Company’s army had defeated the Maratha gunners and their French officers, installed Shah Alam as a puppet back on his imitation Peacock Throne in Delhi, and the Company ruled all of India virtually.

Indeed as late as 1803, the Marathas too might have defeated the British but rivalry between Tukoji Holkar and Daulat Rao Scindia prevented an alliance. “Here Wellesley’s masterstroke was to send Holkar a captured letter from Scindia in which the latter plotted with Peshwa Baji Rao to overthrow Holkar … ‘After the war is over, we shall both wreak our full vengeance upon him.’ … After receiving this, Holkar, who had just made the first two days march towards Scindia, turned back and firmly declined to join the coalition”.

For Dalrymple the crucial point was the unsanctioned actions of Robert Clive and the bullying of Shah Alam in the rise of the East India Company.

The Jagat Seths then bribed the company men to attack Siraj. Clive, with an eye for personal gain, was happy attack Siraj at the behest of the Jagat Seths even if the company directors had no part in this. They “consistently abhorred ambitious plans of conquest,” he notes. Clive’s defeat of Siraj at Plassey and the subsequent chain of events that led to Shah Alam giving tax-raising powers to the company in 1765 may be history’s most egregious example of the principal-agent problem.

Thus, the East India Company acquired by accident the ultimate economic rent — a secure, unearned income stream. Company cronies initially thwarted attempts at oversight in London, but a government bailout in 1772 following the Bengal Famine and the collapse of Ayr Bank confirmed the crown’s interest in the company, which had now become Too Big to Fail. Adam Smith called the company’s twin roles of trader and sovereign a “strange absurdity” in Book IV of The Wealth of Nations (unfortunately, Smith’s long condemnatory discussion of the company receives only a cursory reference from Dalrymple).

As part of the bailout, Parliament passed the Tea Act to help the company dump its unsold products on the American colonies by giving it the monopoly on legal tea there (Americans drank mostly smuggled Dutch tea). This, of course, led to the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution.

By 1784, Parliament had set up an oversight board that increasingly dictated the company’s political affairs. The attempted impeachment of Governor-General Warren Hastings by the House of Lords in 1788 confirmed that the company was no longer its own master. By that stage, the company was an arm of the state. Dalrymple’s coverage of the subsequent racist policies of Lord Cornwallis and the military adventures of Richard Wellesley make for compelling reading, but they are not examples of unfettered corporate power.

Overlaid on top of luck and disorder, was the simple fact that the Company paid its bills. Indeed, the Company paid its sepoys (Indian troops) considerably more than did any of its rivals and it paid them on time. It was able to do so because Indian bankers and moneylenders trusted the Company. “In the end it was this access to unlimited reserves of credit, partly through stable flows of land revenues, and partly through collaboration of Indian moneylenders and financiers, that in this period finally gave the Company its edge over their Indian rivals. It was no longer superior European military technology, nor powers of administration that made the difference. It was the ability to mobilise and transfer massive financial resources that enabled the Company to put the largest and best-trained army in the eastern world into the field”.

Dalrymple pretty much loses interest once the Company gains full control. “This book does not aim to provide a complete history of the East India Company,” he writes. He skips past one mention of Hong Kong, which the East India Company seized after the opium wars in China. A few sentences record the 1857 uprising of Indian soldiers that led to the British government taking India from the Company and establishing the Raj that lasted until Indian independence in 1947.

The author makes passing reference to the fact that the struggle for American independence was underway for much of the period about which he writes. He notes that It was British East India Company tea that patriots dumped into Boston harbor in 1773. American colonists were so grateful that the Mysore sultans tied up British forces that might have been deployed in America, they named a warship the Hyder Ali. Lord Cornwallis provides a connection, having surrendered to George Washington at Yorktown in 1781, an event confirming American independence, and turning up in 1786 in India as governor-general, taking Tipu Sultan’s surrender in 1792.

That reference raises an interesting side question that may someday deserve closer examination - Why were American colonists successful in driving off their British overlords. At the same time, Indian aristocracy and the masses over whom they ruled were unable to rid themselves of the British East India Company and the British Raj for another century?

No heroes emerge from Dalrymple’s expansive account that is rich, even overwhelming in detail. He covers two centuries but focuses on the period between 1765 and 1803 when the Company was transformed from a commercial operation to military and totalitarian — to use an appropriate term derived from Sanskrit - juggernaut. Among the multitude of characters involved in this sordid story are a few British names familiar in general history, Robert Clive of India, Warren Hastings, Lord Cornwallis, and Colonel Arthur Wellesley, who was better known long after he departed India as the Duke of Wellington. None - with the exception of Hastings - escape the scathing indictment of Dalrymple’s pen.

At the core of the story we meet Robert Clive, an emblematic character who from being a juvenile delinquent and suicidal lunatic rose to rule India, eventually killing himself in the aftermath of a corruption scandal. In particular Robert Clive comes in for much criticism by Dalrymple. After putting down one rebellion, Clive managed to send back £232 million, of which he personally received £22m. There was a rumour that, on his return to England, his wife’s pet ferret wore a necklace of jewels worth £2,500. Contrast that with the horrors of the 1769 famine: farmers selling their tools, rivers so full of corpses that the fish were inedible, one administrator seeing 40 dead bodies within 20 yards of his home, even cannibalism, all while the Company was stockpiling rice. Some Indian weavers even chopped off their own thumbs to avoid being forced to work and pay the exorbitant taxes that would be imposed on them. The Great Bengal famine of 1770 had already led to unease in London at its methods. “We have murdered, deposed, plundered, usurped,” wrote the Whig politician Horace Walpole. “I stand astonished by my own moderation,” Clive protested, after outrage intensified when the Company had to be bailed out by the British government in 1772. Clive took his own life in disgrace.

Warren Hastings, whom Dalrymple portrays as the more sensitive and sympathetic Company man, was first made governor general of India for 12 years and later endured seven years of impeachment for corruption before acquittal. Hastings showed “deep respect” for India and Indians, writes, Dalrymple, as opposed to most other Europeans in India to suck out as much as possible of the subcontinent’s resources and wealth. “In truth, I love India a little more than my own country,” wrote Hastings, who spoke good Bengali and Urdu, as well as fluent Persian. “(Edmund) Burke had defended Robert Clive (first Governor General of Bengal) against parliamentary enquiry, and so helped exonerate someone who genuinely was a ruthlessly unprincipled plunderer. Now he directed his skills of oratory against Warren Hastings (who was finally impeached), a man who, by virtue of his position, was certainly the symbol of an entire system of mercantile oppression in India, but who had personally done much to begin the process of regulating and reforming the Company, and who had probably done more than any other Company official to rein in the worst excesses of its rule,” Dalrymple writes. At his public impeachment hearing in 1788, Burke thundered: “We have brought before you…..one in whom all the frauds, all the peculation, all the violence, all the tyranny in India are embodied.’ They got the wrong man but, by the time he was cleared in 1795, the British state was steadily absorbing the Company, denouncing its methods but retaining many of its assets.

Dalrymple has a soft spot for a couple of Indian locals. “The British consistently portrayed Tipu as a savage and fanatical barbarian,” Dalrymple writes, “but he was in truth a connoisseur and an intellectual…” Of course, Tipu, Dalrymple confesses a bit later, had rebels’ “arms, legs, ears, and noses cut off before being hanged” as well as forcibly circumcising captives and converting them to Islam.

Emperor Shah Alam (1728-1806) is contemporary for much of the time Dalrymple covers. “His was…a life marked by kindness, decency, integrity and learning at a time when such qualities were in short supply…he…managed to keep the Mughul flame alive through the worst of the Great Anarchy….” Dalrymple portrays a most intriguing figure in Emperor Shah Alam, a man attracted to mysticism and yet as prepared as his contemporaries to double-deal; someone who endures exile and torture and who outlives, albeit in a melancholy fashion, his enemies. Despite his lack of wealth, troops or political power, the very nature of his being emperor still, it seems, inspired affection.

Part of Dalrymple’s excellence is in the use of Indian sources – he takes numerous quotes from Ghulam Hussain Khan, acclaimed by Dalrymple as “brilliant,” who threads the story as an 18th-century historian on his untranslated works, Seir Mutaqherin (Review of Modern Times). Dalrymple has used a trove of company documents in Britain and India as well as Persian-language histories, much of which he shares in English translation with the reader. However he does this a bit too often and portions of his account can seem more assembled than written.

These pages are also brimming with anecdotes retold with Dalrymple’s distinctive delight in the piquant, equivoque and gory: we have historical moments when “it seemed as if it were raining blood, for the drains were streaming with it” (quoted from a report c1740 regarding events that preceded Nadir Shah’s infamous looting of the peacock throne) as well as duels between Company officials so busy with their in-fighting that it’s a miracle they could perform their work at all; there’s also homosexuality, homophobia, sexual torture, castrations, cannibalism, brothels and gonorrhoea.

The principal protagonists of the “Black Hole of Calcutta” incident are both, naturally, certified pervs: Siraj ud-Daula is a “serial bisexual rapist” while his opponent Governor Drake is having an “affair with his sister”. And one particular Mughal governor liked to throw tax defaulters in pits of rotting shit (“the stench was so offensive, that it almost suffocated anyone who came near it”). All this gives one a rough idea of what historically important people were up to according to Dalrymple. But all things considered, Dalrymple’s research is solid and heavily annotated.

However entertaining and widely researched using unused Urdu and Persian sources, Dalrymple’s overall approach doesn’t tell us very much about the general tendency in eighteenth-century imperial activity, and particularly that of the British, that we didn’t already know. And other things he downplays or neglects. Thus, the East India Company was one of a series of ‘national’ East India companies, including those of France, the Netherlands and Sweden. Moreover, for Britain, there was the Hudson Bay Company, the Royal African Company, and the chartered companies involved in North America, as well, for example, as the Bank of England. Delegated authority in this form or shared state/private activities were a major part of governance. To assume from the modern perspective of state authority that this was necessarily inadequate is misleading as well as teleological. Indeed, Dalrymple offers no real evidence for his view. Was Portuguese India, where the state had a larger role, ‘better’?

Secondly, let us look at India as a whole. There is an established scholarly debate to which Dalrymple makes no ground breaking contribution. This debate focuses on the question of whether, after the death in 1707 of the mighty Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb (r. 1658-1707), the focus should be on decline and chaos or, instead, on the development of a tier of powers within the sub-continent, for example Hyderabad. In the latter perspective, the East India Company (EIC) emerges as one and, eventually, the most successful of the successor powers. That raises questions of comparative efficiency and how the EIC succeeded in the Indian military labour market, this helping in defeating the Marathas in the 1800s.

An Indian power, the EIC was also a ‘foreign’ one; although foreignness should not be understood in modern terms. As a ‘foreign’ one, the EIC was not alone among the successful players, and was not even particularly successful, other than against marginal players, until the 1760s. Compared to Nadir Shah of Persia in the late 1730s (on whom Michael Axworthy is well worth reading), or the Afghans from the late 1750s (on whom Jos Gommans is best), the EIC was limited on land. This was part of a longstanding pattern, encompassing indeed, to a degree, the Mughals. Dalrymple fails to address this comparative context adequately.

Dalrymple seems particularly incensed at “corporate violence” and in a (mercifully short) final chapter alludes to Exxon and the United Fruit Company. Indeed Dalrymple has a pitch ” that globalisation is rooted here, albeit that “the world’s largest corporations…..are tame beasts compared with the ravaging territorial appetites of the militarised East India Company.”

It is an interesting question to ask: How might the actions of these corporate raiders have differed from those of a state? It’s not clear, for example, that the EIC was any worse than the average Indian ruler and surely these stationary bandits were better than roving bandits like Nader Shah. The EIC may have looted India but economic historian Tirthankar Roy explains that: “Much of the money that Clive and his henchmen looted from India came from the treasury of the nawab. The Indian princes, ‘walking jeweler’s shops’ as an American merchant called them, spent more money on pearls and diamonds than on infrastructural developments or welfare measures for the poor. If the Company transferred taxpayers’ money from the pockets of an Indian nobleman to its own pockets, the transfer might have bankrupted pearl merchants and reduced the number of people in the harem, but would make little difference to the ordinary Indian.”

Moreover, although it began as a private-firm, the EIC became so regulated by Parliament that Hejeebu (2016) concludes, “After 1773, little of the Company’s commercial ethos survived in India.” Certainly, by the time the brothers Wellesley were making their final push for territorial acquisition, the company directors back in London were pulling out their hair and begging for fewer expensive wars and more trading profits.

So also for eighteenth-century Asia as a whole. Dalrymple has it in for the form of capitalism the EIC represents; but it was less destructive than the Manchu conquest of Xinjiang in the 1750s, or, indeed, the Afghan destruction of Safavid rule in Persia in the early 1720s. Such comparative points would have been offered Dalrymple the opportunity to deploy scholarship and judgment, and, indeed, raise interesting questions about the conceptualisation and methodologies of cross-cultural and diachronic comparison.

Focusing anew on India, the extent to which the Mughal achievement in subjugating the Deccan was itself transient might be underlined, and, alongside consideration, of the Maratha-Mughal struggle in the late seventeenth century, that provides another perspective on subsequent developments. The extent to which Bengal, for example, did not know much peace prior to the EIC is worthy of consideration. It also helps explain why so many local interests found it appropriate, as well as convenient, to ally with the EIC. It brought a degree of protection for the regional economy and offered defence against Maratha, Afghan, and other, attacks and/or exactions. The terms of entry into a British-led global economy were less unwelcome than later nationalist writers might suggest. Dalrymple himself cites Trotsky, who was no guide to the period. To turn to other specifics is only to underline these points.

After Warren Hastings’ impeachment which in effect brought to an end the era when “almost all of India south of [Delhi] was…..effectively ruled by a handful of businessmen from a boardroom in the City of London.” It is hard to find a simple lesson, beyond Dalrymple’s point that talk of Britain having conquered India ‘disguises a much more sinister reality’.

One of the great advantages non-fiction has over fiction is that you cannot make it up, and in the case of the East India Company, you cannot make it up to an extent that beggars belief. William Dalrymple has been for some years one of the most eloquent and assiduous chroniclers of Indian history. With this new work, he sounds a minatory note. The East India Company may be history, but it has warnings for the future. It was “the first great multinational corporation, and the first to run amok”. Wryly, he writes that at least Walmart doesn’t own a fleet of nuclear submarines and Facebook doesn’t have regiments of infantry.

Yet Facebook and Uber does indeed have the potential power to usurp national authority - Facebook can sway elections through its monopoly on how people consume their news for instance. But they do not seize physical territory as Dalrymple states. Even an oil company with private guards in a war-torn country does not compare these days. This doesn’t exonerate corporations though. I know from personal experience of working in the corporate world that it attracts its fair share of psychopaths and cold blooded operators obsessed with the bottom lines of their balance sheets and the worship of the fortunes of their share prices and the lengths they go to would indeed come close to or cross over moral and legal lines. Perhaps the moral is to keep a stern eye on ‘corporate influence, with its fatal blend of power, money and unaccountability’. Clive reflected after Buxar, ‘We must indeed become Nabobs ourselves in Fact if not in Name…..We must go forward, for to retract is impossible.’ That was the nature of the beast.

Speaking of being beastly, some readers may disagree with the more radical views presented in taking apart the imperialist project and showed it for what it was - not about civilising savages, but about brutally exploiting civilised humans by treating them as savages. I think that’s partly true but not the whole story as Dalrymple will freely concede himself. Imperial history is a charged subject and they defy lazy Manichean conclusions of good guys and bad guys.

Dalrymple’s book is an excellent example of popular history - engaging, entertaining, readable, and informative. However, I honestly think he should have stuck to the history and not tried to draw out a trustbusting parallel with today’s big companies. Where the parallels exist, they are to do with cronyism, rent-seeking, and bailouts, all of which are primarily sins of government.

The Anarchy remains though a page-turning history of the rise of the East India Company with plenty of raw material to enjoy and to think about. To my mind the title ‘The Anarchy’ is brilliantly and appositely chosen. There are in fact two anarchies here; the anarchy of the competing regimes in India, and the anarchy – literally, without leaders or rules – of the East India Company itself, a corporation that put itself above law. The dangers of power without governance are depicted in an exemplary fashion. Dalrymple has done a great service in not just writing an eminently readable history of 18th century India, but in reflecting on how so much of it serves as a warning for our own time when chaos runs amok from those seeking to be above the law.

#treat your s(h)elf #books #review #reading #bookgasm #book review #history #east india company #william dalrymple #the anrchy #britain #colonialism #imperialism #british history #india #personal

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clembarbarossa · 5 years

Text

Rest and Peace I

The life of an Assassin is one of constant toil, emotional duress and gruesome murders. So, I thought it would be nice to give them rest. Nice days to recover and do what they enjoy at least, amongst their loved ones.

Hey everyone! I started I series of fics whose theme is going to be the Assassins (and some Templar) depicted in peaceful moments, often with love and intimacy, because they deserve it.

My first fic feature Ratonhnhaké:ton, along with some Homesteaders, and is dedicated to my good friend @jiruchan! Enjoy!

There is some Kanienké’ha in this fic too. Feel free to correct me if I messed things up.

You may read it here on Ao3 too.

________________________________________________________________

August was coming to an end. The air was still warm, the smouldering summer heat under which Warren and Prudence had to toll wasn’t entirely gone. The year was good, the harvest bountiful thanks to the rich soil of the homestead. His carriage filled with caskets of corn, bags of wheat and vegetables, Warren went to Boston to sell their crops.

Still, Prudence had her hands full. Pigs, Cows, Sheep and Poultry to tend to, and so many vegetables yet to pick, and the most delicate task of all: Hunter.

The boy was no longer a baby she could strap to her back while working. At four years of age, he was as swift and lively as the bunnies that constantly tried to nibble at their pumpkins. Prudence was even more worried that he apparently inherited her restlessness. Since her pregnancy and eventful delivery, she toned down her escapades in the wilderness: she felt like her poor Warren’s heart shouldn’t be furthermore mistreated and brave Connor couldn’t be around every time to save her from bears or impatient babies. Speaking of the wolf…

Ratonhnhaké:ton was peacefully walking down the path bordering the farm. Going to Myriam cabin, no doubt to plan their next delivery of fresh furs. What intrigued Prudence was that the young man wasn’t wearing his heavy hooded coat, even he had to adapt to the heat after all. Even more unusual was the absence of any of his weapons, no bow nor guns and neither tomahawk at his sides. Only his peculiar leather bracers remained.

“Conno’!” Young Hunter had spotted Ratonhnhaké:ton too, and rushed to his side with his usual recklessness. The balance of four years olds being what it is, he tripped a first time, and a second that made him land flat on the ground. The boy began to wail a mere two second after and Prudence could not refrain a chuckle, her son certainly had had worse stunts. Connor picked him up and brushed the dirt off with his hand.

“Hello Connor, what deadly injury has my child sustained?” she jokingly asked.

“Nothing worth bothering Dr White,” he softly replied, as Hunter stopped crying “this case seems beyond saving, I am afraid…”

Prudence laughed at Connor’s unexpected joke; the humour was lost to Hunter who whined and clang to the young man. The usually touch-adverse Connor welcomed the toddler’s embrace and picked him up in his arms as he got up.

“You were up to discuss furs and pelts with Myriam, I wager?”

“Yes. Ellen is expecting a big commission from Boston and needed material, it will be easier to do if we team up.”

“Indeed. Now sweetheart,” she turned to her son, “Connor has business to do, you heard, so you better leave him be…”

Hunter yelped a defiant “No!” and clang harder to Connor when his mother attempted to grab him. The frown she made reminded Connor of how his own mother reacted to him misbehaving; she shifted her tone accordingly:

“Oh no, you son of mine, you do not talk back to me.” Prudence growled without raising her usually gentle voice, “no one has time for a tantrum here, not Connor and certainly not me.” Hunter made a sad put and started to loosen his grip on Connor when the man spoke:

“I do not mind if he stays with me, Prudence. You look like you have much to do and I am not that busy myself.”

Prudence was taken aback by her friend’s proposal, but she had to admit it was a tempting one; she could finish her work much earlier without her toddler scampering around.

“Aw that’s awfully nice of you Connor, but you are like Warren you spoil him too much, he’s going to turn rotten!” Hunter stuck his tongue out at his mother who playfully flicked him on the nose, the toddler giggled.

“Sorry for that”, Connor said with a smile.

“Don’t apologise for bein’ nice. And thank you, I could use this help, I trust you with him more than Terry’s boys.”

Connor chuckled, Malcolm and Angus were rowdy kids and their last attempt at babysitting nearly ended in disaster. Thankfully, Norris saw them in his mine before lighting his charge’s fuse.

<<<<<<<>>>>>>>

One of the first things Hunter told Connor when he started to talk was for asking him why he is so tall. The adults around laughed at the young boy’s questions. Prudence didn’t miss the occasion and proclaimed that Connor became so tall because he wasn’t fussing when eating his soup, unlike a certain someone. Oliver thought more likely that the robust and meaty native diet was to thanks for that and Lyle White pondered if the fresh air of the Kanien’ké valley, free of the towns’ miasma, was responsible. Connor had no answers, although his parents were certainly not short. The memories of both Kaniehtí:io and Haytham made him fell silent for the rest of the evening.

Now, Connor long legs and usual fast paced walk rapidly proved way too quick for little Hunter who scrambled behind him.

“Conno’… Conno’!” The young man turned to face his charge, Hunter’s face clearly showed his frustration as he approached, “you too fast… I can’t follow you…”

“You are right, Hunter. My apologies.” Ratonhnhaké:ton softly replied, he extended his hand to the boy who eagerly took it.

For the rest of the walk, Connor had to lean and adjust his pace to Hunter’s. He didn’t mind as the child was extremely happy that way. He was hopping alongside his friend on the forest path and pointing at the birds while making joyful noises. Connor was used of this now, and resisted the urge to chide him for what would be seen as awfully rude amongst his people. He caught sight of a Northern Cardinal, all crimson, singing on a branch. “Look Connor, all the pretty feathers! Do you use its feather for your hair?”, the boy asked.

“We do not. We use Eagle’s feathers.”

“Oh. And why do you use feathers?”.

Connor pondered the question and the best way to answer it to the boy. It was not often that Colonists asked him questions about his culture, even amongst his Assassin brethren. “We use it to celebrate, to show our feats to our people and our origin too.”

“Origin?”

“Well... I am from the Kanien’kehá:ka nation, or… Mohawk as some say. If I want to show it to the people of other tribes, I will have to put three eagle’s feathers in my hair.”

“Oh!” Hunter showed a great deal of interest that surprised Connor, “and why don’t you do it now then?”

“I… I am not… It will not fit with my hood.”

“Aw… to bad, because I think it’s pretty!”

“Yes. And we use feather to make things pretty too.” Hunter giggled.

As they were nearing Myriam’s cabin, Connor spotted an Owl that Hunter didn’t see. He kneeled beside the boy and pointed at it with is lips, in native fashion. “Look here: tsihstekeri.”

“What!?” The toddler’s shout startled the bird of prey who angrily stared at them both.

“Tsihstekeri,” repeated Connor, “That’s how my people call the owls.”

“Wah! And how you call eagles?”

“Akweks.” Ratonhnhaké:ton replied.

Connor was baffled but endeared by Hunter’s awe. To a four years old boy still struggling with English, the idea that things could be named in a whole different language was a constant source of amazement. When they reached Myriam’s cabin, Connor smiled and said “Iontó:rats.”

“Hello to you too, Connor.” Myriam absentmindedly replied; she was sharpening the knife Norris once gifted her. “Kwey[1]! That’s how you say it too, right?”

That word was familiar to Ratonhnhaké:ton, it was the first that sprung out of the lips of the tribes north and south of the Great Lakes and the Great Walking River[2] when they meet each other.

“This is a greeting we use amongst many people, though my brethren usually say Shé:kon, to greet one another.”

“Then what did you say, just now?”, Myriam stood up, “I hope you weren’t calling me names”, she jokingly added.

“Conno’ is teaching me words!”, Hunter suddenly shouted.

“Yes, Iontó:rats means ‘Huntress’.”

“Oh well, ‘Yon-do-rads’? That’s nice to know. And how would you call a little hunter like we have here?”, she said while smiling at Hunter.

“Rató:rats.”, he replied, while smiling at his young charge who beamed back.

Connor and Myriam started discussing their upcoming tasks: on which ground to hunt and which to lay traps, where to find the best furs for Ellen. Hunter quickly bore of this conversation and began to wander around the Huntress’s cabin. The sight of dead trapped rabbits and drying furs didn’t faze the little farm boy much, he was used to it, watching his father kill pigs and poultry then playing in the feathers his mother plucked. The traps aligned by the door caught his eyes however. While the snares where not much to look at, the wolf and bear traps, with their sharp teeth, inspired him a morbid curiosity…

“Do not touch that, Hunter!”

Connor’s shout snapped him out of his little examination, his fingers already too close to the rusty maws, thankfully closed.

“Oh, you need to keep an eye on that one, remind me of someone…” snickered Myriam.

“Indeed” Connor beckoned Hunter to approach, as the toddler came closer, pouting all the way, he took his hand in his own, “There are things you should not touch, little one,” he lightly squeezed his fingers to make his point, “those could easily hurt you if you are not careful. Do you understand?”

Hunter nodded and looked away, a bit upset by the lecture, Connor elected not to mind that. Myriam laughed as she stood up.

“Well, I’m not in a hurry to get one of my own. It’d be complicated to have another baby around.”

“I’m not a baby…” muttered Hunter and Myriam laughed again, tried to gently poke his puffed cheeks only for the boy to whine and hide behind Connor’s broad back.

“You and Norris aren’t planning to have one?”

“Well, he’d like too, and I’m not really against it, but you know how I feel about the whole housewife business.”

“I do,” Connor smiled, “and the trees remember too.”

“Oh please,” Myriam rolled her eyes, “Don’t bring this up, I panicked and nearly ruined my dress in this damn river.”

They both laughed while Hunter side-eyed them.

<<<<<<<>>>>>>>

Ratonhnhaké:ton and Hunter were back into the wilds, the adults assigned each other places were to lay traps. Once again, Connor was carrying Hunter on his shoulders, to protect him from the bushes and vines. Hunter was lazily resting on Connor’s head, humming a little tune while playing with his braids. Connor didn’t mind and was looking for good spots for trapping foxes. Since he was in charge of Hunter, both he and Myriam thought it wiser that she takes care of the wolves and their pelts.

Finding a good place, he crouches to lay his snare and place some bait. Hunter tighten his grip on Connor’s head and giggles as these movements make him rock back and forth. Connor playfully moves his shoulders to humour the child some more. Hunter’s laughter of delight echoes under the trees and scare off numerous birds.

“Ush, Hunter, look.” Connor pointed toward the edge of the forest, by a clearance bathed in sunlight, first with his lips, then with his hands when Hunter didn’t understand. “Over there, quietly…”

The boy squinted in this direction then gasped.

“A doe!” His whisper barely concealed his excitement.

“Yes. Oskenón:ton. Keep looking, under her belly.” Hunter focused, and saw a small creature peeking under the deer, similar but smaller with a constellation of white spots on its back.

“Her baby!”, this time Hunter wasn’t as discreet and shouted. The doe stiffened and raised her head, sniffing the air, her ears twisting in all direction, searching for any trace of danger. Hunter realised his mistake and covered his mouth with his hands.

“You need to be careful, Hunter,” whispered Connor, “Do not make any noise, lest you want to startle the animals.”

The doe hopped back in the thick of the woods, her progeny right after her.

“Aw no~” Hunter pouted, disappointment clear in his voice,

“You will have other chances. Just remember to be silent, alright.” Ratonhnhaké:ton felt the boy’s nodding and resumed walking.

“Conno~?”

“Hum?”

“I’m hungry…”

“Is that so? Hum…” Connor thought of an answer as Hunter was starting to squirm, he remembered a place where blackberry brambles were growing and probably bear fruits this time of year, it would be a good trapping ground too. “Do you like blackberries, Hunter?”

“I do! I do!”, the boy shouted in excitation and trampled his legs on Connor’s torso. “Let’s go pick bwackberries, Conno’!”

The young man laughed at the sound of his charge’s childish slurs and enthusiasm and sprung forward.

Despite Connor’s firm grip on the boy’s legs, he did bounce quite a bit on his shoulders. Hunter’s laughter and encouragement to go faster made him increase his pace. A soft wind began to blow, ruffling the leaves and the grass, cooling both of their faces. Hunter laughed even more and raised his arms to try and catch the leaves blown away. Connor kept his fast pace and the speed made forest around them blur in shades of green and brown.

As they were nearing the brambles, Connor slowed down but kept skipping to humour the child. Even amongst Hunter’s giggles, he could distinctly hear a ruffle in the bushes that was way too loud to be of a hare, and far too near to be on an animal anyway. He came to an abrupt stop and gently placed in index on Hunter’s lips to advise him silence, the boy gasped and froze, taking this as a new game or the chance to see another creature.

As they stood silent and listening, the ruffling increased.

“Shit!”

“Oh! That’s not an animal!” exclaimed Hunter, “Hey! Your mommy will wash your mouth with a soap if you swear!”

“Don’t tell Ellen, then!” a girlish voice replied beyond the brambles. Connor recognised it as Maria’s. He couldn’t see the girl yet but heard her struggling in the bushes.

“We will not, Maria. But what are you doing?” As he said that, Connor was approaching and saw the teenage girl, her dress tangled in the brambles and stained by blackberries. She looked up with a mixed expression of contrition and anger, somewhat softened by the sight of little Hunter perched atop Connor’s shoulders.

“I was just strolling around. Something startled me and… Mom is going to kill me.” She said looking at the disaster brought on her dress.

“She certainly will not,” Connor reassured her, “but she will probably want you to fix your dress.”

“Same thing! I hate doing it, I don’t wanna become a seamstress, damn it!”

“You should not swear in front of Hunter.”, Connor warned as he was getting the boy off his shoulders.

“Right,” she sniffled, “Sorry, I… I have been trapped here for a quarter of an hour at least…”

“Conno’ and I we saw a lot of birds,” exclaimed Hunter, running toward her, “and a doe and her baby!”

“Ah… I that so?”, Maria replied with a grimace, trying to be somewhat amiable to the toddler.

“Yes!” He lowered his voice, “and Conno’ he told me to be quiet because… because we shouldn’t scare the mommy with her baby!” He exclaimed anew, forgetting his caretaker’s advice.

“Her fawn, Hunter.” Connor softly corrected him as he started to help Maria getting untangled.

“Fawn!” Hunter joyfully repeated, “We saw a doe and her fawn, Maria!”

“You two are lucky, then… The only thing I saw was a go… a cursed wolverine. Foul beast snarled at me, that’s why I ran and got caught here.”

“You did well,” replied Connor, “better getting caught in a thicket than treading on the ferocious Tsikenekerehetshotáhrhon.”

“The what?!?” Exclaimed Maria.

“Conno’ is teaching me animal names in his language.” Answered Hunter, “An eagle you call it ‘Ag-wek’!”

“Oh. That’s nice…” Hunter proudly beamed at her. “I think you’ll have to cut some of it Connor, it’d be too tattered even if you get it out anyway… And I forgot my knife…”

“It looks like you are right…” Connor glanced at Hunter to check where he was looking; luckily, he was already picking and savouring the blackberries. Connor swiftly detached is left hidden blade to cut Maria free of the thorns. She stumbled out the way and stretched her legs, enjoying her new freedom.

“Ah, thank you Connor! You must have magical power, always here to save people when needed!”

“I wish it was true, Maria,” sadly replied Connor, he handed her the ragged piece of cloth he just got out of the bramble.

“Maria! Say “Aaah”!”, Maria looked down to see Hunter presenting a blackberry for her to pick, the boy already had purple juice all over his mouth. She got the fruit with her mouth and smothered Hunter’s giggles with her new rag.

<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>

Once the trio had their fill of blackberries, or “Teiote’nenhrà:kton” as Ratonhnhaké:ton taught them, they got to rest at the edge of a clearing. Hunter was running around after the butterflies, observing the various insects frolicking in the grass. Maria lent him her mop cap to shelter his head from the sun. It made him look rather odd, and her quite improper by colonial standard, with her brown locks free on her back, but neither of them cared, and neither did Connor.

They were both sitting in the shade of a great oak, keeping an eye on the kid, a small mount of berries on a leather piece between them from which Maria regularly picked. Her chin was resting on her knees and her hands were buried in her dress. Connor was more relaxed; his legs were stretched in front of him and he was resting on his elbows. He didn’t get to place a lot of snares but that was something he could always do latter, with a more proper equipment this time.

“I should do like Myriam and wear trousers when I go for a walk”, Maria suddenly muttered.

“That would be more convenient indeed.” Replied Connor, “You said you don’t like sewing, but couldn’t you make yourself a pair?”

Maria frowned and half buried her face behind her knees, “I asked Mom… she said it wasn’t proper, quoted a part of the Bible that said it was an ‘abomination’,” Maria snorted of frustration, “and made me read ten pages of it!”.

“I see.” Connor understood the teenager frustration, colonial women had to put up with a lot of constraints while those of his people were the one running the show. His own reading of the Bible was motivated by his desire to better understand colonial society. While he managed to chew through the Genesis and Exodus, wondering all the way which parts were true, which were fictions and how many pieces of Eden were involved, the following books infuriated him with their nonsensical rules. He gave up and Father Timothy had the kindness to explain the rest to him. “I hope she doesn’t say that about Myriam.”

“No. I brought her up actually, and she said that Myriam wear pants because of her trade and that – unlike me – she’s an adult.”

“Eh, she has a point.”

“Still, it’s unfair. I don’t mind dresses, but what’s the point of letting me explore if I have to keep it?”

“You really do like the wilderness around here, do you?”, Connor asked. He saw a glimmer in Maria’s eyes before she answered.

“Yes! I love it here! Everything is beautiful, it’s quiet, I discover new things every week, I doesn’t stink, and the people are nice. It’s not like in New-York…”, her demeanour suddenly darkened, “When this piece of trash was beating Mom again, I was asking for help to everyone… The neighbours, the guards, nobody answered… If you didn’t happen to be here…”

“I was. And I would do it again anytime, Maria.” Connor comforted her, “As will everyone in the homestead.”

“I know. That’s why I like it here.” She said with a smile. Connor smiled as well; it was during these moments that he knew everything he was doing wasn’t in vain. That he was actually able to help people be safe and happy. They both stayed silent a little while until Hunter ran toward them.

“Conno’!! Maria! Look what I got! Look!” The overexcited toddler opened his hands to reveal a massive spotted beetle with a pair of horns on its head[3].

“That is a good catch, Hunter.” Connor said, “Well done.”

“Looks like a Rhinoceros…” Maria mumbled.

“A what?” Hunter asked.

“Rhi-no-ce-ros. It’s a giant beasty from Africa with two horns on its head, like your bug here. I’m sure Connor has heard of it.”

“I did not. You seem really knowledgeable on the matter, Maria.”

The young girl struggled a bit to refrain a smile of pride, “I have a book with a lot of engravings of animals from all around the world, some of them reaaally weird. I got it at school because of my good grades.” She noticed the gleam of expectation in Hunter’s big eyes, “I’ll show it to you, if you want”

The toddler beamed at the proposal and voiced his approval of the idea. It was at this moment that the beetle decided it had enough of his handling and flew off his hands. The young boy tried to catch it without any success.

“Ah no! It was gift for Mommy!”

“Living beings are no gift, Hunter. Especially wild animals, that’s why it got away, you cannot deprive it of its freedom.” Connor lectured him.

“And I don’t think Prudence would like this kind of gift anyway,” snarked Maria, “You should get her a bouquet instead, there’s plenty for it in this meadow.”

Hunter instantly got his smile back and ran away in the grass to pick flowers. Connor chuckled, memories came back of an adventure where a flowery gift was less appreciated, but Prudence would like it no doupt.

“So, you were good at school, a pity there isn’t any here.”

“Oh, I had time to learn a lot. And Father Timothy keeps teaching me about a lot of things, not just the Bible. And he’s waaay nicer than the Pastor’s wife who was teaching us back in New York.”

“Good to hear. And… do you know what you want to do later?”

“I already work with Mom, and she wants me to take over after her.” She buried her face between her knees again, “And I don’t want to be a seamstress. I think that I want to see more of the world and help people, like you do.”

Connor’s back stiffened. It wasn’t an answer he was expecting, part of him felt pride and approval, but he also felt fear, for his path was hard, dangerous, and thankless. For his brothers and sisters, being an Assassin was their choice. On the contrary, it was something destiny, or dreadful spirits, threw at him and he embraced it without fully realising the implications at first and he had to learn the hard way. He wasn’t one to turn down expectations and potential recruits, but dragging a young girl into his world was the last thing he wanted, especially the daughter of a friend.

“I just help people I encounter.” Connor tried to divert the subject, “It is just something anyone would do, and should do.”

“Ah! You’re humble but you won’t fool me. No ordinary hunter would go around with a frigate, and with those knives inside your wrists”, she glanced at Connor’s hidden blades’ bracers, “Achilles and you were working for people like Tallmadge, right? Helping the Patriots during the war?”

“You… Let’s say that you are not far from the truth.” Connor was impressed by the girl’s deductions and relieved that her conclusion was wrong while still plausible.

“Humpf! You can’t hide it from me,” she said with a mischievous smile, “Once I manage to make a pair of pants under Mom’s nose, you’ll have to teach me how to run in the trees like you do.”

Connor chuckled, “Why not? Myriam could give you some lessons as well.”

Maria brought her legs closer to her body, but Connor could clearly see her wide and proud smile.

<<<<<<<>>>>>>>

As the afternoon was ending, the trio made its way back to the village. Hunter was holding Maria’s hand and his flowers in the other, hopping and humming a tune. Ratonhnhaké:ton was walking besides them, holding a generous bounty of berries in a bag. As they were approaching Ellen and Maria’s house, the girl made a stop.

“Mom is going to scold me for the dress…”

“Probably, but she will also be glad to see you safe and sound. Trying to hide the truth from her is a bad idea, she will know in a way or another.”

“Right…” Maria sighed and went along with Hunter as the boy was pulling her hand.

Maria’s fears were only partially true: Ellen clearly wasn’t happy with the dress but her anger was alleviated by the offering of blackberries, the fact that Maria had to run from a wolverine and the laugh she had when she noticed Hunter still wearing her daughter’s mop cap.

Before they left, she offered a red ribbon to properly hold Hunter’s bouquet, and quickly re-arranged the flowers to better suit Prudence’s tastes despite the boy’s protests when she left the dandelions out.

After proper good-byes, and Maria’s renewal of her promise to show her book to Hunter, they left for the farm. Connor indulged Hunter with another ride on his shoulder. The toddler was overjoyed when Connor crossed the river by doing some free-running on a log instead of the bridge.

When they reached the farm, Prudence was resting under the porch, Connor let go of Hunter and the child ran to his mother.

“Mommy! Mommy! Look what I got you!”

“You what? Oh!” Prudence laughed when her son shoved the flowers under her nose to give her a good look of it. “Thank you, my son, I like your flowers very much.”

“Maria told me to do it and Ellen gave me the ribbon. Do they smell good?” the boy asked. His mother took the bouquet a smelled it, she did it noisily on purpose before giving her verdict.

“They smell wonderful, Hunter.” He beamed and Prudence embraced her son as thanks. This view brought a smile to Connor, he was happy to see that some were able to freely enjoy what was taken from him.

“Well now I’ll have to put them in a vase.” She said while standing up, “A thousand thanks to you Connor, for taking care of my son. I hope he wasn’t too much to handle and that he didn’t prevent you from doing your work.”

“Your son behaved splendidly, Prudence. And don’t worry, none of my tasks had any urgency. I’ll leave you two be for now to attend to it.”

“Wait!” Hunter yelped as Connor was leaving. The toddler ran to the man to hug him. Connor smiled and accepted his embrace.

“Good bye, Conno’. I’ll get to spend time with you again and you’ll teach me other words, right?”

“Right.” Connor smiled, “As soon as I can. Goodbye for now, Rató:rats.” Hunter laughed.

After really leaving and waving back, Connor was left by himself again. The Sun was starting to set and the warm evening light was bathing the trees and meadows. Musty smells of flowers, earth, evergreens and berries were filling the air. Insects and birds were chirping, only interrupted by the occasional breeze that contrasted nicely with the warmth of late August’s weather.

As he came into view of the Manor, Ratonhnhaké:ton realised – with a pinch of sadness to his heart – that it was the first time in months that he had such a nice and quiet time. He probably won’t get another moment like it anytime soon, but such was his work as an Assassin. After all, it was the joy and relief he could bring to others and the promise of such times that made it worth it.

Clearing the clouds of sadness off his mind, like he already did so many times before, and armed with a new resolve, he prepared himself to gear up again.

End notes :

[1] Algonquin for “Hello”, it became a word for salute in many north-eastern languages.

[2] The Saint-Lawrence river

[3] Eastern Hercules Beetle (Dynastes tityus). It looks like a beige Rhinoceros beetle, with black spots.

#Mes Bafouilles #Ratonhnhaké:ton #Connor Kenway #Fanfiction #Assassin's Creed #Kids #Hunter #Maria #Prudence #Ellen #Myriam #Rest and Peace

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borisbubbles · 5 years

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Eurivision: 40 - 36

40. Maja Keuc - “No one” Slovenia 2011

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Psychedelic, secretly evil masterpieces <3

“No one” is often overlooked in many rankings, by people with utterly vanilla tastes, and while vanilla is an excellent flavour, sometimes vanilla needs to bloom into something better with more flavour and texture. ENTER, this sneakily fierce song, featuring Bettan’s hip-waving choreo <3

"No one” slowly but gradually lulls you into its dark, alluring storyline, tricking you into believing this is a break-up song in which the woman is crying over the loss of the relationship, ONLY PLOT TWIST the girl is a textbook psychopath and this message of empowerment is actually one of psychotic obsession and petty revenge. Is this Gone Girl?

That’s in a nutshell, why “No one” is such a fantastic entry. It gradually, slowly unfolds like a paper fortune teller, except every flap contains a message of unfiltered, devious, psychotic energy. 😍 It’s so unabashedly dark and I cannot wait for ~Amaya~ to epically return to ESC (within the next three years) and give Slovenia their first top 10 since Nuša Derenda.

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39. Elina Nechayeva “La forza” Estonia 2018

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[2018 Review here]

Elina is so beautiful.

Wow. I mean, WHAT IS LA FORZA though if not a magnificent wonderland of stunning visual effect. It’s the best example of Estonia’s technological prowess at Eurovision. I mean, look at these projections. They are breath-taking, in the literal sense of the word:

Naturally, I must address that “La Forza” has received the criticism of “ugh, it’s boring”. However most of those people like Tamtaratam, so their opinions can be safely discarded into the rubbish bin. 🤭 I personally think “La forza” is a perfect execution of opera, providing captivating vocals and a sincerely stunning act. Opera is supposed to be a mind-blowing spectacle and “La forza” is exactly that.

However, it might actually be... a bit too perfect for my tastes. Its greatest strengths also made “La forza” a bit aloof and distant, and while this is far from a dealbreaker, it does prevent me from ranking it further.

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38. Loreen - “Euphoria” Sweden 2012

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[this entry was inspired by a popular youtube cooking channel]

Yes, this is not a ranking with Loreen as their #1. This could have been a ranking with Loreen as their #1 if she had gone to Eurovision with either of her other two melfest entries, but look at the flag and look at Sweden’s general taste in melfest winner:

It’s even a wonder a selection which produced THOSE winners also produced "Euphoria” to begin with.

Anyway, now that we’re on to the subject of Sweden, it appears that over the years, the general of opinion of Sweden has dropped. This is because out of all the countries participating in Eurovision, Sweden is by far the most smug.

Which is why the first step in covering the song that is generally considered their best entry, is to humble Sweden:

Hey Sweden, See this country? It’s called Switzerland. Switzerland once won the Eurovision Song Contest with Céline Dion. Céline Dion is one of the best selling artists in the world. She made double the sales ABBA made and has non-stop performed, while ABBA broke up less than 10 years after they won. You’re not better at iconic winners than Switzerland, Sweden. Remember that.

See this country? It’s called Moldova. It is the poorest country in the Euroverse and has amazing staging everbody talks about. Nobody ever talks about your staging because it just conveniently pretty people in various degrees of treadmill. You don’t stage better than Moldova, Sweden. Remember that.

See this country? It is called Malta. Malta have sent a woman to Eurovision for five years straight. They are one of the most unapologetically pro-female countries in the world. Even all of their JESC entries except for two have been women. Meanwhile you aren’t sending women and you know why? Because melfest is a rigged and fangirl pandering sausagefest. You’re worse at inclusion than Malta, Sweden. Remember that.

See this country? It’s called Ukraine. Ukraine have reached the grand final every year they’ve participated. Have you got a better track record? No, because you cannot guarantee qualification without properly without eating crusty professional jury ass first. You’re not better at reaching a Eurovision Grand Final than Ukraine, Sweden. Remember that.

See this country? It’s called Portugal. Portugal are the one of the few countries to have never sent songs with English as the primary language to Eurovision. They have proudly stuck with their native language even though it sounds like drunk Spanish. You know why you aren’t signing in your native language, Sweden? because you have no guts and let’s face it, no glory, that’s fucking why. Also your language sounds like Norwegian with a mouthfull of surströmming. You’re not better at native languages than Portugal, Sweden. Remember that.

See this country? It’s called Luxembourg. Luxembourg is a microstate that everyone wants to see back in the contest. Does anyone get excited when you return to the contest? No because they know you’ll get an underserved top five hand-fed to you, no matter what generic gobshite you’re sending. You’re worse at generating buzz than Luxembourg, Sweden. Remember that.

See this country? It’s called Norway. Norway’s last three entries have scored more televote points than yours have. You know why? Because their entries speak to people and are entertainment. Your entries only speak to people with boring taste and no friends (Denmark). Which is why you will never find or be repped by a KEiiNO. You’re not better at fun than Norway, Sweden, remember that.

See this country? it’s called Ireland. They.... okay, they aren’t better than you. I’ll be honest, Ireland is just a worthless, flavourless slice of slock in Eurovision. They’re flavourless, bland, completely without taste or texture. They’re the iceberg lettuce of this world. It’s a shock they won so many times, but I guess that’s anglophone privilege for you. Still, they have won Eurovision 7 times. Have you won Eurovision seven times, Sweden? Nuh uh, not that, peace! Remember that ;)

Now that Sweden has been properly humbled, it is time move on to the Loreen write up:

“Euphoria” is an everlasting piece of art and everyone who thinks otherwise needs a therapist.

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37. Bojana Stamenov - “Beauty never lies” Serbia 2015

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FINALLY I CAN SAY, THIS SONG IS FANTASTIC AND IT’S... fucking more than “okay”. Bojana is a FORCE OF NATURE.

It is therefore UTTERLY baffling to me that so many jurors ranked this song LAST??? Like,

a of all, look at how the crowd POPS at the key change, that’s as much an objective parametre of quality if ever there was.

B of all, I legit do not understand watching 2015 (a rather mediocre year of Eurovision) and thinking that Serbia is the worst, over, say... Bogus?? Because Bojana is a Goddess while Boggie is boring cunt and Goddesses > Boring cunts.

The jural dislike is even more baffling considering that “Beauty never lies” is a touching and deep exploration of overcoming self-loathing, I rant about meaningitis a lot, but one of the BEST ideas Serbia had was to revamp “Ceo svet je moi” into a body-positivity anthem because that theme + Bojana is a match made in Euroheaven. “Beauty never lies” starts off captivating, a gripping narrative about self-loathing with hints of avant garde artistry. It also has some of the best lyrics found in any Eurovision song. “Finally I can say-” is forever, but “beneath this veil of skin my heart’s entangled in, beauty’s embodied” is pure poetry. Excellent, just excellent.

and then, after a full minute of build-up and completely without warning "Beauty never lies” transforms into... a SHAMELESS CAMPY SCHLAGER MASTERPIECE 😍

This has to be one of the best key changes in Eurovision, right? As “Beauty never lies” starts off sentimental and contemplentative, it suddenly blossoms into an unapolegetic bop that completely DIS-MAN-TLES body-shaming in one fell swoop. Songs like these make me feel ALIVE and proud of being Eurovision fanboy. Thank you for your wise lesson Bojana, you stunner you. Signed with sincerity, BorisBubbles.

This will come as no surprise but she was also the highest Serbian entry on this list, which means it’s also recap time:

Statistics never lie, Serbia was pretty good in this decade. I rarely care for their entries with the intensity that I did for Bojana, but they are also consistently inoffensive. It it what you can expect for a small country bursting with musical talent (and Zheljko Joksimovic).

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36. Giorgos Alkaios & Friends - “OPA!” Greece 2010

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OPA!

I cannot let anyone with that haircut reach my top 35 in good conscience ,but jesus what a FIRECRACKER! I think the general apathy towards 2010 comes from the general lack of ENERGETIC bangers, but between “OPA!” (caps and exclamation point are mandatory) and “Allez Ola Olé”, I don’t think anyone can complain. This song is an EXPLOSION.

Much like how “Dancing in the rain” was a showcase of Spain’s greatest talent, so is “OPA!” an excellent calling card for Greece’s Eurovision prowess: they excel at drunken party anthems. “OPA!” is a bangin’ bacchanal, punctuating every sentence with kickass virile energy, examples of which include ejaculating drums:

Electro-Fiddle solo’s <3

and hammy nokia noises <3 (attempted pandering to the hosts and getting the country wrong <3333333)

This song and “Alcohol is free” were the final times where Greece excelled at high voltage fun (there’s also “Rise up” I guess but lol @ that). GET IT TOGETHER GREECE, but I guess I’ll elaborate further once it’s Koza Mostra’s turn to be judged, juried and executed.

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#Eurovision #Eurovision Song Contest #Maja Keuc #No One #Slovenia #Elina Nechayeva #La Forza #Sweden #Loreen #Euphoria #Serbia #Estonia #Bojana Stamenov #Beauty never lies #Giorgos Alkaios #Giorgos Alkaois' friends #OPA

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octoberinvienna · 5 years

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Youth, Marriage, Motherland

There is something sublime and quietly magical that happens to me when I cross the border into Poland, the country of my birth. It’s not exactly a feeling and certainly no kind of realization but instead a wave or state or sensation that both envelopes and radiates. A profound peacefulness. Some alignment of the axes of my DNA. Not really borne of any geographic nostalgia for the place since I never lived there beyond my toddler years. But a soulful, even spiritual, fondness, connection, unity with the land that was first felt under my tiny feet, that fed and sustained my parents and their parents, with this beleaguered country that appears and disappears from maps over the centuries and yet retains its clear historic arc.

As I’ve already said, despite what it might appear from the above, I don’t feel myself to have any particular nostalgia for being a Pole in particular, let alone any identifiable national pride, but it is the place I’m from, stamped on my birth certificate and passport, and for whatever reason, it’s where I feel most unhurried, most pleasantly resigned, least like a stranger in a strange land. And I can assure you, that as a younger me, I never, ever, imagined that would be the case.

For an immigrant child, the relationship between your personal identity and ‘home’ country is complex in almost indescribable ways. Amongst my earliest memories is my first day at daycare near Roncesvalles Ave, the Polish community’s landing spot in Toronto until very recently. I had become comfortable in a mock car in the corner of the classroom and couldn’t understand why the teacher was pulling me out when I was clearly telling her that I wasn’t done yet. Since children don’t typically require a common language to play, there aren’t too many other misunderstandings that I readily recall from those early days. But every few years after that brought a new mysterious paradigm shift in how I thought of myself, my Polishness in a Canadian world, the accents of my parents, the foods that we ate and avoided, and the wool cardigans I always suffered through on school picture day.

Being different as a kid in Toronto is definitely less difficult than in most other cities of the world. Almost everyone, especially in newcomer neighbourhoods, is some variety of novel. My kindergarten playground was a mini-UN. Grade school was in a Maltese neighbourhood (if you can believe that) and with a healthy mix of Philipino, Vietnamese, Dominican, Jamaican, Portuguese, Ukrainian, and of course, Canadian kids. My high school was predominantly Italian or they at least tried hard to make it feel that way. But even there, I studied and played sports with Croats, Salvadoreans and Lebanese friends and classmates.

Even in this multicultural melange, I still felt outside the norm on better days and embarrassed for my heritage on worse ones. I always had blackforest ham sandwiches on rye bread for lunch. No one else every did. I never got granola bars, or rice pudding, or fruit roll-ups, because I was a sophisticated pre-teen with old world canapes in my He-Man lunchbox. I couldn’t understand why my parents were unable to pronounce three or thirteen or thirsty even as adults. That my dad didn’t recognize the crucial difference between Nike and Nike Air running shoes. That my mom would look for me in the neighbourhood, while I was playing baseball or hockey, by hollering for me in my diminutive Polish name Piotrus – which when you’re 12 is pretty much the equivalent of her with a mega-phone yelling: Sweetie Petey Pie!

In the assertively awkward teenage years, it’s not an exaggeration to say that I shunned my heritage. As I mentioned, there didn’t seem to be many other cool Polish kids around. My skin crawled when recent Polish arrivals gave presentations in English class, well researched and heavily accented. Now, looking back 20 years later, I couldn’t be more embarrassed that I was so embarrassed, but in that frail dawning time of life, I needed confidence drawn from the collective inputs to my makeup and being Polish didn’t appear to provide that in any way. I couldn’t help but feel that being a Pole dragged me down more than it lifted me up.

That all thankfully started to shift in my 20s. Broadened experiences, a University education and the first of many overseas trips began to expand and contextualize how interesting it is to have a whole world within yourself that isn’t necessarily evident to those in the world outside you. With the help of new friends and acquaintances, I felt emboldened to appreciate knowing a unique (if not particularly practical) language, celebrating communal rituals and events in specific ways, getting under the skin of my parents’ decisions and memories of my sandwiches and school trips and all the invisible-to-me in’s and out’s, before’s and after’s of life from their perspectives – that they only now could themselves acknowledge with some distance and hard-earned stability. I realized that the best kind of multiculturalism doesn’t mean the fading away of heritage, but the doubling-down, the creation of new, as yet unknown, fusions, the celebration and sharing of the meaning of your roots.

After all those years and that enjoyable evolution, it still never entirely settled though. I continued to find Poles xenophobic at worst and grouchy grumpy at best. I wondered how I’d ever find a woman to marry me and what I could possibly offer in negotiations to her family for taking on my name. What would my folks expect of my wife? Could she possibly ever meet the exacting Catholic Eastern European standards that travel silently from generation to generation?

As you enter proper adulthood, questions of identity become deprioritized in the all-encompassing effort to become independent, blaze a respectful life and career path, and at the base, manage to have somewhere to live and some food to eat. More time is spent doing than reflecting. In that vein, as a 35 year old graduate student of immigration in Brussels, where once, in a seminar on integration and identity, I may have questioned aloud what I owed to my Polish (and now EU) passport, I found the woman to perfectly complement the parts of me that needed complementing.

Her background was even more interesting than mine, and dare I say, more complicated. A Sudanese Copt of Egyptian heritage with a Russian mother. It still thrills and baffles me to hear the stories of her youth, childhood, emigration, integration and evolution. And always provides an invaluable and cherished counterpoint to my own cultural self-realization.

Dalia and I get to co-habit a world much larger than the one immediately evident in front of us. Full of history and exploration, questions and discovery, interpretation and perspective. She took my name and even claims to like it. She memorized a speech in Polish and recited it to my parents at our wedding to barely a single dry eye. And she sits next to me here, as we drive our rented car across the Czech border with Poland, on the highway linking Osprava to Katowice, and bringing us to Krakow. She looks forward to bigos as much as I do to pierogi. She craves herring and rye bread like a true Pole, but even better, because she isn’t one. My peacefulness is further fulfilled in her. My genes rejoice at being home, my heart rejoices for being hers. The journey of life takes us to many places but in some sense, it’s always about drilling deeper into yourself and the things closest and most important. And there is little better than sharing that journey and even finding an unexpected guide towards its fulfillment.

#writing #love #poland

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astorminacup · 4 years

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LOVE (noun):

/lʌv/ 1.a. (1) strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties (2) attraction based on sexual desire : affection and tenderness felt by lovers (3) affection based on admiration, benevolence or common interests 1.b. an assurance of affection 2. warm attachment, enthusiasm, or devotion 3.a. the object of attachment, devotion, or admiration (…) See the Merriam-Webster website for more.

I’d like to talk about love. Primarily because over the course of the last few weeks, you and I have probably—undeniably— seen and read about hate in abominable excess. And even though I cannot help but still feel anger creep in my veins, rise in my throat, throb like a bezoar, a little more with each and every day that passes, and even though I do have maybe half a dozen of semi-essays on dismantling capitalism in my drafts, I do believe the current energies require of us to be balanced out. Secondly, and it pains me to admit it, it is a rainy Saturday night, here in Lyon, France. I have had three cups of chamomile tea (I’m clearly trying to retaliate for last night’s visit I had from Dame Insomnia), and I have been listening religiously to The Pogues for the last hour, and there is just something incredibly, devastatingly yearning in the voice of that quirky Irish punk. I am afraid the combination of all three is causing me to feel unreasonably sappy. Oh, and yeah, alright. Lastly, I may very well be heart-broken.

So, if you’ll allow me, I will now talk about love.

I talk about it way better than I experience it. Not too long ago, I wrote (to whom? to myself? to the void? who knows) that in the hopes of getting to know me better, one needed to be equipped with the knowledge that “I’ll always be about two things: love, and the sea.’’ It’s true. I was joking with a friend a few days ago that our bodies, as islanders, were probably composed of at least 85% of saltwater. Somehow, no matter where we are, whether that is stranded on a dry piece of land or in the grips of a particularly harsh winter, we always found ourselves going back to it. I carry it with me. Like a small phial of translucent liquid around my neck, as witches do. I carry it with me, like a little conch in the pocket of my jeans. Sometimes I could swear I can hear backwash in the hallow of my ear. I lay down and put my hand against it and I feel for the waves. I carry it with me. Behind my eyelids, when I try not to think of anything but end up having a thousand thoughts rushing in through the gates of my conscience, I see the distinct scintillation of the sun, droplets of silver on that liquid, upside-down sky. I have heard that most people see blue and think about the ether. I see its reflection, disrupted surface of liquid glass. I carry it with me, that peculiar blue, to the point of obsession, so much that it is now (as of Thursday) forever inked on my skin, and its flow is intertwined with my blood, and they both rush beneath the delicate weave of my veins.

That is my mediocre attempt at taming it. An attempt which is destined to no avail, I am sure. Because you see, I am starting to truly believe that love and water are one of the same. They’re both cut out of the same sheer fabric, and one of my deepest fears, one that I can barely utter out loud, is that I’ll probably never be able to fully grasp it. Neither one of them. Out of all her stories, this one is my mother’s favorite to tell: as a toddler, as she was working on her classes (she’s now been a teacher for more than 30 years), I apparently made a habit out of climbing like a monkey on the table and sit down amongst her scattered papers to read the dictionary— ink would stain my ridiculously small and plump hands as I would turn the pages, and a crease would form between my brows, so yes, and that is the conclusion she had come to: I must have been reading. It’s a habit that I still haven’t shaken off. Turn to meaning—not climbing on tables (unless tequila is involved, I rarely indulge). I have a methodical disposition and I like to know what I’m talking about. Which is why love has always bothered me.

I thought, naively, many years ago, that I had came across it. I have recently came to the conclusion that I’d had not. What I did come across… I still am unsure. What do you call it, when you feel like you could have given your whole being to another being, and that being would have taken it, reaped and scythed until the ground that you had offered could no longer bestow? That being would have mastered your own with your full consent, but with no hope of returning the favor. It would have destroyed you and in a way, it did, and you let it. And to be clear, I am not even talking about the physical aspect of things—carnal love is, for many, and for me, the most common gift of all. Hand over your body and your flesh all you want, it does not necessarily mean that you are willing to uncover a sole inch of your soul. Flesh is ordinary, because of its malleability. Soul is sacral.

I was tending to that new wound of mine earlier tonight. For inked skin to successfully recover, you need to meticulously care for it for the very first weeks (and ideally for the rest of your life). As I rubbed in the unguent, I thought back to the conversation I had during my session with the tattoo artist. We talked about, amongst other things—turns out two hours with a complete stranger can sometimes fly by quite easily—the power of images (an extremely relevant topic as of late) and art, and how tattoos were basically chosen scars. Embellished, and carriers of (often) hidden meanings, yes, but scars nonetheless. As I contemplated mine in the mirror, my ribs stinging from the memory of the needles that had danced their funny dance on them, I realized that there probably lied the foundations of love, the beginning of an understanding of it, as I want it. The definitions I have come across over the years would never satisfy me, and to be quite honest, I am constantly baffled at the thought that they could satisfy any of you. I will admit, I often find myself watching with upmost disdain all the people around me, friends and strangers alike, settle for so little. Getting themselves entangled in labyrinths no one truly wants to get themselves lost in. Building relationships out of matches taken from a box that has evidently suffered many floods. I am not afraid of confessing it: I hold those stories in contempt. Worse, I pity them.

I am not afraid of sounding extremely prejudiced; but love is probably the only terrain where I will not accept weak players. How terribly judgmental of me. I am trying very hard to soften this trait of mine; you have to accept the multiplicity of definitions there is of love, I’ve been told. And as I marveled at the daggered heart that has been blooming on my ribs in shades of sea-blue, here’s how I am trying to see it: love is like ink on skin. It is very much a choice, an idea which has stuck with me for a few years already, and which Sartre phrases better than I probably ever will:

« Tu sais, pour se mettre à aimer quelqu'un, c'est une entreprise. Il faut avoir une énergie, une générosité, un aveuglement... Il y a même un moment, tout au début, où il faut sauter par-dessus un précipice ; si on réfléchit, on ne le fait pas. » La Nausée, 1938.

Which translates more or less as follows: “You know, to start loving someone is an undertaking. You need a dynamism, a will to give, a will to be blind to it… There is even a moment, at the very beginning, when you’re asked to jump over a cliff; if you think about it too much, you don’t go through with it. »

Love accumulates. Love is a body count. And if you choose to cover your body with ink, it will remember. You never truly part from someone you love(d). Love conjures up courage. And perhaps you feel brave enough for a certain type of love solely. Perhaps you’re solely able to handle a small piece. Perhaps you don’t have the guts to take on entire sleeves of ink, because the undertaking seems too grand. And you know, good for you.

Don’t I sound formidable and magnanimous, as I stand and watch from the sidelines as you all go into battle? Ha! A few months ago, an old flame told me that I was too selfish to love. I’ll spare you the irksome details of a story that isn’t even worth telling, but I will tell you this: there isn’t enough ways in the English language for me to explain how deeply in the wrong that man was. I’m not too selfish to love—if anything, it would be quite the opposite, really. And even if it were the case, I believe the heart is a muscle, it expands. Learning how to love is an easy task. The undertaking does not scare me. If love is ink, I will cover my body with tattoos, I’ll imprint camellias, and jasmine flowers up and down my arms, a whole garden of them, I’ll stamp moons and suns on the inside of wrist, I’ll trace garters of waves around my thighs. I will love, and I will love to love, and I will love to love love. I’ve been waiting to love for as long as I have been in this world.

But how do you learn how to let yourself be loved? That too, falls under the concept of choice, of will. And if you do think about it for too long, you never let yourself go through with it. You stand and watch from afar, from the other side of a dimly lit bar. And if you stand there for too long, the eyes of that stranger who never truly felt like a stranger will no longer be found.

The rain has long stopped, now—it never rains enough. We’ve circled back around: love and water are one of the same. Within our reach, but out of our grasp.

Unless you’re willing to risk it.

#love #rambling #scripto

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starboyjxmin · 7 years

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First Love (Yoongi x Reader) Pt. 4

Synopsis: Hoseok has a daughter but things take for worse turn as soon as he discovers at what cost.

Warnings: Fluff, Angst, Crying, Smut, Vulgar Language, Cheating

Genre: Romance, Angst, Smut

Word Count: 8361

Pairing: Yoongi x Reader

(A.N. This was suppose to be a Hoseok fanfic but I took a bold, maybe not so much, action that turned it into a Yoongi fic. Also, this is my first fanfic on Tumblr! Bare with me please, much love! X.)

It was kind of emotional to see how quickly you became attached to Yoongi after a few days. The last time you had seen him was a week ago exactly, which was when he took you to the grand dance floor and waltzed with you, whispering words of admiration to you. It was baffling. You were never someone who was praised but hearing it from the feline eyed man made you feel fierce. Beyoncé fierce. You had even called your friend from college to tell her all about Yoongi.

"He's just so.. It's like he's a God." You could hear your friend choke on her drink from the other side of the line.

"A God?" She managed to cough out.

"Mhm, he treats me so well." You immediately flipped on your stomach, pulling your pillow from under your stomach and tossing it to the side of your bed. It was 9:50 P.M. "It's like.. What I wished Robert was like back when I was a teen and how I wished he would have asked me out that one night at the diner near the college campus, or how I wished Rob would have been with me back when we meet my senior year of high school."

"Giiirrl," The disapproving tone in Sasha's voice left you a bit surprised. "I don't want to ever, listen to me, ever hear that fool's name ever again, especially from your mouth. Got it?" You laughed, remembering the days your Bronx friend use to cuss people out for trying to outsmart her. Everyone knew Sasha was a force that one should never try to provoke.

"Okay, okay, I won't say his name!" Both of you giggled and soon the line on either side got quiet.

"What about this Yoongi guy?" You smiled at the sound of his name.

"Well, he has a daughter and a husband."

"...Are you homewrecking?" Sasha's serious voice shook your core which caused a loud, almost bark like laugh to erupt.

"Oh my, no!! No!" You suddenly sat up. "Dear no." This came out of you more calmly. You began to tell your friend everything Yoongi had told you three days before he had practically eaten you at the Charity Ball.

"Wait, really? That's some broken stuff."

"I know, but he doesn't have or carry any luggage from it. He's a great guy. I know for a fact you would love him."

"Hmm, we'll see. Listen, babe, I gotta go. I have to meet with the owner of this company. Can we discuss this another time?"

"What time is it over there?" You checked your phone, counting the hours ahead of you that France was in.

"Baby, it's almost 7 in the morning but the meeting is at 7:30 A.M."

"I'm sorry, well go ahead Apple's CEO, having fun in France." Sasha giggled at your words.

"Bye now, sleep well." And with that, the line went dead.

Yoongi was staring blankly at his screen, not believing that for the first time in so many years, he had nothing to write about or produce. His mind just kept going back to the Charity Ball night. He didn't understand just how intoxicating it had all become once you and him began to kiss outside of the venue. He felt like a teenager all over again.

Y/N couldn't quite understand just what it was about Yoongi that suddenly made her all giddy and playful. You laid there on bed, turning the phone over in your hands. The man was horrible before but now, he was the only thing on your mind. The lingering thoughts of how he gently touched you, his long fingers playing with the back of your dress and his hungry feline eyes rolling back at how your tongue danced on his neck. The gentle touches became more needy and sloppy. God what were you thinking? Little did you know Yoongi couldn't help but think of your touch as well.

"Just like teenagers," He shook his head with a smile. It had been years since he had experienced a woman's touch. It had been years since he had felt true hungry and having had the skin of your jaw in his mouth made him realize he was starving. He closed his eyes, feeling the electrical fuzz of where your hands were before on his chest, slowly creeping down to his stomach and down his hips. There, you were such a nymphet to him, such a sweet, fucking tease. It didn't help that you were so bright-eyed and curious. The ghostly memory of how you giggled after giving him a shy squeeze around his manhood, made him tremble despite it being a week.

You looked at your phone, seeing how Yoongi's contact name illuminated your screen, pondering whether or not you should call. But at the same time, you remembered his husky voice and how you shivered in his arms when his breath tickled your ear and neck.

"Don't play games with me, baby doll. I'll have you saying my name like a prayer."

Bluff, just a bluff you thought as you shook your head, bringing you back to whether or not you should at least text. He hadn't spoken to you, and Rose didn't bother you about her attractive father either. You would see Jimin or Jungkook sometimes at the end of the school day, picking up Rose from school. Jimin was the one who would make clear advances towards you, leaving you to assume that Yoongi was never actually interested, just persuaded by the light buzz he had. You were buzzed too but here you were, wanting to know more about the man.

Yoongi woke up with a start.

Someone was ringing the doorbell rapidly. He groaned as he heard the lullaby repeat in weird places, not sounding beautiful at all.

"What time is it?" He began to rub his eyes, realizing he had fallen asleep in his office.

"12:52 P.M." Replied Siri as he stood up.

"Thanks." Siri didn't respond. He was still in yesterday's clothes and surprisingly, fell asleep with his shoes on still. Yoongi began to walk out of his office and descend from the stairs. The lullaby was still fumbling through the house with its broken notes. "Hold on!" This was no way to wake up a man, much less after he realized last night his attraction towards his daughter's teacher. Yoongi didn't really bother to look through the peep hole, given that it was at Taehyung's eye sight level rather than his. He began to mumble under his breath just how stupid it was that Tae had it installed for his eye level when it was Yoongi that spent all his time at home. He opened the door unceremoniously just to see Hoseok.

It was Saturday, a fine day to go out with friends or even mingle. But today was your court day to finalize everything to the divorce. Everything.

You sighed, seated on the toilet with no panties on, just a long red shirt Robert forgot when he had packed his stuff, deciding that he just didn't want you anymore.

"I should wipe my ass with this shirt."

Your ex-husband would look a you and realize (Hopefully) what a complete fucking douche he was all these years to you, regret leaving so much and fucking your co-worker who has no idea that you knew she was fucking your husband. She kept giving you smiles and compliments as if no such thing had happened before.

"Hi, Yoongi." Yoongi was astonished to hear his past best friend's English sound so perfect, better than his own actually. He didn't say anything but just took in the sight of his friend. It was as if Hoseok hadn't aged a single second from the lat time he saw him, 7 years ago. "Rose only speaks English right?" Hoseok said again in English.

"Uh," Yoongi was still trying to process what was happening. "You-" It was just so baffling. "Wait." Something snapped deep in Yoongi's chest. "You fucking left her. You fucking abandoned her. What the shit are you doing here?" Hoseok held up his hands in front of his chest, palms forwards as a sign of mercy.

"I'll take that as a yes. Listen, may I come in?" Yoongi couldn't believe Hoseok really had the audacity to come back.

"Why are you here?" He shoved the younger man, despite being shorter. Hoseok closed his eyes, not fighting Yoongi back, his hands still in the same position.

"Hyung, I just want to come in and have a civilized conversation with you." This was just angering Yoongi more.

"No! You fucking abandoned her! You left us to take care of Rose and of her mother's body!" He began to shove Hoseok again. "You helped Amy make Rose but you could't be responsible of them after you shoved yourself in her and had Rose?!" Yoongi shoved Hoseok farther away from the front door and again Hoseok just took it. "WHERE WERE YOU WHEN SHE NEEDED YOU? ROSE IS MY DAUGHTER, NOT YOURS!" It appeared as if the older male was going to take a swing at Hoseok's face. "YOU CAN'T JUST SHOW UP AFTER 7 YEARS AND SAY SHE'S YOUR DAUGHTER WHEN YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW WHO SHE IS OR WHAT SHE LOOKS LIKE!"

"Suga Hyung-," Hoseok's voice came out as a warning as he was continued to be shoved further and further away from the house.

"YOU CAN'T JUST COME BACK AND TAKE AWAY MY DAUGHTER JUST BECAUSE NOW YOU FEEL LIKE SHOWING ANY INTEREST IN HER!"

"MIN YOONGI!" Both males turned at the sound of the very deep, baritone voice.

Taehyung stood at the door, looking at his husband who appeared to be close to the verge of tears and the distant man he wished he could forget.

"Tae," His name came out mangled from his husband's mouth, a clear indicator that there was this deep pain in him. Taehyung didn't care to think but walked to his partner, and as soon as he was within arms reach of Yoongi, the older male threw himself at Tae, hugging him tightly.

"We have neighbours, jagi." He whispered to Yoongi who just stood there, relinquishing.

"Hi, Taehyung-ah," A low growl came out of Yoongi as Hoseok greeted Tae. "May I come in?"

"Sure. But Rose isn't here." Hoseok's face fell. "Come now." The two men walked into their home, Tae still being hugged by Yoongi as Hoseok followed shortly after them. "You can close the door." Which he did.

"I honestly don't want to be a part of this." Yoongi let go of his husband, shooting a dark look at Hoseok who weakly chuckled as he scratched the back of his head.

"You have to. This is about our daughter." Hoseok grimaced at the emphasis Tae put on our. They took a seat in the living room as Yoongi picked up one of Rose's shoes before placing it next to his shoes along with Tae's by the doorway to the living room. Hoseok noticed just how small her shoe was, he wondered just how smaller her feet must have been when she was born. Just how much had he missed out on?

"Why are you here?" Yoongi's menacing voice echoed through the room.

If there was anything you were going to do right, it was to get dressed up nicely for court. You wanted to make sure Rob looked at you the same way Yoongi did the night of the Charity Ball. There wouldn't be any time for you to feel sorry or mop around because this was literally the man who had cheated on you, and treated you horribly. When he wasn't emotionally harming you, he neglected you, pretending at times that you never existed. But lo and behold, you thought as you slipped on some lacy panties, I am very much alive.

You decided to immediately opt for a dress and a bombshell bra you were given at your bachelorette party that was never once worn. The dress you picked out was a suede contemporary dress that seemed to be more body con than contemporary. But it was long, so it was fine. You ruled out heels given that the bruises from Friday night's event were still very tender as well as noticeable so you grabbed some socks and wore the black Lita boots that were once your go to back in high school. Luckily, they weren't scoffed from anywhere. You had forgot just how tiresome it was to untie them and retie them once again.

"12:52 A.M." British male siri said, reminding you that you had to be there at 1:30 P.M.

"Thanks, babe."

"You're welcome, your Majesty." It had been very difficult to program your siri software to respond back to your thank yous and thanks but in the end, when you finally got him to welcome you as well as refer to you as "Your Majesty." It was all very worth it in the end.

You had gone for a jog at 4 A.M., come back home to shower, eaten breakfast and fallen asleep for 3 hours before calling Sasha which she surprisingly answered after the first ring, despite it being late for her in France. It had actually been Sasha who reminded you of your court date being today and at 1:30. Stupidly enough, you had received a text from Jimin asking you out for lunch at 3:00. Dear, at what time did he eat breakfast then? You subsequently agreed to his invitation, worrying about the dancer.

Hmm, makeup would be nice too, you quickly applied blush and mascara, not overall worried about looks since your hair always made you cute when messily put down. This was a look book. You loved how you were able to bring out the beauty in you, anxiously waiting to see your ex husband's face so you could witness the reaction he would have. The goal was for him to regret everything. It was ambitious to say the very least.

You quickly grabbed your purse and phone, dashing downstairs while rummaging through your purse to get the keys. You hastily locked the loft and poked the buttons of the elevator which was thankfully in front of your door, and after the 7th poke, the elevator doors opened for you. No one was inside, leaving anxious you feeling a bit better. It wouldn't help if a stranger saw just how flustered you were over the final and last stage of your divorce. But was it a sin to be happy about being legally and finally fully divorced? Probably not but it was best if you kept it to yourself.

Ding!

You zipped past the parting doors and out of the complex. Your car was parked in the front, across the street. This wasn't the time to walk to the light and wait for it to turn green so you could walk across it and down the street to your car. No, this was time for jaywalking.

"Goodness, if any of my students were to see me." You had made it safely to your car, opening the door and quickly stepping in followed by buckling, closing the door, and turning the engine back to life. "It's a good day," You signaled before driving down the abnormally still street. "It's a hard knock life for us." Singing was a bad habit of yours that only occurred when you were faced with extremely stressful situations.

The whole ride to the court house consisted of you profusely checking your face in the rear view mirror at red lights and stop signs and singing Annie.

Finding parking right in front of the court was almost a miracle as you luckily parallel parked.

It indeed was a good Saturday.

"I just came to meet her. I-" Yoongi was already starting to growl but once Taehyung placed an arm around his waist, he stopped. "Would really like to know what became of her and say goodbye to Amy properly." Hoseok's voice wavered towards the end of sentence.

"Well, since Yoongi is clearly upset about you being here, we can't let you see Rose." Hoseok was about to protest but Tae cut him off. "But we can tell you where we put Amy to rest."

"I don't think he deserved to know that either. He just dropped her there like nothing as well." Yoongi said to Taehyung, loud enough so Hoseok could hear on purpose.

"Hyung, we were best friends-" He pleaded to the older man who was still looking at Taehyung, pretending that he couldn't hear.

"I'll give you the address, we had a nice ceremony for her. We have pictures if you wish to see." Yoongi couldn't believe Tae. He was going to let the traitor back in as if what he did was forgivable.

"Thanks, namdongsaeng."

"He isn't your little brother and stop calling me Hyung because I'm not your brother either. You left us all, you can't just come back and call us these things as if we are a happy family again. Get over it." Yoongi stood up boring his eyes into Hoseok. "We aren't young anymore, we aren't the same boys who were chasing a dream together, we aren't the same people who use to stand on stages around the world with fans cheering us on, we aren't in Korea anymore, we aren't in that small practice room where we would laugh and share stories. Stop thinking you can just have it all back."

"Yoo-" Tae stood up, grabbing his partner's wrist just to be lightly shook away.

"I don't know who told you it was okay to come." The lullaby flowed through the house, finally beautifully and in all of its entirety. "But this was not a good idea." Taehyung walked out of the living room to see Rose standing in the hallway with Jin holding her hand as he laughed with her about something.

"Hey, Tae! Sorry we can back a little earlier, Kelly was paged during our time at the park so we decied to come back for lunch." He failed to notice Tae's face and how quiet the house had gotten.

"Hi daddy! Did you miss me? Where's Daddy Yuyu?" She let go of Jin's hand and hugged Taehyung's waist.

"He's um.." Taehyung began to mouth to Seokjin that Hoseok was in the living room, to which he excused himself before going to see it for himself. "Let's go upstairs okay? You must be sleepy from being at the park."

His daughter pouted.

"No, I want to see daddy."

"He's a little- No!" Rose had let go and ran to the living room.

"We are here gathered today for the final of the divorce between (Y/N) and Robert. (Y/N), you filed for divorce stating reconcilable differences as well as cheating, correct?"

"Yes, your honour." Your lawyer smiled at you, sensing your nerves. So far, when you had entered the room, Robert did look a you. And he still was. Maybe because he was angry.

"Do both parties agree that this is correct?"

"Yeah." Rob's raucous voice seemed to piss you off.

"Yes."

"Okay, she keeps the paid loft that was Mr. Peters' as well as the Audi. Hm, pretty generous of you, Mr. Peters." The judge said, smiling at Robert.

"Just how I am, your honour." You couldn't help but roll your eyes at him. So generous that he let women hop on his dick. You were thankful that he stopped touching you a few months into marriage.

"Anything you would like to add, Miss?"

"No."

"Alright." The judge gave one of the two guards in front of his podium, a paper. "What Derek will be handing to Robert is the divorce papers to terminate the marriage." Rob signed and smiled at the Officer who brought the paper to you. Even his stupid signature bothered you deeply. You signed the paper and towards the end of your flourish, you let out a breath you didn't realize you were holding.

Freedom.

You gave Derek a huge smile that seemed to radiate all your joy and he meekly smiled back, before taking the signed documents to the Judge who overlooked them.

"Okay." The following words the judge said weren't heard from you. You felt like the world around you was muted. No more Robert. No more having to put up with any of his shit, no more disrespect from him to you about your job.

It was a beautiful feeling to know you were no longer tied to Robert. He probably reciprocated your feelings but regardless, you were so happy. It seemed hours until your lawyer poked you, saying that it was all over, time to go home.

Home.

"Hi." A shy Rose looked at the strange man in the living room who was standing, with her dad and uncle staring at the man, it seemed as if they were holding their breaths.

"Hi." He spoke as he got down in a knee.

"Rose," Yoongi felt his breathe get caught in his throat as he watched his daughter slowly walk towards Hoseok.

"Oh my god," Jin didn't really know how to process what was going on. Hoseok had just suddenly, without a warning, come back to them. It was something so unheard of. And to see Rose actually go up to him, was just further mind blowing.

"Hi, my name is Rose Olivia Min. What's your name?" She politely stuck out her hand to the man who created her. Hoseok's heart hurt. She had Amy's emerald green eyes and his tan skin. But upon a closer look, he realized her face was symmetrical and her eye shape seemed to be cat like but had some roundness to it, reminding him of a porcelain doll. It was strange how she had traits of Tae and Yoongi. He took the soft, small hand of his daughter and shook it.

"Hi, my name is Hobi. How are you?" He didn't want to let go of her hand but Yoongi's cough made him drop her hand.

"Daddy," She turned to Yoongi who had an estranged look plastered onto his pretty face as his eyes were glued to Hoseok's face. "Daddy." The little girl huffed, reclaiming her dad's attention, which he gave her with a soft smile. "Is he a friend?"

"No baby, he just came by to say hello to us." Jin finally spoke up. "Hoseok, I think it's time you go."

"Did he do something wrong?" Rose looked back at Hoseok who gave her a weak smile.

"Something among those lines." Taehyung answered as he leaned against the wall, near Yoongi and Jin.

"Oh, well, bye Hobi." She stretched out her hand again to him, so unaware tht he was her father and she once had a real mother.

"Bye Rose."

You arrived at a rather large dance studio that seemed like a company rather than a studio itself.

"Hi, are you here for a class?" The male secretary asked you polity.

"Um," You walked over to his large front desk and leaned over it. "I'm here to see Jimin?"

"He'll be out in a second, his class should be over now." The male gave you a smile before turning back to his computer.

"Thanks." You were about to make your way to the chairs in the lobby to wait for him when you heard Jimin's voice.

"Hey (Y/N)! Sorry for making you wait, I had to change so you wouldn't see me in a mess." He laughed as he gave you a tight hug.

His secretary raised an eyebrow.

There was a lot to Jimin that you hadn't really notice before about the smiley man who was currently telling you about his class that offered a self defense course because he use to box and got certified to teach it alongside his contemporary jazz and ballet classes. Jimin was very kind. He held this glint of overbearing adoration in his eyes that seemed for everyone. He gave the best, tight hugs and the way he held his face with his hand, elbow resting on the table as he heard you discuss your court date, you could say that the man was very kind and a good person. It sounded very bland to said it but you just didn't have the perfect words in your vocabulary to properly describe him, it was a bit sad.

"So I think, he just left me those things out of spite and because now I will be forced to live with his stuff for the rest of my life given my measly salary of a teacher will never be enough to insure me such things that will last and fully paid for."

Jimin gave you a sweet smile as he leaned into his hand lazily.

"Well, I think if it really upsets you, just sell his stuff and buy yourself something comfty but nice with the money you receive from the sells and add in your 'measly salary of a teacher'." You giggled at his words and took a bite from your burger.

"Hm," You swallowed down your food. "You're absolutely right, Mr. Park." He laughed as he kicked back his head. The sun caught his glossy Prince Eric like hair, leaving you starstruck. Jimin was so beautiful.

"Anyways," He poked at his almost finished salad and looked into your eyes with amusement and a smug look on his face. "How's everything with your new man?" He raised an eyebrow.

"The emphasis on 'man' that you did was positively unnecessary!" You shot him a teasingly dark look, praying that somehow your face didn't give away that you had not yet spoken to him despite thinking of him in sinful ways. It was so strange how Yoongi still hadn't called you. Maybe he wasn't that great as you made him out to be.

"Yoongi-Hyung can tend to be a bit distant but it's because he doesn't know how to fully react to people he likes. He usually has this cool laid back, I-don't-give-a-fuck thing going on, which is true because he doesn't care much for other people's thoughts or opinions but when it comes to girls, he's at a lost." He popped the remaining of his salad in his mouth.

"Hm," You looked at your burger, noticing how the sour dough bread was crispy and had a golden glaze to it, and how the cheese stuck snugly to the meat. He didn't strike you as a shy person, much less that he was at a loss. The way he spoke to you at the ball, in the shadows with his mouth attached to your ears and lips, it seemed like he was more than certain he wanted to try something with you.

Jimin watched your face go from unreadable to a sudden pang of hurt and even uncertainty etched over your features.

"Hey, what is it?" He reached over, placed his soft warm hand over your cold one. Your attention shift to the subtle contact.

"Do you think it's possible he just.." The hesitation in your voice sounded so childish but Jimin caught onto what you meant.

"No," He rubbed your hand with his thumb soothingly. "Dear no, Yoongi has a daughter and he has always had high standards that he has put himself to. Trust me, if he wanted some," He leaned in with a smug smile. "He has his husband."

"You know what, you right!" You giggled while popping a fry in your mouth.

This was a beautiful thing. It had been just so long since you had an actual pleasant conversation with anyone, let alone with someone who was becoming a very close friend. Sasha was your best friend but there was a huge time difference between you two and her job was far more demanding than yours. Maybe Rob was right, being a teacher didn't mean enough when you got hungry.

You smiled at something you had missed that Jimin said with a laugh that seemed to make the worst problems seem minuscule.

"I just can't believe Hoseok really came.." After sitting around in the living room and seeing Hoseok departure again for the second time, the boys finally began to talk.

"Fuck him." Yoongi spoke up, looking at Namjoon who had talked. He had rushed from his law firm, missing Hoseok for merely ten minutes. Namjoon was secretly glad he did, what would it have been like to see Hoseok again after so many years? He might have not handled the situation as well as Taehyung and Seokjin did.

"Did someone tell Jimin?"

"Yeah, as well as Jungkook." Jin replied to Taehyung who had a sleeping Rose in his arms as he scrolled mindlessly through his Twitter feed. "Jimin said he was busy at lunch with a friend but was coming 15 minutes ago. Jungkook is still in his classes and he has work afterwards, something about taking his girlfriend out too so he was sorry, however he would come over tomorrow, blah blah blah." He looked up from his phone. "The kid has better things to do than to worry over some guy who is back despite being a jerk."

"Yeah but this is important." Namjoon rebutted as if it would make a difference.

"He's in Med School, calm down." Tae stood up with Rose in a deep slumber in his arms.

"I'm fucking done with Hoseok, why did he come?" Yoongi was angry, he was still shaking from the frustration he felt. This was all so bad.

The lullaby rang through the house, making him feel a little at ease. He breathed in, at least he had his music.

"I'll go." Yoongi closed his eyes as Jin stood up. Hm, he needed to go upstairs and write something, anything. A diss track. He smiled at that thought. Yeah, a diss track would be amazing right now, especially with everything he felt.

"Hey Jin, we met the other day when you picked up Rose?" His eyes shot open.

(Y/N) was standing there in the hallway, her voice had become closer as she made her way into the living room with Jin. He saw you walk in with Jimin's hand on your waist. Wait what?

"Oh dear, yes! You're friends with Jimin?"

"She's actually a family friend. Hey babe." Taehyung walked over to (Y/N) and kissed her cheek.

"Taetae, how are you?" She finally turned to everyone else in the living room, noticing the off atmosphere. "Yoongi." You breathed his name, leaving the poor man to cough as a cover for the groan that immediately erupted through him. The sound of your lips opening and how your tongue effortless rolled his name while that voice you posses, it sent a shock right through Yoongi's being, and right to his cock.

Fuck, this was no time to be aroused by the sound of your voice saying his name.

"Hey," His casual tone caught you off guard, but he was looking at Jimin who shrugged adorably at you.

Yoongi's eyes twitched.

"Why haven't I met your family friend? Tae?" Namjoon stood up and made his way to you. God, what was it with this family with their insanely hot relatives? Jin was the definition of handsome as well as husband material. Namjoon was a fine specimen of a man, a daddy. There was no way you could ever fit in with this beautiful family. "Yoongs?" Namjoon shook your hand as he directed the question to Yoongi as well.

"She was at the Charity Ball, not our fault you didn't notice our honourary guest as well as my beautiful date." He finally decided to stand up, giving Jimin a look of death which caused the younger male's arm to be by his side, rather than wrapped around your waist.

Yoongi looked different, you noticed. He was weary looking and had a disheveled look as well. This concerned you quite a bit given that he was very always holding this playful gleam in his eyes that was ever so present when Rose was around, which she was even if Rose was soundly asleep in her other father's arms.

"Are you okay?" You couldn't help but to express your concern about the feline-eyed man.

He blinked, engulfing you in a tight embrace.

"Now I am."

After Yoongi had excused you and himself from the living room and brought you to his office, he had told you about Hoseok's sudden appearance, how the rest of his family reacted, how Rose talked to him, everything that had happened externally as well as internally. You sat there, listening to him, watching him sit on the black soft carpet of his office. He looked small and vulnerable. At time, he would cry or hold back his breathe when he would talk. Sometimes, he would shyly reach his hand over to you, and you would tightly grasp it, massaging it from time to time.

His whole aura was a bit sad. Yoongi really loved his daughter, you could swear that he was the one who had impregnated Amy and had Rose. How scared must you be, to raise a baby from birth, watch her wrapped in that hospital blanket and suddenly feeling this overwhelming need to be there for that baby, loving them with more than your entire being. Just to have all that love and nurturing care put into having this child grow with standards and never feel the abandonment their previous parent did because now they have you, just to have this so called parent come back and expect to some certain degree, have the love of their child without the staying up late in the nights where you had to work, just to take care of this child who was either sick, fussy, bearing a nightmare, or too embarrassed to reveal they were scared to sleep alone. It was devastating, Yoongi didn't have to say it to you out loud, you could hear it from the pain in his voice to the way his eyes would water.

"I'm sorry, Yoongi." You scoot closer to him, bring your knees to your chest and fixing your hair behind your ear. He leaned into your shoulder, closing his eyes.

"It isn't your fault," He sighed. You looked at his face. His dark eyelashes fanned out against his cheeks, the contrast of his fair skin and his black lashes were very striking.

"I'm here for you." You felt the need to brush his bleached hair away from his forehead.

Yoongi could feel your eyes on him, leading him to open his eyes. You locked eyes with him for a brief moment.

There was this unspoken conversation between you two by simply staring into each other's soul.

His heart began to thump against his rib cage, he needed to touch you or else it felt like his chest would explode.

"May I-" His voice was weak. "May I please touch you?"

"Yes." That whisper was all he needed.

You braced yourself for a hard kiss as well as rough hands shamelessly pulling at your skin and clothes.

But..

Yoongi softly traced your cheekbone with his finger pads, his mouth a few inches away from yours. His breathe warmed your cheeks, coaxing a blush. His other hand soon traveled from your enclosed hand to your back. Yoongi's eyes seemed to have said millions of things to you. This all caused there to be a so distant yet familiar sensation between your thighs.

Yoongi soon closed the space between you two by pressing his ajar lips against your own lips. The soft feeling of his lips moving with yours, and the occasional tongue he would slip into the growing kiss made this slow burning fire taint your lower abdomen.

His large, rough hand left your face and accompinated his other on your back. He pressed his hands up and down your back, teasing the zipper of your dress. You felt yourself grow deliciously wet from his soft touches. It had been so long since anyone had touched you.

A hand of yours pressed into his lower stomach as the two of you made wet sounds with your swollen lips pressed into one another's, and pressed down to feel his already hard cock. You swallowed the deep groan emitting from the man. His hands finally unzipped the dress, feeling and appreciating the skin under it.

"May I undress you?" He pulled away from the passionate kiss and rest his forehead against yours, breathing hard.

"Please, Yoongi." He let out a moan at the sound of your intoxicated voice saying his name and how your naughty hand was working him against his jeans.

"Princess," He pulled on the short slash looking sleeves of your dress down gently, his fingers making you shiver when they would rub down your shoulders and arms as he pushed the sleeves, the neck of the dress was being pulled down as well with them, revealing your almost suffocated padded breasts. "Could you call me Oppa?"

You sat up, moving a bit so he could pulled the dress off from under you, finally.

"Oppa." His puffy lips and the daze that struck his eyes left you breathless.

"Mmm," He enjoyed the sound of you voice so much, and saying that left him harder than before. "Come here, Princess." You sat on his lap, facing and almost straddling but you were suddenly hit with shyness.

It had been so long since a man had fucked you, let alone touched you so preciously that it left you dizzy.

Yoongi pulled down the strap of your bra, dancing his long digits over the newly discovered skin. He pressed a kiss against your shoulder, earning a soft moan from you. His tongue soon slipped out, rubbing and swirling on your bare shoulder, making you bubble with whimpers.

"D-Oppa," He repeated the same thing onto your other shoulder, leaving you a wet, hot, mewling mess. You began to rub your wet, clothed core against his denim jeans. Surely, they would become stained from your evident arousal.

"I didn't expect anything like this so I don't have a condom, do you?" He said very suddenly, pulling away from your skin but one of his hands was now unclasping the bra while the other held your lower back, anchoring you to his lap.

"I have the little implant rod birth control thing." You admitted, slowing your rhythm on his thighs, looking away shyly.

Yoongi smiled at you, he could swear you were an angel for how pure you looked despite the evident lust that swirled in your iris and how you were just now rubbing against him.

"Okay, princess. Sit up a bit, please." You adjusted yourself a bit, and felt his hands leave your skin. He was unbuttoning his jeans, and pulled down his zipper.

You instantly felt how your panties were pooled with wetness at the sight of his hard, clothed member. He slipped it out, looking up at you.

"Oppa," You whimpered as his hand left his dick and reached under you. He moved your panties to the side and slowly dipped a finger in.

There was a sudden crash of euphoria running through your body and pressure building up in your hips.

"You're soaking wet," His mouth was now attached to your ear as he kissed it and made grunting noises as he pumped his long digit in your wet core.

You reached for his cock, feeling the protruding veins as you tightly tried to close your hand around it and began to pump him. He soon curled his single finger up, massaging the soft slick top as he pressed another finger against your clit, slowly rubbing his thumb on it and creating invisible circles around it. This was the first time both your clit and g-spot were being stimulated. You were whining his name as tears slipped from the corners of your eyes. The building pressure was getting too much, you began to buck your hips on his hand. How could he use a single finger to bring you to this intensity and another on your clit? You had even forgotten about his twitching dick.

Right before you were about to cum hard, he slowed his pace and gently pulled his finger out.

"God," You breathed. He gave you a smirk.

"Princess, come closer please." Yoongi removed your hand from his painfully harden cock and laid it down. You slid closer to him, feeling the head sliver through your wet lips. He let out a loud moan. He wanted you to tease him as well.

But you couldn't. He had edged you too much.

"Daddy," His eyes snapped to your face. "I want you to take me now." You sat on your knees, leaving a gap between you and him. You moved a bit back, holding his cock a bit up and slid it into you as you moved closer to him.

Both Yoongi and you whined out loudly from the bare feeling. You could feel his skin, his ridged veins pressing against the walls of your core. He could feel how warm and wet you really were. Yoongi's eyes rolled back into his skull, he was afraid to release that moment from how beautiful you felt.

"Sit princess, please sit." You never felt more sexier in your life. This gorgeous man was a complete whimpering mess from under you, begging you to take more of him. This had never happened before.

"Yes Oppa." You wiggled a bit, causing him to grip your hips and his jaw to slack. You finally sat fully down, his cock fully immersed in you.

"C-can I move?" It was so shocking to see Yoongi, someone who had this intimidating look and fearless aura around him, beg and melt before you. It was so empowering to you.

"Yes Pappi." He picked you up and began to slowly rock his hips up into you. You never expected that such slow but powerful thrusts could cause you to moan so loudly. The two of you had even forgotten his family was downstairs.

"F-fu-ughhhhh," Yoongi's low growls and the intensity he was using on you began to make you tear up again. There was this blinding pleasure building up behind your eyes, and these shocks of ecstasy that would wash over you when he began to go a bit faster that made you drop your jaw and even drool a bit.

Yoongi was so lost in his own pleasure that he sloppily began to run your clit faster, feeling you contract against him.

"Yoongi, Yoongi, please!" The shocks of his finger rubbing your clit furiously as he began to angle his dick into you while he slammed you against his lap, was leaving you numb and deaf. The ringing in your ears was dull but very much present.

"Fuck yourself Princess, use my cock." He bit your neck causing you to scream. He had let go of your hips and was now pulling at your nipple as his other hand continued to rub you. You began to ride him hard, bouncing on his cock as your breast rolled against his chest. His lips began to attack your own, as he would try to talk at the same time but you were already too far to understand him.

Your climax hit you hard, it spurred out, making you actually sob in deep, blinding pleasure. It felt so great to feel the pressure in your belly finally crack into millions of pieces.You collapsed, face first into the side of his neck, crying from how good it was. He held you to him as he continued to thrust himself into you, cumming as well. You began to squeal in intense pleasure, feeling his cock twitch in you as he released his hot seed deep within your soaked walls. Yoongi slowly came to an end, his hand cradling your head and his other arm firmly around your waist.

"M'pfmm," You tried to speak but it was as if that orgasm was a reset button to your brain.

"I love you, (Y/N)." This caught you very off guard. "I love you so much."

You couldn't look Taehyung in the eyes the following day when he had called you, asking to go out for lunch with you.

What the fuck.

You had really homewrecked him.

Taehyung on the other hand, kept talking to you, even smiling as he ate and spoke to you about his latest photo shoot.

"Kendall actually said I was her favourite modeling partner to shoot with because she enjoyed me. Hey what's wrong?" He put his burrito down. You couldn't dare look him in the eyes. His husband had made love to you, in their home, under their roof.

"Tae," You grimaced at the sound of your own voice as you spoke his name. "I-I think I shouldn’t be here."

He laughed.

"What? No! Don't be silly, babe!" You cringed at his nickname for you. "Hey," his tone grew soft. "Look at me, babe." Reluctantly you did. You were expect a harsh look in his eyes, even some soft of trail of anger.

He held softness in his eyes.

"I just fucked your husband." You chocked, feeling tears flood you.

Taehyung stared at you for a long time.

You cried loudly, earning stares from nearby booths. There was no way Tae would ever forgive you. You were a fucking whore really, you were no better than the women who ruined your marriage. You just ruined someone else's marriage. What a fucking hypocrite.

But Tae began to laugh. He laughed so hard that he began to cry with you.

"Babe!" He chocked out in between tears, "You're so cute!!" Tae couldn't stop laughing at you. You stopped crying. It was incredible how Tae was acting as if you had just said the funniest thing in the whole world. Was he thinking you were joking? "Oh god!" Tae began to breathe hard as he tried to calm down his laughter. "Babe," he leaned in as he sniffles a laugh. "We aren't a real couple."

"But-" He raised a finger.

"We have a daughter, true. But we aren't romantically together." He took a sip of his Coke. "I haven't been faithful to him either. In fact, I have a girlfriend. She's met him and he knows about my adventures." You were deeply confused.

"So.. Are you guys ... Polygamists?" Tae tried to keep a straight face but failed. You noticed he bad a beautiful smile when he opened his mouth.

"Babe, no! We are together for Rose so she has a stable family. Yoongi and I would not divorce anytime soon since Rose is still young and needs both parents here for her. She is to meet Zendaya next week, given that she was the one who match made you and Yoongi. That gave me the opportunity to finally introduce my girlfriend to my daughter." He gave you a sweet smile. “We’ve been together for two year, of course she met Yoongi right from the start as I told her the truth before pursuing anything with her, Zen didn’t seem to care. She was just happy I was honest from the beginning.” You suddenly remembered the comment Yoongi made the day he showed up unexpectedly in your classroom after-school about how Taehyung was a lady’s man. It made complete sense now.

“Wow.. I wasn’t aware of this.” Tae reached over and took one of your cheese fries. He bit half of it before going on.

“Hm,” He swallowed. “It isn’t anything taboo or controversial if you really think about it. Couple do it all the time for the sake of their families and are rather much best friends with their partner. You do know Yoongi and I were never in love right?” You nodded. “And that we got married to share custody over Rose?” Again, you nodded. “Alright. You should meet Zendaya too.” You nervously looked up at him, taking a sip of your Dr. Pepper.

“Me? God, no.” You nervously put your drink down. “She’s so pretty and this huge fashion icon, I’m just-”

“You are (Y/N), the girl who finally possessed my man and stole him from his true wife and mistress, music. The man loves you more than his own music. He rather spend his time talking to you than being locked into that office. Of course, Rose did too but that’s his kids, he has to put that away for her sake. But wow, you did the impossible You are strong, intelligent, passionate, fearless, and most of so beautiful from the inside and out. So please don‘t belittle yourself like that. You are now my family as well. I don’t want my little sister to think so poorly of herself just because she isn’t on a magazine. I think you’re making way more of a difference by teaching than being on the cover of a magazine compared to my girlfriend and I. You are shaping the mind of the future. Wow, look at you, babe!”

Admittedly, that did make you feel loads better.

“Thank you, Taehyung.” He took another cheese fry before simply shrugging.

“You’re important, I just hope one day you understand this, sweet girl.”

And you did. For the most part. Tae was right, you were important. Rob was forever and always wrong. You didn’t do a shit job and got a shit career. You were the one who was teaching the future surgeons, the future rappers, the future models, the future engineers, the future Ceos, even the future anthropologists. You were in the making of something wonderful. And no one would ever take that away from you, not even a stupid man who was always undermining you and belittling you all the time. You finally had a true family, one that wanted to see you go higher. That was enough to keep you afloat.

Part 5 (Not ready)

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siodymph · 7 years

Text

Symmrat Week Day 2

Boy howdy! his one is definitely going to be my longest submission for the week! I was a bit rushed to finish this all in time but hopefully it doesn't show too badly lol

Today's theme was an AU so i went with one i'd actually been thinking about, an Alternate Universe where everyone in Overwatch are Youtube gamers! Hope you all enjoy!

(Also RIP people on mobile, I’m sorry)

“That was an absoblutely booti- beu-… absobluty- Uhhhhggghh!”

“That was a wonderful game and I’m so happy to have experienced it. Thank you for joining me, if you wish please subscrur- errrr.”

Satya groaned as she deleted yet another recording of herself stumbling over her outro. Why was it only the ends of her videos that she got so tongue-tied? And when she did manage to get through her outro she’d rewatch it and realize she was making a weird face or her hair had been messed up. Was it too much to ask to do her English outro perfect by the fifth try?

After pressing her palms into her eyes she sighed and took a deep breath through her nose. She just needed to calm back down and stop over-thinking these outros. If she didn’t focus so intently on the English words then they would come much more naturally. She just needed to relax.

Satya looked over herself one more time in the mirror by her camera, smoothing down her hair and readjusting her shirt before taking one more deep breath through her nose. And attempted her outro one more time.

“That was a wonderful game and I’m so happy to have experienced it. If you haven’t already I highly suggest playing it for yourself. Thank you all for joining me in this playthrough. And if you wish please subscribe to my channel and see you all in my next video!”

It wasn’t perfect, but it was a close as she could get. If she just sat here all day trying to record one outro she’d get nothing else done. She might try recording it again later but for now that would make a good placeholder for then end. Now came the part she enjoy much more. Most of the other youtubers she talked with hated editing their videos, but personally she actually enjoyed it. Compiling the most interesting moments during her recordings and putting them together however she liked. Even though it could be a bit more time-consuming Satya always found it worthwhile. To have complete control of her videos. To make them exactly how she envisioned, down to the very second. To make them perfect.

But before she got started editing, she decided to check her email, many times when she started editing she’d go into a zone and miss out on plans with her friends or important messages from her advertisers. For almost two years now she had been in a symbiotic relationship with Vishkar Tech that had elevated the videos she loved making into a viable career.

Before their contract Satya, or rather her online persona Symmetra, had a decent audience that grew steadily by word of mouth. She was always complimented on her calming voice, positive outlook on games and always keeping things age-appropriate for younger viewers. As it turned out Vishkar Tech liked her videos too, especially the latter factor. Enough so that they felt she was the perfect gamer to be a face for their products. They offered her a deal where they would give her a paycheck for each of her videos, as well as promote her material. And in turn she exclusively used their products only. Her headphones, her keyboard, nearly everything, even her chair were all Vishkar’s top-of-the-line products. And now for two years she’d been able to do one of the things she loved the most thanks to their support.

As she went through her email, she found no new messages from Vishkar. However there was one new email, one she didn’t recognize. It stuck out almost painfully in her inbox full of formal, professional emails. Its caption read “wanna collab??”

Wanna. Not Want to. No capitalization. Not to mention the fact that there were two question marks. She could just see her old English teacher from school looking at this in horror and making corrections in red ink all over the words, if they could even be called that. The addressed seemed strange too, like it had been created by a child going on the internet for the first time. “thejunkergamer@” The only thing missing was a bunch of extra numbers and underscores.

She dreaded opening the email, but at the same time she couldn’t help but feel curious. She’d never done a collaboration before. Mostly because she was seldom a big interactive person among the gaming community on youtube so no one had ever invited her into any crossovers or meet-ups. It did make sense though, with her growing popularity paired with Vishkar’s support she had become rather popular quickly, views on her videos increasing almost exponentially now. Who knew, it might be a fun change.

So not able to resist, and silently hoping this wasn’t actually a virus, she opened the email.

“Hi! So, your the great Symmetra everyones been talking about? I’ve seen a bunch of you’re stuff and I think your just great! Real chill and you seem like a nice person, got nice videos

Ok, this all started out as a joke in my videos. My mate Roadie and I would crack jokes about all the blokes who where “totally collabing” with us. And one or two times we may of brought up your name and it turns out, people actually liked that idea! Crazy right? So anyways it got big enough that a whole lot a people suggested you as a guest for our next crossover. But I dunno how this would all work. Since you’re in India and I’m bouncing around the States this year. Maybe if you’re in LA for that one convention thing we could meet-up then? I don’t know.

So email me back if your interested and we can figure all this out!

-Jamie (Junkrat) Fawkes”

Satya couldn’t help but stare at the email in slight confusion, like she was looking at strange modern art. It was legible but as Satya read through it she questioned if this could have been his real first language. At one point this so called Junkrat had written, taken the time to type “dunno” yet at another part had typed out “I don’t know” correctly. Why not write it correctly both times? How do you miss those kind of errors? The fact that the correct spelling was written near then end of his short email baffled Satya still. Who writes to someone they don’t know like that? “Yours” and “You’re” were mismatched all over, seeming random in choice of spelling.

The when she looked over the name and email again, she finally recognized it. He was on an Australian gaming channel, not one of the biggest household names but still rather popular. Their name regularly popped-up in the comments on her videos and in her searches. But she had never actually seen one of their videos.

She decided to change that now and looked up a playlist of some of his most recent videos, to see who she could potentially be working with. To be a popular face on youtube he had to be making interesting videos. And even if his form of entertainment wasn’t quite what Satya preferred to invest time in she had to respect the fact that he’d made video content a career for himself like she had. And who knew, maybe Junkrat would surprise her? What if behind his barely-legible email there was an engaging, entertaining series of videos that got him and his channel an audience.

Trying to keep an open mind, she clicked on one of the first video she saw. It was titled “Sonic ’06 Part 14: …”

She immediately regretted her choice when she saw the full title “Sonic ’06 Part 14: WHO WANTS TO BE SILVER’S B****??” The video began with someone yelling out a slew of swear words while a deep voice laughed in the background. Nope. Satya immediately got out of the video as soon as she could. That was way too loud and brash. She tried scrolling over the first video in the series, maybe they wouldn’t be so ridiculous with the first video. After all, it was probably just going over the tutorial, how bad could that be? She didn’t take any chances this time though, and scrolled over the title instead of blindly clicking on it.

Sure enough the full title was “Sonic ’06 Part 1: I WISH FOR THE SWEET RELEASE OF DEATH”

She made a mental note to just avoid any games related to sonic after that. After a few more minutes of searching she decided to try a video titled “Ocarina of Time Part 7: Tone Deaf Jam Sessions”

Throughout the video Satya found herself becoming more confused than anything. When Junkrat wasn’t yelling during difficult parts of the game he was just talking with his friend with the deep gravelly voice. Most of what they said had barely anything to do with their task at hand. Instead they’d either make terrible jokes or simply talk about their day. It was all rather mundane, like they were just two friends catching up over lunch. Most of the time they barely paid any attention to the game, Junkrat getting easily sidetracked. At one point their discussion about motorcycle repairs got so intense Junkrat accidentally walked straight into an enemy and got killed. And the strange character of a gamer would either laugh or scream at his own negligence while his friend would make dry comments.

This is what made them so popular? She’d seen many gamers rise to fame by just screaming throughout their gameplay but this was different. Sure they yelled plenty when it was expected but more so they would be trying to have an ordinary conversations. So much so it caused them to actually play worse, which by all expectations would mean they’d lose an audience, not gain one.

Another thing that was strange to Satya, the fact that they never showed footage of themselves. Most other gamers put in an small video of themselves in the corner of the screen but not them, they just showed footage of their game. If someone were to mute the game they would never even know someone was adding commentary.

But at the same time as she watched several more videos in the Junker’s Ocarina of Time series she felt herself grow a tad jealous. Sometimes she’d spend hours putting together her outfit and make-up for each of her playthroughs and for all she knew the Junkers were just playing in their pajamas. Actually. in a few of their videos they actually confirmed they indeed did. Satya couldn’t help but think of all the time she could save only voicing over her game play, but she knew that since she already made a habit of filming herself play she’d only get massive backlash for suddenly changing her videos. Not to mention Vishkar would probably be very cross with her if she suddenly stopped showing regular footage of herself using their products.

She stopped herself halfway through their series so she could go back to editing her videos, she still had her job to do after all. But as she went through her recording and began to piece together her video she kept mulling over Junkrat’s offer.

As her luck, or maybe her misfortune, would have it she had been invited to two different panels at the convention Junkrat had mentioned. Vishkar had already paid for her flight there and a room for the entire week. She would be there for the whole duration of the convention as well as the few days before, so she could afford the free time… Despite the email being a nightmare to read, he seemed nice enough. Maybe not a person she’d think to do a collaboration with, but it was still an interesting offer.

As for all the poor jokes, screaming and ridiculousness maybe it was all just an internet persona he and his partner put on for their show. Everyone who starred on a channel altered their personality one way or another. Even Satya had in creating her persona Symmetra. And despite being very much the same, Symmetra had never been a carbon copy of real-life self. Though Satya had to admit it would be nice to edit herself and her conversations much like she edited her videos, save herself from many embarrassing moments. Maybe the crazy persona of Junkrat was just that and Jamison Fawkes was a much more reasonable person to work with, one who just happened to have poor grammar. At least she hoped so…

But even if not, perhaps this could be the start of something. If she agreed to Junkrat’s invitation maybe it could open doors to more collaborations with the online gaming community. While she enjoyed working independently and was never one for large crowds or their chaotic noise she never hated the thought of having a few more friends online who she could interact with beyond the odd email every couple weeks.

Before she got too ahead of herself however, Satya realized she’d definitely have to ask Vishkar for permission before anything else. She hadn’t even thought of them. Would they even allow her to do crossovers? Especially with a persona as rash and vulgar as the Junker gamers? She decided to email them to ask before responding to Junkrat at all, just to be sure. And after she finished editing her current video of course. By the end of the day the newest episode in her playthrough of “The Deer God” was successfully uploaded and a full email was sent to Vishkar. Asking about a potential crossover and pleading her case for why it could be a further advancement for her channel.

Though as the email notification popped up on her screen, she couldn’t completely decide if she hoped they would say yes or no.

~~~~

A month later, and two days before the convention Satya wished Vishkar had said no.

If there were any difference between Jamison Fawkes and his online persona of Junkrat it was microscopic.

They had agreed to meet in the studio of some friends Junkrat knew to record their video. And when she had first arrived she still foolishly hoped that Jamison would be an actual person, and not the maniacal character he appeared like in all of his videos and emails. She couldn’t of imagined just how terribly, terribly wrong she had been.

After twenty minutes of nervously pacing around the small lobby of the recording studio Junkrat finally arrived. The only way Satya even knew it might be him was the sudden shouting and commotion outside and a car horn ringing out obnoxiously loud. That alone made her want to stay inside. But when even the receptionist hurried outside to see what was happening Satya decided enough was enough and she ought to find out what on earth the alleged Junkrat had done that was so outrageous. But as soon as she stepped outside and saw him she regretted it.

First of all was the parked car that looked like it had been crashed then left to rust for a hundred years. Chains and scrap metal decorated the thing as if it had just been driven out of an apocalypse. Then there was then man himself who stepped out of the car grinning from ear to ear.

A tall bean pole of a man crawled out of the vehicle, a raspy voice somehow shouting clearly over the growing crowd around them. His dusty goggles were pulled off his face and short blond hair that might have been gelled into spikes at one point were frazzled and wind blown out into every direction. And much to Satya’s fear the strange skin-tight grey shirt he was wearing wasn’t real. He was shirtless and that was all dirt.

There was only so much she could take, and as Junkrat and the crowd around him drew away from the car and towards the studio Satya raced back inside and to the restroom. She brought hands up to her scalp and groaned. Whatever hopes she had for this recording session going normally were dying and dead. How on earth was she supposed to work with that maniac? She wished she could just sneak back out of this studio and hide in her hotel. Maybe they’d believe her if she said she was sick all of a sudden and couldn’t make it in today?

But she’d already made a promise to record and they surely knew she was here by now. So instead she took and few deep breaths, splashed some cool water on her face and smoothed down her hair. And checking herself one last time in the restroom mirror, she went out to go meet Jamison “Junkrat” Fawkes in person.

She counted her lucky stars that the crowd that had come in had finally dispersed though it did little to quell the churning in her gut as she walked up to Junkrat. His back was turned from her as he talked with two other people Satya slightly recognized from other channels. As she approached Junkrat made no movement that he knew she was there. She looked to the two other people he was talking to but they made no effort to let him know either. That worry twisting her insides only coiled tighter at the awkwardness. For a moment she feared she’d have to tap him on his gross, dirt-coated shoulder, she hated anyone touching her in such an abrupt manner and dreaded having to do so to another person only slightly less. Instead, she cleared her throat loudly, a little rude Satya had to admit but at least she avoided having to touch him, and that finally got the Junker to turn around.

For a moment he looked completely lost and Satya feared for the worst but then his face suddenly lit up. “Oh! So we finally get to meet face to face, the great Symmetra! How’s it hanging!” He said. His voice could have almost sounded melodic if it weren’t so raspy.

When he put out a hand to shake Satya had to stop herself from recoiling, dirt coated his hands like gloves. “Uhhh…” Satya started, she didn’t want to be rude, but there was no way she’d ever want to touch that much dirt. Not even while held at gun-point. “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance errr, Junkrat. But I’d rather not shake hands if I can help it.”

“Wut?” He said looking between her and his hand before realization finally dawned on his face again. “Oh yeah! Sorry about that, completely forgot I was wearing this stuff. Me and a few of my best mates just got done filming a prank video! It’s gonna be hilarious!”

Satya had seen a few pranking videos here and there, though she never was realty fond of any of them, but she’d never seen anything as outlandish as Junkrat’s get-up. And all for a prank-video? “And what sort of prank is this for?”

Junkrat smiled proudly with mischief clear on his face. “Mad Max. We signed up our car outside for Uber and then we went around town scaring the shit out of people! It was amazing, like we just rolled out of the apocalypse! I think my favorite when this little kid did the Sign of the V8 to us. It was just the cutest, you should have been there!” He looked like he would of kept going but then he shook his head and stopped himself. “But look at me going on and on when there’s a video to be made! I’ll show you back to the studio, we can pick out a game and get started!”

“Wait!”

Junkrat had been ready to leave when he turned back around to face Satya. “Yeah? Something wrong?”

“Aren’t you…” Satya really couldn’t find a nice way to say thing. But even if Junkrat didn’t, Satya at least had standards she hoped he could go by! There was only so much she could take today before she just overloaded. “Aren’t you at last going to try washing some of that… stuff off before we record?”

Junkrat gave her a blank look and then shrugged his shoulders. “Alright. I’ll just show you where we’ll be recording and you can get yourself all situated while I try and freshen up. Then we can find a game and go from there!”

To Junkrat’s credit he at least tried to wash off some of the dirt and make-up, Satya had to at least give him that. Even if it wasn’t much and when he came back into the recording studio he was more muddy than anything, she could tell he had at least try. He mentioned using a sealant on his arms and face which helped explain why it was such a pain to get off instead of normal dirt. Even if it still irked her and made want to grind her teeth in annoyance she could still realize that he’d tried at least.

Unfortunately, that was the last time he put forth any effort for the rest of their playthrough.

It started off mundanely enough. Together they had decided an old puzzle-platformer for their one-off crossover video. And after setting everything up, cameras, game, times, they stated recording and went through with introductions. It all went so smoothly, Satya decided she must have been lulled into a false-sense of security by it.

Then, inevitably perhaps, Junkrat grew bored. Just a little past the ten-minute marker it began. He had been telling her about his experience so far in America, Satya had actually been interested in what he was talking about, when he started trailing off suddenly focusing more on the game than he had ever before. Satya should have suspected something then but it was already too late. Suddenly a weird chirp sound came from the game and the whole screen seemed to lag.

“Oh no.” He said in a voice lacking any real distress. “Whenever I try to go to this room, everything gets all wonky.”

A look a pure mischief was on his face and Satya realized she wasn’t going to be in one of the calm JunkerGamer videos where they talk about their days, this was going to be a Sonic ’06 type of playthrough.

It all went downhill from there. Junkrat kept messing with the weird room, and at first Satya tried not to let it affect her. It was Junkrat’s channel he could make whatever mindless glitch-abusing video he liked. But it just… it was becoming way too much. She tried saying something, that he should just leave the stupid room before he broke the game and he’d just laughed. The game’s music grew more distorted, the pixelated designs started flashing. At that point Satya had snapped at him. That finally got him to turn and look at her.

“You alright?”

And then the game crashed.

But of course it couldn’t be an ordinary crash where the game just shuts itself down. No, instead the whole screen became flashes or blue and red and the whole game sounded like it was shrieking in chip-tune anguish, like a small robot was being murdered.

All she could see was red and she needed to get out of that room now. She could hear Junkrat and she told him to leave her alone. And then he’d left saying he’ll be back if she needed anything. She couldn’t clearly remember what happened after that but she found herself outside in the hallway. Breathing deeply through her nose, both her hands gripping her hair and unable to bring herself to look away from the floor. Normally she would have considered this an absolute, humiliating nightmare but at the moment she still felt too overwhelmed and pissed off.

She didn’t even know how long she was out there. But after some period of time, she heard someone coming down the hall and finally brought herself to look up. It was Junkrat, carrying two bottled waters and a plastic bag filled with snacks.

“Uhhhh, here.” He said, handing her the bottled water as a peace offering. She’d never seen him so shy before. She didn’t even know he could be shy.

She didn’t say anything back but still accepted the water.

“I… I am so sorry about that.” He said, fiddling with the bag of snacks instead of looking at her. “I shouldn’t of gone crazy on ya like that. Should of asked how you wanted things to go, from the start really.”

“You’re channel” Satya said.

“But it’s your crossover too… I’m sorry about all this, really. Do…” He took a deep breath to get whatever words he wanted to say in order and tried again. “Do you need me to call you a ride?”

The offer was tempting, so so tempting. She wanted to just go back to the hotel and forget this day ever happened. But at the same time, she still had a promise to go through with. Both of them had already told, even advertised to their fans that they were finally making this crossover. And Junkrat seemed sincerely sorry.

“No. I’ll stay.”

“Wait wut?” Junkrat was completely dumb-founded.

“On one condition.” Symmetra continued. “I pick out the game. We can still have commentary but I’d rather be in control.”

“Uh- yeah yeah, of course. Anything ya like.”

Massaging her head one last time, she pulled herself off the wall and together they walked back into the studio. She decided on “Endevor” an old game she’d been fond of back in her Newgrounds days. They set everything back up, wrote down their new time slot for editing later and tried their second attempt at a crossover video. Satya started the game with the keyboard, explaining to Junkrat what it was about and how much she’d loved it long before she began filming her playthroughs. At one point or another she ended up handing the game over to Junkrat to play and he seemed to enjoy it as well, mentioning how he always liked games with a free-world the most. He even finished his story about being in America. She realized somewhere between the American snacks she knew must sound awful on the mics and the calmer game and music she’d stumbled into something that felt right in the middle of one of her own playthroughs and one of Junkrat’s “talk-about-your-day” ones. It was all so pleasant. She was actually having fun.

But much sooner then either of them had expected, their time in the studio was up and they said their goodbyes before ending their video.

As Satya left for her ride Junkrat followed her out to the lobby of the studio.

So I’ll get the video done and send ya the finished copy before posting it anywhere?”

Satya nodded and smiled slightly. “Sounds like a fair plan.”

Her ride drew into the parking lot and she turned back to Junkrat. “Good bye then, Junkrat.”

“Thank you for doing this, really it’s been a lot of fun.”

Satya wasn’t too sure what to say, certainly not ‘you’re welcome’ though the words seemed to impulsively come to mind. “I enjoyed this myself. It went much better than I had expected.” Hopefully that sounded alright.

“Glad to hear it.” He said smileing. “But honest I gotta make it up to you.”

“No need.” She said, politeness being more like e a knee reaction.

“No no I mean it. Just say the word and I’ll make it happen.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” She said as she stepped into the car. “Take care of yourself, Junkrat.”

“Same goes to you ‘Metra!” He said waving.

Then just like that

~~~

Much later Junkrat went to work with Roadhog editing a bunch of their footage from the day. They’d been hoping to get thse videos out by the weekend in time for the convention. Hog was working on the Mad Max prank while he did the crossover with Symmetra.

So far it looked like the crossover video was going to be a bit shorter, barely scraping 15-minutes, than the normal half-hour material the Junker Gamers usually worked with. Junkrat had been tempted to use some of the recordings from the first half of their recording session but decided against it. Being an ass was only funny if A: the person you’re dealing with was a cunt or B: They were in on the joke and knew what was going on, and Symmetra had been neither.

But even being cut short, overall Junkrat considered this crossover a technical success. Sure, they may have gotten off on the wrong foot. And sure, the one and only Symmetra, calmest voice on the internet, had yelled at him and called him an ass. And sure, at one point she was about ready to walk out on their recording. And, actually if Junkrat were to grade himself on the overall this would be a failure, no arguments. Luckily Junkrat wasn’t looking at the overall, he was looking at the end result. And after finally getting his head out of his ass, and talking things through they had actually made a successful crossover playthrough. He’d even enjoyed himself the second half of their game. And Symmetra had become much more relaxed too.

He’d actually felt terrible that she’d gotten so overwhelmed, especially since he’d had his own moments of sensory overload and knew how much it sucked. He should have seen all those signs early on and backed off but instead he’d kept pushing and pushing, trying to be funny and keep the show going.

He counted himself lucky she didn’t leave the studio all together, he certainly would of if he were in her place. And thankfully while their playthrough at least ended on a high note he felt like he should really try making it up to her. Definitely this week before the convention. But what would someone like Symmetra even like? They’d talked some while playing their game but in the end he still didn’t know that much about her.

Roadhog’s deep laugh pulled him from his thoughts. “Oh fuck, Jamie look at this!”

Junkrat crawled out of his chair and leaned over Roadhog’s shoulder to see what he was laughing at. It was a clip of when they’d finally gotten to the studio. He and hog were doing their thing, being crazy and scary when in the background was Symmetra. She came out of the front doors to the studio and when she saw them her face contorted in sheer terror like a deer in headlights before bolting back inside. Roadhog had gone back over the video and zoomed in on her, and started adding the caption “nope” as she ran away. Normally something like that would have made him cackle but right now it only felt like his guts were sinking.

Junkrat started rapidly tapping Roadhog’s shoulder before he could add the clip into full video. “Hog, Hog, wait! Don’t add that in. I never got permission from ‘Metra.”

“You sure? Looks pretty funny.”

“Yeah, she was having a crappy day and- just don’t add that in.”

“Ok...” Roadhog began, he hadn’t heard Junkrat sound so worried. Not in a long time, not since they started their channel. “Everything go alright with her?”

Junkrat chewed at his lip a little before answering. “I guess so, we did ok. At the beginning I was doing my usual shit, fucking up the game and she wasn’t having it. She actually got real upset before we took a break. I thought she was going to walk out on our crossover. Can see why though, I was being a real cunt.”

“And that’s your idea of ok?” Hog added dryly.

“Hey! Things got better after we took a break!” Junkrat snapped. “We finished off the recording, shorter than I would of hoped but that’s my own fault. And at least we ended it without wanting to tear off eachother’s heads… Still wanna make it up to her though.”

“Well you better get cracking then. Cause you got less than a week to do something.” Roadhog rumbled before going back to work on their prank video. And as Junkrat followed suit his mind was a buzz trying to find ideas.

He didn’t want to do anything cheap and faceless like a fruit-basket or any of that sort of shit. He had to make this a bit more sincere, to let her know he was actually sorry. And he wasn’t sure quite why, maybe for the sake of vindication or something. But he wanted her to know that he understood where she was coming from, that they were both a bit more alike than she even knew. But most of all he hoped that by making this up to her they could actually become friends.

But what on earth would she like? He decided later after he finished up their crossover he’d go watch some more of her videos and try finding any clues that might be there. He knew she liked really pretty-peaceful-artsy-type games so maybe he could build off of that…

~~~

On the day before the start of the convention, Satya received a package sent to her hotel room. It was a light-blue and gold-trimmed box, sloppily wrapped by someone who obviously had little experience. And on the tag she found out it was from Junkrat.

Unsure of what she might find she tentatively unwrapped the gift. Inside was a homemade playlist of songs, some of which she didn’t recognize while other she did, she was surprised to find a few of her favorite themes on the CD as well. On the CD Junkrat had scribbled out “’Metra’s Jamz” as well as the small smiley face that littered the Junker’s videos. There were a few other things in the box as well, a bound journal (also blue with gold trim), a few gift cards to cafés in the area, a handful of American and Australian candies. But what ultimately caught her eye was a note that was shoved into the bottom of the box instead of on the outside like most letters. It was an apology from Junkrat, and that he hoped they could meet up again sometime during the convention.

She was surprised to say the least, she’d assumed that after their recording that would be the last she ever heard of Junkrat. And now here was this, yet another thing completely unexpected. But also so kind, seldom had someone else been the one to apologize, she was so use to having to apologize to other people for her outbursts and yet Junkrat not only did but went out of his way to make up for it. She wasn’t sure what to think of it all. She did hope that they could see each other again at the convention.

#symmrat week 2017 #symmrat #junkmetra #symmrat week #youtuber au

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erraticwriterscanvas-blog · 6 years

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The Girl on the train - Part 1

Chennai Central Railway station, the biggest of its kind that I had ever seen, welcomed me once again. Honestly it was a warm welcome because the station inside was way too hotter than the streets outside. The bustling crowd that spread over the long trench over a mile was no surprise.

Five days ago, when I began my journey to Chennai, I was really excited about travelling all alone. It was my first experience of travelling alone to a city far from mine, and I was thrilled about the feeling of responsibility I would have towards myself and my luggage, the personal space I would get for myself among the thousands of unknowns on the train, the decision making situations where I don’t have to listen to someone else’s commands to choose what I want. Travelling seemed like fun, but it eventually turned boring. I should have carried few novels to read. And what added to the disappointment of excitement turned to boredom was that there was no sign of a girl in my whole compartment. How could there be no Meenamma on ‘The Chennai Express’ ( Meenamma is the female lead character in the movie ‘Chennai Express’ in which hero meets her heroine first on train). A bunch of Tamilians were my travel companions and I had no clue what they spoke about throughout the journey. A good aged Tamilian uncle cleared my confusion about how to reach my destination in Chennai (The only reason why I felt he was good coz he understood fair bit of Hindi, and it wasn’t hard to communicate).

My purpose of visit to Chennai was something I was really proud of; so proud that I told all my friends about it. I was one among the few hundred chosen to appear for an interview at Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (my dream world). I was imagining IIT, when my thoughts were broken by the whistling of train. It had reached ‘The Grand Chennai Central Station’, that I had heard a great deal about. It didn’t look any different from other railway stations at my place, when I stepped out of the coach. I realized how vast it was, when I had to walk ten minutes to make my way through the busy crowd at 5am, and reach the exit. It had 12 stations stretched over one and half mile; and truly deserved to be called ‘MASSIVE’.

I took a breath of relief when I finally got out of that station. A fresh breeze of air felt refreshing, when I closed my eyes. When I opened my eyes, I found myself circled by a bunch of taxi drivers, some trying to grab my hand and my luggage, some cursing each other about who would carry this new boy in town. I didn’t panic because I knew my way to IIT. Firmly holding my luggage, I walked away towards the nearest subway across the road.

It looked a neat city, with clean roads, fast moving vehicles, differently shaped buses, metro rails, restaurants, and obviously busy people. I wanted to explore this city more, but for now I had to go to IIT first. A very polite bus conductor directed me to a bus to IIT. The bus raced on the smooth roads, crossed flyovers and in fifteen minutes I stood before the gate of my heaven that I had dreamt of. A day before I had read an article that said IIT, Madras is 30 cooler than rest of Chennai. I was ready to experience this chill.

The excitement grew every second as I travelled through the roads of IIT. Old rusty buildings hidden behind century-old trees, dense trench of trees where deer and monkeys could be spotted made me think if it was an engineering college or a natural habitat for animals. I told myself ‘may be this is how IITs are’. Instruction boards were at every corner that said interference in the animal’s habitat is punishable. Seriously!! Humans seemed like a worthless creature here compared to animals.

It was 8am when I got down at hostel area and was accommodated into a room, all for myself. I was tired because of last night’s sleepless journey, and my body cried for sleep. But as per timings of IIT, breakfast ended at 9. So I hurried to clean my stinking body. Nothing’s more refreshing than a cold shower in a hot summer morning. I rushed to mess for breakfast.

Unlike my expectations, North-Indian food sucked there. I just stuffed my stomach to quench my hunger, despite the disgusting taste. I stepped out to explore the surroundings. A minute later, I cursed that guy who wrote the article about IIT being cooler than Chennai. It was too humid there. Bathing everyday wasn’t a task of concern, because I got drenched in sweat every hour. I restrained myself from going out and chose to rest in my room.

My entire day was spent in my room, succumbed to my loneliness and boredom, doing nothing. I walked out of my den in the evenings when the place felt rather cooler. Interesting people flocked everywhere (People refers to strictly girls in hot dresses). Most of the students were South-Indian but only North-Indian girls caught my attention for one reason. Hearing a fair skinned girl speak Hindi fluently was captivating. But I couldn’t dare to walk to someone and spark a conversation or the least a formal HeLLO. I was neither as charming as ShahRukh, neither did I have a great physique like Hrithik, nor did I carry my style like Beckham; so there was nothing in me that would make a girl want to talk to me. I had always been bad at starting conversations with God’s favorite gender.

My expectations of this place were going way down, thinking I have to spend my evening just as I spent my morning, bored and alone. But thankfully, I saw something. FOOTBALL!! A bunch of local hostelites were playing football. I got into one of their teams and began the game. Everyone around there was resident of Godavari hostel and majority of them were from Karnataka. Damn, it was hard to communicate during the game coz the only language we both understood was English, and you know that the real emotions are best depicted by the language of my choice; Hindi. We did fairly well, trying to speak and we won the game with our marvelous (totally exaggerated) team effort by 3-1. I bid them bye and promised myself that my evenings are never going to be boring, as long as I am here.

That night, when I lay down on my bed, I felt tired of having done nothing all day. Gazing at the ceiling and the fan, I imagined how my life will be at IIT if I fortunately got in. These hostels, junky north Indian food, vast football playgrounds, world class sports facilities; I would do anything to get here. The next morning was my big day; the day of interview.

I woke up the next morning when sun rays peeking in from the window hit my face. I realized it was only 6am. I sat on my bed erect, and scanned the walls that were scribbled all over. Hand sketches of cartoons, forgettable phone numbers, poems (barely romantic), and hell lot of formulae written on one corner wall. FORMULAE!!! Damn it! I had totally forgotten to prepare for the interview. And in the baffle, before I could prepare something seriously, clock struck 7. I rushed to cleanse myself, masked myself with a strong deodorant that would last all day, stuffed my tummy with slices of bread, and off I go.

Good morning IITM. The morning sun shone bright, while many joggers were returning to their dorms. Group of friends flocked around everywhere, catching up on a morning waali chai, and phone bugs hung around with their phones and earphones on. With a bright smile on face, I got into the bus to find it all empty. Adjusting my trousers and my over sized formal shirt, I struggled to stabilize myself in the moving bus and grabbed a seat. I hated formals, coz I cannot carry them. But you see, these were mandatory for an interview.

In less than five minutes, I was at the mechanical engineering block. What a rusty old building it was, barely visible, hidden behind the trees and little deserted too. I asked myself if I was too early, but it was 8am and that’s when I was asked to appear. I found my way to seminar hall, where everyone else appearing for interview on the same day had gathered. My jaw dropped when I opened the door, seeing that there were no less than 800 students of which only 25 would be selected. For a moment I thought if I had come to the wrong place; may be this wasn’t the place for interview. The instruction plate on the door read clearly “Research interviews, Mechanical Engineering” and my doubt was answered. I looked through people there, some were of my age group and while others seemed to have graduated years ago. To my relief, I heard someone say that Ph.D candidates are also being interviewed on the same day and few of these might be appearing for that. I found a corner seat from where I could have a clear view of the entire place. Only a few were dressed in formals and were trying to not mess up their attire, and clearly they were first timers like me. Others were in shorts and casual Ts.

An hour later, instructions arrived that we had to appear for a screening test before facing the interview. Four hours later, I walked out of the exam hall, with my face doomed in mixed emotions. I flunked the written test. I had least hope of clearing it. Lunch at the cafeteria didn’t seem as bad as breakfast; or perhaps that’s what I felt. Screening test was worse than the lunch served. I ate my food in silence and walked to my dormitory. Dumped myself on the bed, and thought to myself “Was I not good enough for the interview?”. Before I could think of something, I fell asleep, out of the tiredness of the morning.

Evening was same as the day earlier, playing football, stalking at girls around, shopping in the local cloth store, and distracting my mind from the failure of today’s test. A little hope still persisted that I would do better the next day.

Three days flew away in the blink of an eye. I flunked miserably in all three interviews I attended. Actually I did fairly better in the last interview in comparison with the first two. Now it was time for me to pack my baggage and find my way out of this place. In four days, I had fallen so much in love with this place. The peaceful atmosphere here (forgetting the heavy moisture content that made me seat all day), the teaching facilities, students from every corner of the country, unforgettably beautiful and rarely seen north Indian girls; all of it was so alluring that I didn’t want to leave this place. It felt like I belonged to this place, like I always have wanted to be in a place like this. When I got down from the bus at the exit gate, I turned around to have one last glance at the top ranked college of India. That moment I told myself “promise yourself that one day you will walk in through these gates, and never have to leave again.”

Clock tick 6 when I walked into the “Chennai Central Station”. The hustle and bustle in the station added more discomfort besides my disappointment of returning home as a failure. It was peak time and everyone at the station was waiting for Chennai express to arrive. My thoughts were crashed by the announcement of the railway department that the train was delayed by 30 minutes. Karma!! Even the Railways don’t want me to leave Chennai so soon. I had to get myself out of these thoughts of dejection and failure, coz worrying now is no way going to help. And I thought to myself “what could be a better distraction than food”, when my eyes fell on the food truck stationed at a corner. Making my way through the crowd, I reached the menu board.

“Two dosas and a plate of Idlis,” I placed my order.

I was scanning through the menu, looking for something more tasty and spicy, when a girl slammed her hand on the counter.

“Six samosas and pudina chutney. Wait, also add Rasmalai to it. And please make it quick,okay?” She went back to looking at her phone and tapping her feet to the rhythm of the song playing in her ears.

“How bossy!! She could be a little polite. Hogi koi bade baap ki beti” I thought to myself.

My thoughts were interrupted by the voice of the guy at the counter”72 rupees sir. That will be 72 rupeees”

I dug into my pockets for a change, but failed and handed him a 100 rupees note. He gave me 20 back and a five star chocolate, with a smile of gratitude.

“Paise kya tere baap ke ped pe ugte hain. Mann toh karta hai iss chocolate ko tere mooh mein ghusa doon” I thought to myself, but took that chocolate from him, with a made up smile, cursing him within. When I turned, the girl was gone. I turned around but she had disappeared in the crowd. Did she just vanish in a second??

Waiting hall was completely occupied. I managed to find a seat at a corner, and looked at my watch; 6:10pm. What do I do for twenty minutes now? Observe!! Observing people around always had been my best pass time. There were many young people around, in their mid twenties, and they all looked like they knew each other. Everyone was talking to someone around, except me who watched them talking. There was a bunch of girls at the far end, and from their baggage, they looked like they were on a holiday, perhaps on a adventure trip like trekking or camping. Beautiful and rough girls!! Adventure reminded me of the photos I had clicked at IIT, some next to the grazing antelopes, some at the great lake. Never in my life had I shot so many pictures at one place. I smirked thinking “Nature can really inspire you to become a photographer. “

Whistle of the train was loud, and at once the whole waiting hall stood to move. Chennai express had arrived, ten minutes before its delayed schedule time. I picked up my baggage, pulling my trunk; I craned over the crowd to look for the S5 coach.

Coach S5, L 47- Aryan Malhotra; I spotted my name on the reservation chart. I walked in and surprisingly I was the only one in the compartment. Resting my bag, relaxing on my berth, I peeked out of the window to look for water bottle vendor. Adjacent compartments were slowly filling up, but my compartment had only me yet. People of all age group were walking in and out of the coach, and I could hear raw Hyderabadi slang; it felt soothing to my ears to hear Hyderbadi language after so long(four days precisely). But what do I do alone in this empty compartment of mine? Updated my facebook status, tagged a few friends in hilarious posts, wished happy birthday to few others, scrolled through facebook wall, but everything seemed so regular and boring.

A noisy bunch of people entered the coach from one end, perhaps they were a joint family as it had kids, aunties, uncles in their 50’s and a huge huge luggage. One of the kids yelled “45 se 52 wahan hai” and my eyes popped out. No no no,I didn’t want this noisy family in my compartment to ruin my peace. And before I could gulp this fact below my throat, they began filling my compartment. 45,46,48,49,51,52; they filled in all seats; aunties with their heavy sarees were trying to load their baggage on upper birth, while I hardly had place to move my ankle. It felt suffocated sitting amidst them as they tried to figure out seats for each other. Moving out of this family drama, I pulled my bag and sat at the other single window seat, to have my peace time.

“sabko apni jagah milgayi? Aur meri jagah kahan hai?” a girl standing at the entrance spoke.

It was the same girl I had seen at the food court, and who vanished before my eyes. Rude and bossy!! Bade baap ki beti. I turned my eyes to not look at her.

“kahan reh gayi thi itni der? Yahan toh sab baith gaye hain. Tu woh window ke paas baith ja” an elderly lady of the family told her, pointing at the seat before me.

I was moving my eyes looking at the lady and the girl, when she said “Excuse me, will you move your bag please?”

“Sure” I said in a low voice, breaking my eye contact and moved bag on to my lap. Squeezing my legs close to make way for her to sit, I wished that she doesn’t fuss now, asking for more leg space. She sat down comfortably, adjusted her clothes, gulped some water and relaxed, while I was trying to squeeze my legs, so that I don’t accidentally touch her. My bag was heavy, but there was no place to rest it. My eyes were looking for some space and she caught me.

“May I help you please? I think your bag can fit in here” she said, pointing at the berth above her. She took my bag and placed it gently there.

“Thank you” I said in a sweet voice, surprised by her sweet gesture. This wasn’t expected.

She smiled and went back to flipping the pages of the book she held.

At the food court, I had no time to look at her. And from the first impression I had of her, I didn’t even wish to look at her. But this second impression of her was different. She wore a pink top with a creamy brown night pant; a small, tight bun over her head, and moderate sized reading classes. She looked cute though. No lip gloss, no eye liner, no plastic put upon face; it seemed like she had forgotten her makeup box in a hurry. She was so immersed in reading the book that she didn’t look up even once.

“Why am I admiring her beauty? As if I have nothing important to do” said to myself and went back to Facebook.

A minute later, one of the two kids in the family moaned, finding it difficult to sit in such little space. She came weeping to her elder sister, sitting before me.

“Excuse me, I’m sorry but can she sit here? She wants to be with me” asked she, looking at me hoping I would nod at her.

“Bag rakhne ke liye jagah nahi hai,and now you want your sister here” I thought to myself. But before I could speak something, the little kid, moved my leg and found her space between us. I was gaping at her in dumb shock, thinking “Fuck, I better jump off the window than squeal here”

“Thank you, I hope you are comfortable “she spoke again, with that bloody disgustingly sweet smile on face. I nodded, having nothing else to say.

Bored of facebook, I thought of starting a conversation with her. But what do I say first? I never have spoken to a girl myself. The book in her hand was PRIDE and PREJUDICE. This seemed like good way to start things off. But at that very moment, the name of its author escaped my mind. Arthur Daniel, William Leslie; it wasn’t any of these names that passed my mind. Author’s name on the cover was so small, that I couldn’t read. I bent my head to have a better view of the cover, when she saw me.

“Pride and Prejudice, the best seller of its year” she said, showing me the book.

I leaned back, calmly and said “Of course, I know”, trying to sound confident.

“Have you read it? I bought this book a while ago at the stall” she said.

“No, I didn’t. But my friend has, and he said it’s good” I said with a shaky voice.

“Of course. That’s why I bought it” she responded, not sounding very friendly.

I leaned back to my seat and took a breath of relief. Thankfully I didn’t showcase as a fool, before her.

An hour passed and we kept quiet; I, hoping she would look at me and boost me to talk to her, and she, being deeply immersed in reading. Fuck! I hated that book in her hands so much. But I chose to break the silence myself.

“So, where do you live in Hyderabad?” I enquired, to which she raised her cheeky big eyes, hiding behind the large frame of glasses.

“Sultanpur. But we are shifting soon to Gandipet. We bought a new house there.” She grinned.

“Wow, that’s cool. And what’s with the visit to Chennai?” I questioned, desiring to know more.

“Big fat wedding. My cousin got married this week. And our entire family had attended it.” She said, showing me her mehendi.

“Is this all your family?”I blurted out, even before I knew what I had asked. That question was really offensive. I fucked up this good going conversation myself. But to my surprise, came her answer “No, the rest of my family is in the next coach. We couldn’t get our seats at one place. You see, ours is a joint family” she smirked.

That’s a GIANT family.

The conversation got better with time. She was sounding sweet to my ears, friendlier than I would expect a stranger to be (especially a girl), and preferring to talk to me over reading the book she carried. Had the sun risen in the east, or was I dreaming? Never had a girl been so nice to me to have talked to me for fifteen minutes at a stretch. Wow! Fifteen minutes of uninterrupted talk with a girl. That felt like an achievement in my life.

Rage of my expectation usually peaked in fraction of minutes. An introvert like me, had lots of things on his list that were yet to be experienced. Some of these to-do’s were talking to a girl, asking for her number, kissing someone, dancing in public with a girl and etc.

It was soon 8pm, and train halted for few minutes at a station. I peeked out of the window, and saw that more passengers were flooding the train. But our coach still seemed spacious, fairly vacant. By then, the giant family next to me had drooped over their Tiffin boxes, feeding each other, littering the entire seat like uncivilized barbarians. This girl, sat before me quietly eating her food, with her ear phones plugged in, and looking out of the window. She didn’t look like she was a part of this noisy, uncivilized family. She was different.

I was finished with the food I had bought for dinner. Stretching my arms, and yawning, I grabbed the novel in my bag. Before I opened the first page of it, the lights of the compartment were turned off. The family was done with dinner and shut the lights off to sleep in peace, unbothered of my presence there. Surprisingly, even the girl had fallen asleep in just a minute. Damn it, I wanted to talk to her, but I cannot dare to wake her for this silly desire of mine. I usually don’t sleep so early. WTF should I do now!!

Tossing around on my berth, I was looking at the dark sky, in a disgusted mood. I hadn’t caught any sleep since the lights turned down. My watch flashed 11pm and I let out a heavy breath of discomfort. The family was deep asleep, snoring heavily to their pleasures, where as I barely had space to move my legs. Cautious that I didn’t disturb the herd, I tiptoed to the door.

Silence brooded over the whole coach, as everyone was fast asleep. Finally there was some peace in the darkness of the coach. Cool breeze of air brushed my face as I stood at the door. Train had caught its full speed. Little lights glowed at a distance, and the feeble cry of cattle could be heard. I always wanted to live my life in a country side home like these, where peace wasn’t scarce. I sat down at the door, to live that moment for a little longer.

“You wouldn’t die if you jump off, instead would end up with broken limbs and disfigured face” I heard a voice from behind.

I turned around, and to my aghast it was her.

“What are you doing here?” I asked horrified.

“You surely don’t own this place. Do you?” her reply slammed on my face.

“I mean, you were asleep right? You lay motionless so long, so I thought you were fast asleep” I retorted.

“So you were stalking me!! “She probed doubtfully.

“Uhh…..” I fell silent. She caught me in the act.

“Chill…. So what are you doing here?” she enquired.

Tumhare family ne mujhe sone kahan diya. I let go off my disgust look on face and turned sweet, to answer her “I couldn’t sleep. I’m not used to sleeping so early.”

“Hmmm….” She exclaimed, sitting down next to me. She looked gorgeous as her hair flew over hair, and she pulled them across her ears.

“So what’s your story?” She asked, looking straight into my eyes. I was jolted by her question. My story!! What does she mean?

“I don’t have any story” I retorted.

“I mean, what brought you to Chennai?” she cleared.

“I was here to attend interviews at IITM”, I answered facing the fast moving trees outside.

“I thought IIT was a college, but not a company. What did you attend interviews for?” she pondered.

“It was for the post of research scholar. It’s for those who wish to do research” I explained in not more than a line, assured that she had no freaking idea of what it was.

“That’s cool” she exclaimed, but with an ironic expression. “Nerd” she whispered in silence.

With passing minutes, she made herself comfortable sitting next to me, leaning on the door for back rest, and closing her eyes now and then. Silence brooded over. I had started to feel little uncertain about how to initiate the talk, though deep within my mind wanted to spend the night talking to her.

“I didn’t catch your name”, I said timidly, trying to sound cool.

“I never told you my name” she replied in an imperious tone, with her eyes still closed. I was awed about how quickly she switches from being sweet the-girl-next-door kind of person to being bossy, egoistic brat kind of person.

I refrained from snapping back at her. Insecurity was driving me now.

“I mean, what’s your name?” I asked, not looking at her.

“Aisha….. Aisha Gujraal is my name. What’s yours?” I heard her question, while I was still gazing outside.

I turned to her, with a smile, but noticing that she still had her eyes closed, I retorted in despair “Devansh Awasthi”.

“Tum toh naam se hi nerd lagte ho”, she blurted out laughing to herself. But silenced, seeing my grave expression. Damn her senseless jokes.

“Sorry yaar, but I’m not used to talking to nerds. This is my first time” she said and giggled.

Offended to the limit, I turned, moved an inch away and went on to enjoy my own company.

“So, what do you do?” she enquired, pretending to be sweet again. I didn’t bother to respond back.

“Hello, I asked what you do” she raised her pitch to make herself audible, amidst the noise of the train.

“Graduation…. Pursuing B.Tech now.” I replied in mono-syllables. Who damn cares to answer her anyway? I dislike her already.

“Oh, I study Commerce, and I totally hate it.” She uttered in a miserable tone.

I already had heard this a million times from many. I wasn’t bothered by her reply, and kept my eyes glued to the view outside.

“I said I hate commerce” she yelled at her highest pitch, assuming that I hadn’t heard her the first time. Damn! Why does she want to be heard always? Why is she here to ruin my tranquility?

“Oh..” I muttered, not knowing what to respond. “so what do you wish to do, if not commerce”

“Fashion Designer!! I wish to be a fashion designer. This one time, I saw a movie in which the lead actress is a wedding planner, and since then, I have been obsessed about it” she said delightfully.

I had the faintest idea of this career choice. I had never heard anyone pursue it, but it surely sounded interesting.

“And how do you think of getting there?” I asked in amusement.

“I haven’t thought of it yet. But I will find a way” she said with a pleasant smile. She seemed certain about her choice of life. I turned towards her, and now she was facing me. It seemed like the perfect moment to start a conversation, now that we both had a pleasant expression.

Clock ticked 12, and I was puzzled about where to begin. The awkward silence, that crept in, amidst the pleasant smiles on our faces, had to cut down.

“Tell me about you. Where do you live in Hyderabad ?” she broke the hush.

And with that began our never ending talk. We were comfortable talking to each other, though we were complete strangers a few hours ago. I didn’t know the reason why? Perhaps it was because of the serene, tranquil night with its clear sky and dazzling star, that worked like magic.

Two hours passed, and we hadn’t stopped. I had never felt time fly so easy, and never had I talked to a girl for so long. I have to ask for her number. I don’t know how. Before I could utter the next word, I heard a voice from behind us.

“Aisha, what on earth are you doing here, at this time?” It was her aunt. She was horrified, seeing that we had been sitting for more than hour at the train door. To me, she looked nothing less than hungry lioness, ready to hunt me down. Her eyes blazed with anger, and in the flash of light that fell on her face, she looked like a blood thirsty vamp.

“ Chachi,main toh bas……” and before she could finish, she was shushed and dragged away by her aunt. I sat there baffled, thinking about what I could have said to avoid this from happening. But then, I felt Acha kiya jo kuch nahi bola, warna aur bura ho sakta tha. Perhaps we were meant to get along this far. I convinced myself that there was no coming back of her, and it was in best interest of me that I rested my eyes now. Less than two hours were left for the sun to hit the skies.

I woke up the next morning, not because of the sun rays peeking in from the adjacent window, but because of the chaos in the compartment. The GIANT family had woke up, and now I was seeing them, gravely staring at me. Instinctively I covered myself, fearing I might be in an obscene posture or was uncovered. Few seconds later, it struck me that the reason was what happened last night. I rolled my eyes around to avoid looking at them, but from the corner of my eye, I could still see Vamp Aunt explain them the scenario of last night. Embarrassed, I moved out to other compartment to avoid any further humiliation, and glued my eyes to my phone screen. A few minutes later, Aisha woke up. She seemed normal, unaffected and walked to washroom. She didn’t even notice me sitting by the window side, ready to smile at her if she looked. But she didn’t.

In less than 20 minutes, the train halted at Hyderabad station. The jostling crowd, waiting for 9am train to work, covered the entire platform. It wasn’t unusual. I grabbed my bags, and got down the train. As I was scanning through the crowd, I saw her family get down too. I stood at a distance, hoping that she would at least look for me. A minute passed, and it turned harder for me to stand there in despair. Finally, there family walked past me. I was still gazing at her, desperately hoping that she would turn around to look at that guy she spent the last night talking to. But no, it didn’t happen. Soon they disappeared in the crowd, and I was left there thinking “This was how it’s supposed to end. When did anything start in the first place? We only had a conversation for a few hours last night, in seclusion, which by no way means that we would see each other’s faces the next morning. I am a total jerk to have thought that the conversation mattered to her. She must have had thousands of such conversations with thousands of strangers…. But it certainly mattered to me, coz it was my first time.”

Soon, we parted our ways amidst the bustling crowd, and disappeared in the busy streets of Hyderabad, my home.

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an-ephemeral-blog · 6 years

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