Welcome to Bumbling!

Hello dear(est) reader, 

If you have not yet flummoxed yourself with a list of new things to catch on to and keep up with this year, fret not, we are here to get you started. 

This newsletter is an attempt by us to do a couple of things. First, permeate so deeply into your lives that we will now also sit in your inboxes and pester you to become privy to our thoughts, because, honestly, how much of us is too much? Second, give our lives an illusion of meaning by telling ourselves that we are people who have profound observations about the world that should be noted down and shared regularly. Third, hold on to our remaining bits of sanity by keeping each other accountable for at least one thing in life. 

On that seemingly positive note, welcome to Bumbling! You’ll find our noses in your business twice a month, one piece by each of us on a theme that we think is worthy of the time we take off from sending each other memes.

We don’t promise wisdom, learnings, or life-changing anecdotes. We do promise feelings, a lot of them (most of them confused and ineffectual). We promise a silly search for love and joy in the blunders of the banality that surrounds us. And most importantly, we promise words that will hopefully cure your “indescribable longings”. If not, maybe we can still keep bumbling together. 

But before that, we coerced each other to share why words are important to us and why we are doing this. Keep reading (pls).

Siddhant 

It all started with Mahabharata. Yes, I am talking about the show that revolutionized Indian Television. Back in 2001, my paternal grandmother came to stay with us after her heart surgery. At 10:30 PM, on weekdays, the family religiously watched reruns of the original Mahabharata dubbed in Odia on a channel named ETV Odia. I had a lot of questions about the characters and the interesting stories associated with them. I used to bug my grandparents (Jeje had also moved in by then) with my questions and they were more than happy to answer. That was my introduction to the art of storytelling. At around the same age, my maternal grandmother, during my summer vacations, used to treat me to spooky ghost stories (some true, some made up) that she had heard or experienced. She could hold a room filled with people with her ability to tell a tale. I would say my grandparents planted the seeds of my love for stories. 

When my grandparents went back to the village, or when the summer vacation ended, I had this storyless void that I had to somehow fill. So I started reading. Reading whatever I could get my hands on. Newspaper, atlas, dictionary, school books, books that were beyond my understanding (I had tried reading a copy of “Crime and Punishment” which my grandfather had) and I also tried reading the phonebook, but it wasn't really filled with stories except my classmates' landline numbers. My cousins helped me with it too. Two of my favorite cousins gave me a copy of the Tinkle digest and that is when I found a new world which I lay ahead of me for exciting exploration. It had so many stories, some thrillers, some with a moral lesson and some just comedies. It was a wonderful experience. After every half yearly and final exam, my parents gifted me a couple of Tinkle digests. Sometimes I would demand 4 and I was never disappointed. 

The same cousins also introduced me to the world of video games. Super Mario and Contra. I was in love. I didn’t know you could do so much with your TV just using a console (you know the ones where you blow into the cartridges when they stopped working) and flimsy controllers. There is a reason why I mention this here. 

After I came back home from my vacation, I still had a few days to kill before my school began. At the same time, I would be missing the console games a lot, my virtual friends from the TV. So what do I do? I narrated the gameplay from all the games, like I was telling stories about my friends’ adventures, to my mother, whose sole focus was to keep the house clean in case any guests arrived without warning. I would tell her how Mario reached the princess or how the Supersoldiers in Contra used the “S” and “M” powers. I even included the background music for a complete immersive experience. She didn’t care for my narration, but I guess she was happy to see me engaged. 

During the afternoon, as I lay near her for my afternoon siesta, she would sometimes read me stories from the weekly Odia magazine. She made sure the stories she read out were about kings, queens, animals and magical creatures and didn’t include mature themes like death, infidelity or sadness. I still remember how she would wrap her arms around me, holding the magazine and reciting the stories. I miss the warm feeling if truth be told. 

Now let’s jump years ahead into my engineering days. It was the 3rd year, and I was lying down in my dark room. That is when it struck me. I had been writing my views on movies and politics, detailed football reviews and life anecdotes, all on Facebook, so why not try my hand at writing short stories? 

I wrote a handful of them over the course of 5 years. I even worked on a novel (let’s not go there), and that is when I realised, I might just be an above average story-teller. 

Now that brings me to the present day. What I wanted to establish was that I have loved stories from a pretty young age and they have been a part of my life since forever. In my opinion, you can find a story in everything. So here I am, trying to tell you stories about everyday life, things you might find interesting and things that no one cares about. Most of them will be random, some a bit relatable, a few of them might make you think and some you will forget as soon as you get done with it. I hope you have a good time reading our bumblings, and if you don’t, well…. I know a Japanese-Italian plumber who has a pretty violent past. 

Aaryaka

“Well, at least, it’ll be a story to tell.”

Most of us, by virtue of being mere humans who try to find comfort in silver linings, say this to ourselves as tumble across our bumbling lives. We all try to make stories that we can tell others (but mostly ourselves) later. We toy with our tales, we add and subtract, and we ingest stories with a little bit of ourselves as we go. The stories have always been fascinating to me, but where I find people residing in these stories is within the words that they choose. 

I, too, have always found myself scrambling towards words when life happens to me. 

Recently, I found myself back on the streets of the city that I once called home. I have somehow always ended up romanticizing winter there (much to my dismay). My reflex, on most days, is an indescribable longing that I feel in my stomach, one that I know can only be cured by words. 

Words that wrap feelings inside them and offer warmth that the world outside of them cannot. 

Words that perfectly describe how the cold that achingly settles in the spaces between my fingers will refuse to leave until intertwined with another set of fingers going through the same ordeal. 

Words that bring to me the whiff of the devilish air that feels almost like cardamom and makes me crave chai. Words that lead me to preach in front of unknowing strangers that this smell that intoxicates them is saptaparni and not raat ki raani. 

Words that offer some meaning to the unaccepting hearts of girls like me who grew up in small towns and moved to mighty cities with big dreams, struggling to find themselves. Words that tell them that these are the places where they belong, they somehow always have. 

My search for words to describe the winter of my memories led me to think of the number of times I tried to unfurl my feelings with letters stringed together but did not. It led me to think about how when my dog died, the only thing that I felt could help me accept my grief was a set of words that could describe her big, brown, beautiful eyes. I couldn’t find them. I still haven’t. One day I will, but until then, I’ve decided not to part ways with words entirely. 

Sometimes I feel like I am still the 15-year-old girl whose words were loved by English teachers all her life but was scared to make even one spelling error (maybe that’s why she was loved). I just grew up to build my life on the stack of jumbles created by those too-perfect words, shying away from mistakes and the embarrassments they bring. 

Maybe this is a mistake, but I’ve carried stories on my shoulders that can be offered with the brush of a hand and received with a smile for far too long now. 

I am not saying that my words will make sense; they will definitely falter and fall, and they will leave me bumbling, more than I would like to admit. But now I’d like them to be yours. 

If you’ve made it till here, thank you. If you’ve just skipped to the end and are reading this, we will quiz you about very specific details from our excerpts and shame you into reading them.

Anyway, we’ll be back soon. Until then, keep bumbling.

Love,

Aaryaka & Siddhant