Written by Kanika Bhatia

I didn’t grow up in a house where parents narrate bedtime stories to you. They got you books, and the means to buy them. We had the claimed narrations by nana-nani and dada-dadi, but eventually you knew it wasn’t them who necessarily wrote or compiled them. I have loved stories. I loved the red fox, lion and coyote of the jungle. I love the village that differed only minutely in most stories. I loved the different professions. There was the carpenter, potter, metalsmith and a smart mouth in most of them. Obviously I associated myself with the wise man of the village every time. Duh. 

As I aged, the black ink on white sheets progressed to include more complicated plots. The emotions grew deeper, the characters had layers, storylines grew to include more complicated learnings than just how greed was bad. Often, instead of moral of the story, we learnt how morals are most questionable if every character has their own set to abide. The writer was sometimes trying too hard, and often rushing through some details that I wanted him to stress on further. There were stories that gave goosebumps courtesy the writer’s mind. Who would have ever thought of that ending? Speaking of goosebumps, who remembers books by the namesake during scholastic book fairs? The speciality of the Goosebumps series remained how you could choose your  own ending. Of course the number of endings were finite, but the thrill of changing the plot entirely was an adrenaline rush in a young mind. 

Indelible stories have brought me up. It was Pride and Prejudice that taught me that hardened men have soft hearts, if only you pay attention. Kite Runner asked me to never lose sight of friends, and Alchemist reminds me to carry a thick book each time I travel. You never know when you feel like sleeping under the stars. But here’s the thing with stories that have been framed, and written. You can’t reshape these stories on your whim. You can’t hope to have a different ending, sometimes even the imagination doesn’t allow it. This black ink is so final, so sure that you fear changing it might mar its whole purpose. It doesn’t discount the fact that we love knowing the plot. The need to have a plot in the first place is an existential idea in itself. 

We love the idea of knowing our story. Soothsayers, tea leaf readers, tarot card readers and palmists didn’t exist out of lack of job options. They know humans are curious, they inquire and humans love a good story (true or not.) Nostradamus had one job in the palace. 11.22.63 was a really successful American thriller novel on rewriting the plot of Kennedy’s assassination. Because while we may love knowing stories, we love to be able to control the narrative much more. Adaptation of the original only to change variables is not just cheap thrills, it gives us a lot to think about. We like to know about the what ifs. 

As of now, we are lost. The jitters, the idea of restlessness, the impatience are all symptoms of the same problem. We miss knowing. We are used to chalking plans, or have them laid out for us. We are sure of certain variables most times, if not always. We have the what-ifs in a three to four multiple choice question answer format. From “mommy who will I marry” at 5 to “what will I be” in our teens, we have sung every version of que sera sera. But now, too many aspects of life are unknown. The 2020 planner sits stale on the desk. The what-if scenarios are too many to account for, and it’s impossible to account for a pretty picture without gloomy losses. We don’t have a great beginning, the characters to build, or the purpose/ moral of the story. If we believe Instagram lives (and there seem to be an awful lot of them), we just know it has to be written and it’s going to be one hell of a story. 

Featured Image: Unsplash

About the Author:

Kanika Bhatia is an entrepreneur with a love for writing. She has been a columnist with YKA, Images Group, Shoes and Accessories for 12 editions of the monthly magazine. She writes regularly on her social media accounts, and recently launched her blog and podcast: SheSaidIt. You can check out her profile on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/kanikabhatia14/