Aftermath

Prologue

Aromal wanted me to write a story for SPAV-Corridor.com and I knew exactly what I was gonna put up. So I wrote this story and titled it "Thattathin Marayathu". The post was a hit, but the excitement was short lived.

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Bob Marley was right!

I always worried that at some point in my life, I would look back, and regret at the things I could have done, but I never did. That’s why I finally gathered all my guts to let her know. I wrote my story, of how I met her, and named it ‘Thattathin Marayathu’ for the college’s online magazine. The editor was worried that I went overboard with privacy invasion. I had mentioned her name, her place, her dad’s occupation, even shape of her face, her dress colours and what not. He asked me to get her consent before publishing it. Now that was some hurdle.

Later when she was online in Facebook, I texted her

“I wrote an article for SPAV corridor which mentions your name couple of times along with few others, no harm meant, hope you don’t mind :P”

In my years of experience, I haven’t come up with a more powerful smiley than the tongue smiley. It had the ability to deal with the most tensed conversations light heartedly. A moment later, she replied.

“Which article?”

Silence. I applied Less is More concept.

“Ya…” She continued. I figured it later, she has a thing for full stops.

“It’s ok. :)"

There was a smiley! That was some achievement.

“It’s about fresh meat syndrome.” Later that night, I hinted her the matter in its most complicated term. I took my time to reply her, to show her I was least excited.

I couldn’t wait to tell the editor that I had my consent. Later that night, the post was published under the pen name ‘The Optimist’. And soon, likes and comments started flowing in. All of as a sudden, everyone was curious to see how much optimism the world had left. Next day, I came online to check on the developments. The post was nowhere to be seen. It was gone! And instead, the page said-

This article was accused of breaching the privacy of certain someone. So currently it has been put on hold. If any breakthrough happens, it will become available again.

Come on! Didn’t we have a discussion on this before? I had a message from the certain someone in my inbox.

“What’s with this article now?”

“Why not? I told you!”

“Ya… But you only said that you mentions my name couple of times… I don’t like anyone posting about me like that…” Full stops! Full stops everywhere.

“You didn’t mind showing it to your dad! And then wants the post to be taken down?”

Oops! That sounded desperate. My agent had reported me that she showed the article to her dad, and, fortunately, he was cool about it, and that she went all padre preaching and warning him about the consequences of keeping a grown up girl unmarried. Report even said that she threatened him to find her a groom before more headaches emerged. Was she for real?  

It took her a while to reply. Maybe she was outraged at the realization that there was some tipster inside spying on her.

“Personal reasons. I don’t want it up there… And ya, it’s your article, you can do whatever you want with it... but don’t include my name in it.”

That last full stop felt like a stab on me. She was talking like an untrained politician, with her contradicting statements! I can do whatever I want with my article, and I should not write about her?

I am done with womankind! I pictured Bob Marley with that ‘meme’ish troll face consoling me with ‘I know that feel bro!’ hug.

No Women No Cry!