SUMMER OF LOVE

Five Bazaar India contributors pen short stories about finding kindred spirits, exploring worlds unheard of, and what first love feels like.

- Meghna Sharma

HOUSE OF CANDY

by Megha Rao

Author of A Crazy Kind Of Love, It Will Always Be You, and Teething

The summer my Ajja told me my first story, I was six. His was a strange world; dragonflies gossiped, chairs danced when nobody was looking, and trees dressed in flowers to impress the sun. When I slept, warm against the gentleness of my mother's sari, I thought about Ajja's fish that flew to the orchestra of oceans and Gods who headbanged to the protest poetry of thunder.

It was in this world that I felt truly alive.

For him, I was not Megha, but Megham, which meant cloud in Malayalam. He told me I was a warrior of the sky, shielding the moon prince on nights that felt too dark. Some days, I was an airplane's favourite roller-coaster ride, and some others, a superstar rain maker. Shapeshifter, lightning archer. And so, often I found myself disappearing into his world even after we stopped visiting him. Into the mysterious candy house of tales, the secret hiding spot for misfits, the safe spaces for silly girls who spent more time imagining than studying. I daydreamed in class, and I drew on desks until I was sent to the principal's office for vandalism. I sat alone, and all my friends were imaginary: characters from books I'd read and fantasised into life. But time was a thief. It stole from me my surreal glittery lands, it replaced them with stone pillars of bitter truths. Love showed up fast and business-like as small talk at workspaces. I moved through the ordinary with a jaded indifference. Undoing my old school romanticism and shooting into my bones the doctrine of kiss and run.