{"id":2128,"date":"2016-06-03T20:11:22","date_gmt":"2016-06-03T14:41:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/13.201.39.237\/ex-box-dilemma-gifts-girlfriends-past\/"},"modified":"2016-06-03T20:11:22","modified_gmt":"2016-06-03T14:41:22","slug":"ex-box-dilemma-gifts-girlfriends-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/13.207.105.184\/?p=2128","title":{"rendered":"My Ex-Box Dilemma: What Should We Do with Gifts from Girlfriends Past?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

W<\/span>e are perhaps the only generation who could be graphically represented by an ostrich with fake feathers whose head is firmly up its own arse. We document everything in our jhaant barabar lives and have moved from slam books to <\/p>Snapchat<\/span><\/a> in the blink of an eye. Now we\u2019re at the cusp of falling into the \u201cTum aa gaye ho, Noor aa gaya, chalo <\/span>threesome<\/span><\/a> ho jaye?\u201d abyss of modern relationships.<\/span>\n\nWhich is why, the whole <\/span>Priya Varrier fiasco<\/span><\/a> came as a huge surprise to me. News channels were referring to her as the \u201cnational crush\u201d. Really? The last few years had convinced me that only <\/span>cows <\/span><\/a>were allowed to be our national crush and anybody who thought otherwise would be <\/span>crushed<\/span><\/a> into believing so. How could a people who failed to agree on anything except \u201cPakistan Chor Hai\u201d and \u201cAcche din are just around the corner\u201d forget their differences for once and be united in their puppy-love appreciation of Miss Varrier? <\/span>\n\nCould it be that high-school romances were in vogue again? <\/span>\n\nThe Priya: Varrier Princess drama got me thinking about my own \u201cPehla Nasha\u201d days. The high-school romance has a distinct whiff of its own: an immediate throwback to the smell of damp staircases, John Mayer CDs, and catching the smell of her \u201cL\u2019oreal enriched\u201d luscious locks for the first time. Sometimes what seemed like a lifetime ago is at an arm\u2019s length if you trust your <\/span>olfactory power<\/span><\/a> and Kumar Sanu\u2019s melancholy blues. <\/span>\n\nI found what I had labelled the \u201cbreak-up box\u201d, a painfully decorated dabba speckled with faded glitter, which lost its shine as soon as our relationship did. This box of \u201cwhat ifs\u201d was chucked at me by my ex as she made a dash out of my life. Not only did it have the remnants of our relationship, it was also a comprehensive timeline of the time we\u2019d spent together. <\/span>\n

All grown up today, I think there certainly are better ways of displaying affection than borrowing a few strands of hair and potential dandruff.<\/blockquote>\nBack in school, the affirmation of a relationship often came with people showing off that they\u2019d been on expensive dates \u2013 but that was exclusive to conspicuous-consuming South Dilli laundas. Us chhichora Jamna Paar types could only do what we saw in films on Zee Cinema. We were the type who\u2019d peep into each other\u2019s classrooms between lectures, meet in science labs during lunch breaks, and on the luckiest day of our lives, maybe get the opportunity to walk the whole corridor with her, hand in hand, even as our friends kept track of teachers. The backbenchers would sing, \u201cTera mujhse hai pehle ka naata koi\u201d and the whole corridor would erupt with raucous laughter. Back in class, the girls would show off oversize metal-rimmed watches they\u2019d borrowed from their boyfriends as trinkets of the \u201cbhao\u201d they\u2019d shed on poor sods like us.<\/span>\n\nThe memory box was filled with a bunch of scrunchies. Being the Kumar Gaurav sort of lover boy, I\u2019d take a hairband from her hair every day, as we got into separate buses after school. All grown up today, I think there certainly are better ways of displaying affection than borrowing a few strands of hair and potential dandruff. <\/span>\n\nPeeping out of a sea of scrunchies was an empty bottle of Dettol. I remember rushing to her house at 2 am fearing that she might die from the torturous pain of a paper cut. This antiseptic bottle is a reminder of how we\u2019ve wiped our slates clean of any of these inconsequential deeds today and allowed ourselves to marinate in the dullness of adult life. <\/span>\n\nI can track the trajectory of our failed relationship through a neatly stapled but faded collection of movie tickets \u2013 as if Ameen Sayani were whispering out my memories as I flipped through the stubs of <\/span>Bodyguard<\/span><\/i> and <\/span>The Planet of the Apes<\/span><\/i>. I remember trying to chew each other\u2019s faces off like lovestruck apes as Piggy Chops and Harman Baweja danced to <\/span>What\u2019s Your Rashee.<\/span><\/i> With love comes pain, and pain triggers filminess. During troubled times, I watched <\/span>Rockstar<\/span><\/i> when both of us wished the other person would die so that our love could become \u201cmuqammal\u201d and we wouldn\u2019t have to go through another fucking break-up. But neither of us passed, so we kept \u201cworking at the relationship\u201d and watched Salman flicks one after the other secretly wishing we could be virgins like Bhai again. <\/span>\n\nA photo frame from one of our birthdays has two perfectly opposing interpretations. One, a reminder of <\/span>Old Monk<\/span><\/a>-induced \u201cpuppy love\u201d, but look at it closely and you can find the two of us barely managing a smile at a fuck-all party, only so that people on our timelines know that we are still keepin\u2019 it cute. Long before the origin of Buzzfeed, we\u2019d penned \u201c100 reasons why I love you\u201d in our handwritten cards, a testament to the adage, \u201cAn idle mind is the lover boy\u2019s soppy workshop\u201d. One of the reasons on the list, \u201cbecause eskimo kisses are the best\u201d, made me want to chop off my nose and hand it to the <\/span>Karni Sena<\/span><\/a> for some petty cash. <\/span>\n\nThe last of our relationship horcruxes was an old record of a Dire Straits album with the track \u201cRomeo and Juliet\u201d encircled in red. I laughed; \u201cgali ka ishq\u201d and \u201cschool ka ishq\u201d might not materialise into something epic but it will still be a story we tell our grandchildren.<\/span>\n\nYoung love is na\u00efve. I look back and realise that, as teenagers, maybe even now, we are more obsessed with the idea of love than love itself. Of course it was doomed. But what about the gifts and tokens of love that we forget as time passes and heals our broken heart? Do we still keep them around? Or try to send them off on their way, \u201cMera kuch saaman\u201d style? \u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\n\nRecently, an ex who was moving in with her \u201cnew cutie\u201d, sent me a picture of the five-year-old me, the time when I was kaatilana cute. I was a bit baffled. Should I ask her to return my photograph and anything else that belonged to me? I had done the same. Did she not want to shut that chapter and move on? <\/span>\n\nThen again, maybe it wasn\u2019t such a bad thing. Maybe the photograph should stay with her, where it once belonged. Years later, maybe her kids would find the picture in a hidden folder. They\u2019d know\u2026 That our relationship might have changed, but we still had a story. <\/span>\n\n\u00a0\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I stumbled upon my \u201cbreak-up box\u201d and hidden in it were a few love letters and all the memories of my high-school romance. I wondered if I should still keep the mementos? Or try to send them off on their way, \u201cMera kuch saaman\u201d style?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":133,"featured_media":2129,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[4310,4311,3619,4312,224,22,1466,408],"class_list":["post-2128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-love-and-sex","tag-boyfriends","tag-exes","tag-gifts","tag-girlfriends","tag-love","tag-relationships","tag-romance","tag-sex"],"yoast_head":"\nMy Ex-Box Dilemma: What Should We Do with Gifts from Girlfriends Past?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I stumbled upon my \u201cbreak-up box\u201d and hidden in it were a few love letters and all the memories of my high-school romance. I wondered if I should still keep the mementos? 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