Chasing the mirage of love

Each of these stories is a heart-wrenching journey.

Life is a beautiful fantasy or so we are told. We grow up on the concept of ideal love stories through novels and movies. We are told and expected to risk everything in the name of love. No one tells us that life is too short to be in so much delusion and reality can be harsh. We all have had our own fair shares of loving someone who has gone without reciprocating it. Despite the unambiguous signs from the other side, we still cling onto a distant hope and end up breaking our own hearts with unnecessary expectations. After all, there’s this strange obsession of loving someone who doesn’t love us!

Avantika Debnath’s ‘Dear Russell, Yours Truly’ meanders through the lives of men and women — living and dead — in search of love. Every character, every protagonist in all the seven stories go through their respective ordeals to find love, just not in the standard way they or others expect. Each of the seven stories takes us on a beautiful and yet heart-wrenching journey, at the end of which not only do the characters find acceptance and vindication, but we readers also find some answers to the questions they had spent a lifetime chasing.

Waiting for the one

In the title story, Avni falls in love or rather imagines herself being in love with standup comedian Russell Peters. She stays awake to wish him at the strike of 12 on Instagram for his birthday and is lost in her dream world staring at the screen, which has his reply, “Thank u @Avnidn”. She misses her cab because she is too busy “embracing” his reply on Instagram and later discovers the cab she was supposed to take had met with an accident. She’s saved from death or rather feels Russell saved her from a deadly accident.

When she gets a chance to see his performance live in Dubai, she buys a front-row ticket, but returns to the hotel room to watch ‘Russell Peters, Outsourced’ on YouTube. She’s sure that he would notice that one empty chair in the front row. “You won’t know who it belongs to, the unknown person to have crossed your mind for the tiniest fraction of time, is me.”

While Russell is unaware of Avni’s love, Sid gets to know about Sabrina’s love for him after she’s long gone in ‘From the other side’, the last story in the book. The book begins with the story of Avni who is happy in her own world, imagining her love with the celeb comedian, while it ends with a celeb singer realising how much Sabrina was in love with him till she breathed her last. While Avni never wants her love reciprocated, Sid reciprocates Sabrina’s love even though she’s no more.

Each of the characters in the book know that someone’s inability to reciprocate love is not their fault. It’s because everyone has the right to love whoever they want and no one can force love. They realise sooner or later that all they can do is to open themselves up to the world and wait for the one who can accept them wholeheartedly.

The author knows how to tell a story. The flow of the stories will force you not to leave the book until you finish it.

The characters touch your heart and resonate deep within you long after you have finished reading the book.

Chaitra Arjunpuri