shot a million stars to let you know

Going through my old, extremely old wip drafts, today I stumbled upon a particularly special wip - a snippet from an original novel that I had once thought I’d write, but never quite ended up fully fleshing out. The idea had first come to me the summer after I finished high school - I was a complete nerd for modern Indian history, especially the nationalist anti-colonialism movement and the story I had envisioned was  of two best friends, Dhrubo and Borun, who become embroiled within the anti-colonial struggle in 1940s rural Bengal, and how the epic story of their love, romance, longing and coming-of-age plays out against the backdrop of the real historical events of the 1946 Calcutta riots, and the freedom struggle as a whole. 

I had conceived this as a historical romance novel in the vein of European wartime fiction like Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong, or even Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, but of course, this comes nothing close to any of them. But I did write a couple of scenes that I was proud of, and I found this particular one which is one of my favourites, and I thought I’d dump it here anyway, since I don’t plan to continue writing this novel in the foreseeable future. Have fun reading (or not reading, lol)