TRANSCRIPT? SCREENPLAY?
(ANYHOW, A PRELIMINARY DRAFT):

(Camera zooms in on an unexceptional home in suburban India.)
He:

Now if you’ll stop badgering me about chitau pitha (HONESTLY, enough for now) for one blessed minute, I have something to say. I’m leaving for England, pretty soon. Oh, I know, there’s Skype and there’s reduced-rate phone calls, and this is 2016, and and and…goddammit would you listen for a change, I’ve had it up to here with your interruptions! I mightn’t see you in person for over a year now. I appreciate your company, you know, and I suppose I might miss you a little bit.

She:
(slapping wrist on forehead)

Arre go na, go go, whocarestwopice. Every Ram, Nita, and Geeta goes abroad these days, and what for? Those firangis and their prim ways. I’ve heard tell! Even the curries there, so bland and spiceless, they sing “God Save the Rani”, baaprebaap, and speaking of the Queen, didn’t she invite Narendrabhai for some chai pe charcha a while ago? What became of that? You fools, your intelligence is lower than your IITJEE scores even. Last week, at Sheila Auntie’s daughter’s wedding, we were discussing that only. Look at all the achhe bache, they go to engineering or medical college here, or a decent B-school (By God, Sharma ji’s daughter scored in the 99th percentile on the CAT ! ) and then on an H1B visa to the US or Germany, or simply stay back here and launch a start-up! You don’t know Flipkart or what? What’s all this English-Vinglish, Britain-Shritain? Are you Punjabi? The goddess Ganga alone knows what you are upto abroad. They send you back thin as a reed, even.

He:

(nervously clutching his copy of Francis Turner Palgrave’s Golden Treasury closer to his body, like a rosary or a made-to-order magic carpet, thinking back to the disintegration of identity in that one year he’d spent abroad. Yes, even now, in this hyperconnected age of social media and labour mobility, with desi bande on every street corner in Dublin…mingling with the anonymity of the times, head mind soul buried in a newspaper at the bus stop or by the Luas tracks, coming face-to-face with the absurdity of loss and discovery, with the debris of the soul, stillborn hopes flushed down the toilet, extinguished destinies, deleted Facebook messages, forgotten knife wounds, and embarrassment on cold European evenings that weren’t quite love or adventure but surely, surely, their distant, pale shadows… Yes, even now, he feared for the future and for the lack of a future, and for both these things on certain idle Sundays.)

Very well, I’ll call. Once every week.

She:
Arre go na, go go, whocarestwopice !!!

(She breaks into sobs, badly concealed: India, as ever, she of the oppressive monsoons, rids herself of neatness and nuance with a sadistic, implacable frenzy.)

He:
(chuckles to himself, despite the circumstances)

Proper England bhai, ASLI England, no joking-shoking. Capital of Vilayet. Off I go !