Right Here Right Now

Have you ever thought of it that if we lose our memory how will we survive? We won’t get to know who was true to us and who is acting fake. Who might try to take advantage of our illness and whom we can trust? Something like this takes place in the novel of Nikita Singh – Right Here Right Now. I have gone through this novel and today, I will be sharing what I found and what I liked and what I did not.

This story is about a seventeen-year-old school going girl Kalindi Mishra (I don’t know why such a protagonist). She wakes up with a nightmare and eventually finds out that she was in a coma for past 19 days. Not only this, she gets to know that she is now suffering from Retrograde amnesia which means that she had lost her ability to recall memories before the head injury. Now here the writer tries to build up suspense by mentioning some car accident and she was not driving but sitting in the car. This creates another suspense because neither she nor her friends know driving. Then who was she with late night?

She accepts her parents as nice people as she has no memory to connect to her and then her friends Ada, Bharat, Kapil, Sameer and Trisha as they are. Though she doesn’t like them and their mannerisms. She doesn’t like her room that was done as per previous Kalindi’s taste. She doesn’t even like the clothes she used to wear. She goes to school to make fresh memories. She is able to solve Maths problems without remembering the formulae and this is something which goes out of my understanding. She remembers Amitabh Bachan but no one else. And this further makes a new height of blunder in fiction because of so many reasons which the intellectual reader can understand! One day through her diary she finds out that her friends and her boyfriend had cheated on her the night she met with an accident as she went out angrily.

Her friends were hiding the truth from her so she feels betrayed. And then comes the different group of classmates who were the so-called ‘nerds’. They are genuine and trustworthy but again something happens that she is shaken. What happens to her school syllabus, her board exam, her love life her friends and her personal life is for you to find out by reading this usual story around teenage love by Nikita Singh.

The writer has tried to do so many things in the novel which she can’t bring to the finale. Like that suspense factor about the car and her accident remains suspense only. The life after waking up from a coma and living in amnesia is build up but a girl struggling with identity crisis falls in love too soon. And within a month she is deeply in love and ultimately climbs seventy feet to confess of her love not a bit afraid of all the ordeal she just went through. Overall, you can go get a one time read. This is for the teenagers and for those who love reading the usual stuff every next novel. Not for the readers who would love to dive in only if there is substance – because here, it’s hardly any!

by – Nidhi Sharma