Ah, forbidden love. We hate to love it, or love to hate it. Regardless, it’s one of the most common tropes portrayed in romance novels, movies, and art. Particularly, there’s one that’s located on the shore of Batumi Boulevard in Georgia (the country, not the state): a moving sculpture inspired by the story Ali and Nino, written by Kurban Said.

Bewarned: spoilers ahead!!

The story is set in 1914, in Baku’s Old City of Ichari Shahar, just before the Bolshevik Revolution. 

Ali Khan Shirvanshir is an eighteen year old boy and a descendent of an noble Muslim family located in Baku, Azerbaijini. Though he has been raised by his family’s strong allegiance to Islamnic faith, Ali has been exposed to western values through attending a Russian school for boys. He has also fallen in love with Nino Kipiani, a seventeen year old Georgian princess with Christian ideals. Though Nino also comes from a respectable family, their cultural differences play a huge role in separating them from the start.

As a graduation present for finishing school, Ali’s father grants him three wishes. (This isn’t an Aladdin-retelling- I pinky promise.)

 

Wish 1: Ali wants to spend the summer in Susha, Karabakh by himself, which is (totally coincidentally, not), where Nino’s family is also spending the holiday.

There, the two agree that they want to get married as soon as Nino graduates, but they each want to raise their children with their own respective religions. This inevitably creates a slight strain of tension on them, since they are both very passionate about their own cultural identities.

While the two are vacationing in Susha, World War I breaks out. Because of Karabakh’s geographic insecurity, Ali and Nino both return to Baku. However, in Azerbaijini, there is an unwavering expectation for men to enlist in the military to help fight in the war. 

 

Wish 2: Ali wants to be allowed to draw his sword when he wants to. 

Though his father agrees to this wish, it is evident that Ali is expected to eventually help fight. Instead, Ali and Nino ask their parents’ for consent in their marriage. Much to their surprise, Ali’s father grants his permission, but with the stipulation that Nino must first finish school before they get married, and that she will not actively try to bring her Christian faith into their home. 

Nino’s father, on the other hand, has a different stipulation for the two: they can’t get married until the war itself ends. The two, hoping to get married sooner, reach out to one of Ali’s friends (Nachararyan) to broker a deal between the two families. Eventually, Nino’s father agrees that Ali and Nino can get married as soon as Nino finishes school.

Almost a year later, Nino finally finishes school, and the two travel to Tbilisi in Georgia to finalize arrangements for their wedding. However, Georgia soon becomes a dangerous ground for battle and violence. Ali’s friend from earlier, Nachararyan, confesses that he has loved Nino all along, and under the pretense of recusing her, abducts her and takes her to a safer country.

Ali eventually finds his (ex) friend and stabs him to death. He runs away, knowing that he will be punished for his actions. Months later, when Nino ends up finally finding Ali, they finally get married and live happily ever after. Until:

The Bolsheviks seize control of Baku, and Ali and Nino are forced to flee once again. Once Azerbaijan has been established as an independent republic, Ali and Nino return to their home. When the Red Army invades Azerbaijan, Ali chooses to finally fulfill the promise he made to his father in return for his second wish, and stay to fight for his country. On the other hand, Nino flees to her homeland of Georgia with their newborn child. While they are apart, Ali dies in war. 

 

Wish 3: Ali and Nino end up together.

This wish is mine. Obviously, it’s not granted in the story, but we can see this exemplified (briefly) in one other area– the aforementioned sculpture. Each of the two figures (one of Ali, the other of Nino) constantly move towards each other, meeting for a brief kiss, but never truly connecting. 

~ The End ~

 

 

** There’s a movie adaptation of this story too, if you’re interested in watching how the story unfolds in a much more coherent manner than my storytelling – check out a review by the New York Times here.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve recently developed a slight obsession with the  ~ randompeopleof*insert school or location here* ~ accounts on TikTok. (Examples here, and here.) Essentially, these are videos being taken of random people walking down the street, accompanied by a block of text explaining theories of who these people are and the types of lives that they lead. I’ve found such joy in reading through these seemingly strangely accurate details of complete strangers, and so I thought I’d try my hand at writing them. Here are some stories that I’ve made up for random people lurking in the backgrounds of the photos I have in my camera roll. 

Luke & Emma. 16 & 15, respectively, but she’s about to turn 16 in exactly 2 weeks. Their first date together. (Actually, this is the first date that Emma has ever been on, but she’s definitely not about to admit that to Luke.) 

They’re both in the same US history course, where he used a sly pickup line to ask her out on this date of theirs – “I’m learning about important dates in history; want to be one of them?” In preparation, Luke texted his 🥶 the boys 🥶 Snapchat group chat to brainstorm what he should plan for this first date. His friends threw out lackluster options, such as going on a lunch date at Chick Fil A or watching Dear Evan Hansen at the AMC 12, but finally his older sister suggests a quaint sunset date. As with the typical older sister-younger brother dynamic, Luke values his sister’s opinion a lot more than he’d like to admit, so he texts Emma with “his” idea of going sunset-watching. The other day while scrolling through her VSCO feed, she had republished the an aesthetic photo of the sunset and she suspects that he’s been stalking her account. He hasn’t, but that’s neither here nor there. 

The day of, he picks her up in his parent’s 2004 Honda Civic (much to his pride – he got his driver’s license just last month). As per his sister’s suggestion, he gives her a single pink rose when she gets in the car – he meant to get a red one, but Jewel Osco just so happened to be out of stock. She appreciates the gesture anyways; in fact, she’s absolutely blown away by his thoughtfulness but she acts nonchalant about it. When she gets home, she’ll have her mom help her press the flower so that it can serve as a keepsake. On their way to the Blackwell Forest Preserve, he gives her the aux. She plays the ~ there are boys in my car ~ playlist she found on Spotify, densely populated with Juice WRLD and Lil Uzi Vert music; the only song on it that she knows is “The Box” and he secretly is much more of a country fan, but neither of them tell the other that. 

As for the image above, she’s currently looking at the picture they asked a random hiker to take for them, as documentation of their first date. Under the pretense of making sure their photo turned out well, she’s actually texting her friends with frequent updates of how the date is going – so far, so good. When he asks for her to send him the picture, he’s simply just making up an excuse so that she’ll text him. But, this photo of them together is only the first of many. 

Eric. 26. A relatively new professor at Columbia University.

He was hired just last year, which means that he’s only had experience teaching online courses. He’s nervous about teaching in person this year, and even more nervous about what his students make of him. In reality, his students are more or less indifferent. They’re not huge fans of how heavily he weighs attendance in the grade book, but at least his teaching style isn’t entirely mind-numbingly boring. 

He chose to teach Urban Planning because when he himself attended UCLA as an undergraduate, he took a course on the urban planning of Los Angeles and was absolutely appalled by the shoddy layout of the streets and frankly inconvenient transportation system. When he moved to New York for his Master’s Degree, the second he saw the symmetricity of the city map in the subway station, it felt as if the city was calling his name.

 Now as a Columbia professor, he wakes up every morning at exactly 5 am sharp to buy the NYT paper from the newsstand across the street from his apartment; he is fully aware that he can save a ton of money by simply purchasing the digital subscription, but he enjoys making small talk with the elderly man who runs the stand. Plus, getting up earlier in the day helps to boost his daily productivity levels, in his opinion at least.

In the above image, it’s currently a Sunday. He just bought his daily newspaper and is on his way back to his apartment. His plans for the day are as follows:

• Make a cup of (black) coffee in his Keurig

• Grade the get-to-know-you papers he assigned to his students last week

• Iron out the logistics for the upcoming field trip for his Urban Planning class, where he’s going to have his students make the trek all the way from upper Manhattan down to the Financial District to experience the NYC urban planning firsthand; here’s the catch though: each student only gets a certain amount of money to spend on transportation fees, as well as a time limit (to ensure that they don’t end up walking all 12.3 miles);

This field trip is what conclusively wins his students over, for him to become their new all-time favorite professor; years later, when he receives his well-deserved tenure from the university, his inbox will be flooded with past students of his asking him to serve as their doctoral advisor. 

I pretty much did just write fan fiction about pixelated people I’ve found loitering around my camera roll. I’ll admit: throughout this writing process, I’ve become rather emotionally attached to these strangers; I hope they all receive happy endings, even if they’re not ones that completely align with the hypothetical ones I gifted them with.