The Scribbler
Friday, October 15, 2010
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Smitten Scribbler
It happened. I knew it had to sometime. Although I acted like I’m immune to it.
Every time I threw pebbles at ‘em and got stared at by their mothers in return, and every time I’d wished their fathers had done the same thing too, deep down, I’d always feared it.
I was always the bright li’l kid; the intellectually gifted one. Like this one time when the society had arranged a magic show for the annual event. I’d been away for a week to Granny’s and was returning home that day. Dad had a grin on his face when I came back. (I later on learned that he’d had that grin the whole week.)
‘Come on son. I’ll take you to a magic show tonight!’
‘A magic show?! Wohow! Will there be huge ice-cream tubs and chocolate waterfalls and genies?’
‘Uh... No son. They’re only in the movies.’
‘But they’re genies! They can come outta the movies whenever they want to!’
‘No. They can do that only when the director says so.’
‘Screw him! Who’s he?’ I said with a long face.
‘Where do you learn to say all that?! Is that how I’ve raised you? When I was your age, I used to pee in my pants when my father walked by…’
Now I don’t know whether it was me, or all the nostalgia, but the grin was no longer on Dad’s face.
Dad was back to normal again!
Later that evening, as I tugged at Dad’s shirt for the umpteenth time to ask him when the show was gonna start, I realised from my prodigal ability to process multiple signals of body language that if I pulled at his shirt one more time, the man was gonna rip it all off and sport an Einstein hair-do.
And as it finally began, I huffed, I puffed and made faces at a man on stage who was dressed for Halloween, trying to pull out flowers and handkerchiefs from his sleeves. Bah!
And then, he did it! The unthinkable! The unquestionable! The indubitable! I watched in awe as he pulled out three rabbits in a row out of a hat and turned it over to show it was empty! I instantly turned to look at Dad. Dad’s smile faded as he saw the big question mark on my face.
‘Dad?’
‘What?’, he grunted.
‘When magicians pull out rabbits from their hat, where does all the poop go?’
With that scientifically unanswered question, ended the first and the last magic show my Dad took me to.
I was twenty years old when I first met her. No, it wasn’t at college. Or at a wedding! Or a club! (Bah! As though I could afford to go to a club anyway!)
Mom had gotten promoted and was transferred to another city so I was forced to come to terms with Dad. Since part of my daily routine was to bunk college, I was to do the cooking on weekdays. And since weekends were the only days Dad got time to relax, I was supposed to the cooking on weekends. Now I shouldn’t sound like I’m complaining here, so I must tell you that Dad boiled the milk.
So as I woke up one fine morning to see my father packin’ his mid-day meal for work and givin’ me the silent treatment, I had a debate with myself that the possible cause of this awkward bliss might be the Algebraic expressions operating amongst Coulomb’s law and the third law of Thermodynamics, in turn affecting Newton’s laws of motion causing a subsequent change in the Doppler’s effect!
The odds against my scientifically established theory were that the man had heard me sneak into the house late last night.
He made sure that I learnt one more way of ‘how-not-to-devise-a-theory’ that day. I had been ordered to pay the electricity bill as it was the last date for payment. I had blown away all the money on ‘don’t ask what’ and as I had finally found a friend who had agreed to lend me money (Yes, that’s what I call people who lend me money), my motorcycle coughed outta gas. As a guy with the golden luck would have it, it started to pour down like the Niagara had Viagra (I promise I won’t try to write poems), and half an hour of protesting against the showers, I was at the petrol-station.
I was almost run over by a smart-derrière auto-rickshaw when I first saw her. She wasn’t like the other delicate darlings I saw there. She was like… Maggi Tomato Ketchup; you know, it’s different!
I conducted a symphony of my own. There were bells ringin’ in my head! And violas and trumpets and saxophones and… and car-horns?! Whaddaya know! The people behind me were playin’ along too! I wonder why they had that pissed look on their face though.
That’s when it happened. She looked at me, and then she smiled!
It was magical.
I was smooth as satin, cool as a refrigerator, suave as an eagle! In fact, I was the James Bond of suaveness! (Yes, I stood there and scratched my head.)
‘Pump it or move it.’ (This was the petrol guy.)
‘Wha..?’, I scratched my head again.
‘I said, pump it or move it!’
Never had I thought I’d hear such words of wisdom from the gas-guy. I muttered a thanks, set my bike aside, and walked towards her.
Did you ever have that sinking feeling in your stomach? (No, not the kind when you eat a stolen lunch-box sittin’ in the front row of physics class. It’s the kind o’ feelin’ when you’re about to make a pathetic speech at the morning assembly and you don’t even remember it. And standing there you’re wonderin’ which is worse: recallin’ that pathetic speech and gettin’ screwed by the other kids in return? Or gettin’ screwed by the other kids for gapin’ at the mic like it was gonna start talkin’ all by itself?)
Well I pretty much had the same feeling, except my stomach felt like Pearl Harbour. And by the time I realised this, I was already standing in front o’ her. I didn’t even have a freakin’ speech to recall!
So I just said hi. She gave me a blank look. (Normally when you’re a stranger and you say hi to an Indian girl, she either burns you down with her stare and make you wish you never walked up to her in the first place, or, give you a ‘WTF-why-are-you-even-talking-to-me-you-pathetic-lonely-creepy-stalker’ look. That applies even if you don’t fall under the ‘pathetic, lonely, creepy, stalker’ category. That’s just the way Indian women are built. You could just be saying hi to the girl you know, standing behind our women and you’ll still get one o’ the above. In my case, I get stares even from the woman standing behind.)
‘What’s your name?’ I asked. (What’s your NAME? Smooth move, Casanova. Why don’t you ask her which grade she’s in while you’re at it?)
‘Cinderella.’, she said without even lookin’ at me now. (See this is another thing Indian women do. They give you all the right signals, but they blow you off when you approach and brag about the same to their friends. They’re satisfied just by knowing the fact that they attract men! No wonder God made Indian men sizably-challenged in the condoms department; their women’re satisfied before they even buy it!)
Clearly she wasn’t interested anymore than that so I started to turn away.
‘What about you?’, she popped a question from behind.
‘What about me?’, I grumped.
‘What’s your name, silly?’
‘Rumpelstiltskin.’, I said.
‘Good to meet you Rump.’, she smiled. ‘And now that the small talk is over and that I’m about to leave, what’re you gonna do?’
Good question. What was I gonna do?
‘Uhh... look for your glass shoe?’ (Way to go Prince Charming The XIII! And then what? Spin it into gold?)
‘Well, good luck with that.’, and she turned to walk away.
I watched her glide towards her scooter. Damn, she had that poised walk! Too bad my magic show had to end before it even began.
She got on her scooter, and drove... only to stop right in front o’ me!
‘Put out your hand.’, she ordered.
‘What? Why?’
‘Come on! You ask too many questions!’, and she reached for my hand, pulled out my wrist and wrote something.
‘There. Call me when you’ve found my glass slipper.’ She’d written her number down! I felt like the manliest guy on the planet! (Before you think I’m over-reacting, here’s the thing about Indian women and their cell-phones. They’re more secure than Guantanamo Bay. Only they can decide who goes in and out of their cell-phone. See, asking an Indian girl for her number is like askin’ a girl to move in with you on your first date: a) you’ll freak her out, and b) you’re never gonna see her again. I must mention here that asking a girl to move in with you on your first date gets you a free membership to the ‘Pathetic, lonely, creepy, stalker’ club. Now, if our girls don’t wanna talk to you, they’ll accidentally delete your number. Yes, they’ll accidentally hit the ‘Contacts’ menu, accidentally select your name, accidentally hit the ‘delete’ button and accidentally hit ‘yes’ when the phone prompts to delete it or not. Oh and they don’t answer calls from unknown numbers so don’t get all dramatic if they don’t pick up your calls.)
‘Say hi to your cruel stepmother for me!’, I yelled as she drove off.
I called her the next day.
‘Found it already?’, were her first words.
‘What? No ‘hello’?’, I asked. ‘How’d you know it was me?’
‘Who else could it be at 8 in the morning?’
‘Oh. What time do you get up?’
‘As of today. 8!’
When I got off the phone, it was 11; which was a bit out of the ordinary, because my calls never exceed 19 seconds. 31 seconds at the max if it was anything serious. I had no idea what I had spoken to her all this while, but it felt great! The time I spent on the phone gradually increased until it became a routine. We were cuttin’ down on our sleep to stay on the phone. She said things I’d never heard before and she made me say things I never thought I could say before. As for Dad, he was always smellin’ somethin’ around me, ‘cause I sounded happy all the time. Mom must’ve suggested that I could be under the influence of the holy ‘spirit’.
On her birthday, I bought a Cinderella Barbie, and gifted her the glass shoes she’d been nagging about ever since we’d met. (Just the shoes guys, not the doll. Stop lookin’ at me like that.) She felt the shoes were a couple o’ sizes too huge but she said she could manage with whatever little I could provide. Life was a hell of a ride when I was with her.
She’d make a big hue & cry and all along she’d make me sigh. She laughed & hugged and got me high. She’d wake me up to say goodnight and end up tellin’ me to get out of her sight. I’d make her wait an hour ahead, just to see her nose get red. She could kill me without a knife and always bring me back to life. She’d get stoned on a bottle of beer and she won’t even let me near. She’d bite me, she’d fight me and challenged that she’d right me. She talked me out of me sometimes and slammed the door on me sometimes. She found herself lost in me sometimes and kicked the shit out of me sometimes. She’d mother me sometimes, brother me sometimes, and when she was done she’d colour me sometimes. She was fun, she was a pain, and I loved it when she ran her fingers through my mane. She talked and never stopped; she got me into trouble and stood & watched. She said a thousand words with her eyes. She struck, she amazed, she knit, she gazed, she smiled, she cried, she winked and she lied, she pinched, she gnawed, she sneaked, she cooked, she hugged, she missed and of course she kissed, she leapt, she slept, she wept... and then she left.
Every time I threw pebbles at ‘em and got stared at by their mothers in return, and every time I’d wished their fathers had done the same thing too, deep down, I’d always feared it.
I was always the bright li’l kid; the intellectually gifted one. Like this one time when the society had arranged a magic show for the annual event. I’d been away for a week to Granny’s and was returning home that day. Dad had a grin on his face when I came back. (I later on learned that he’d had that grin the whole week.)
‘Come on son. I’ll take you to a magic show tonight!’
‘A magic show?! Wohow! Will there be huge ice-cream tubs and chocolate waterfalls and genies?’
‘Uh... No son. They’re only in the movies.’
‘But they’re genies! They can come outta the movies whenever they want to!’
‘No. They can do that only when the director says so.’
‘Screw him! Who’s he?’ I said with a long face.
‘Where do you learn to say all that?! Is that how I’ve raised you? When I was your age, I used to pee in my pants when my father walked by…’
Now I don’t know whether it was me, or all the nostalgia, but the grin was no longer on Dad’s face.
Dad was back to normal again!
Later that evening, as I tugged at Dad’s shirt for the umpteenth time to ask him when the show was gonna start, I realised from my prodigal ability to process multiple signals of body language that if I pulled at his shirt one more time, the man was gonna rip it all off and sport an Einstein hair-do.
And as it finally began, I huffed, I puffed and made faces at a man on stage who was dressed for Halloween, trying to pull out flowers and handkerchiefs from his sleeves. Bah!
And then, he did it! The unthinkable! The unquestionable! The indubitable! I watched in awe as he pulled out three rabbits in a row out of a hat and turned it over to show it was empty! I instantly turned to look at Dad. Dad’s smile faded as he saw the big question mark on my face.
‘Dad?’
‘What?’, he grunted.
‘When magicians pull out rabbits from their hat, where does all the poop go?’
With that scientifically unanswered question, ended the first and the last magic show my Dad took me to.
I was twenty years old when I first met her. No, it wasn’t at college. Or at a wedding! Or a club! (Bah! As though I could afford to go to a club anyway!)
Mom had gotten promoted and was transferred to another city so I was forced to come to terms with Dad. Since part of my daily routine was to bunk college, I was to do the cooking on weekdays. And since weekends were the only days Dad got time to relax, I was supposed to the cooking on weekends. Now I shouldn’t sound like I’m complaining here, so I must tell you that Dad boiled the milk.
So as I woke up one fine morning to see my father packin’ his mid-day meal for work and givin’ me the silent treatment, I had a debate with myself that the possible cause of this awkward bliss might be the Algebraic expressions operating amongst Coulomb’s law and the third law of Thermodynamics, in turn affecting Newton’s laws of motion causing a subsequent change in the Doppler’s effect!
The odds against my scientifically established theory were that the man had heard me sneak into the house late last night.
He made sure that I learnt one more way of ‘how-not-to-devise-a-theory’ that day. I had been ordered to pay the electricity bill as it was the last date for payment. I had blown away all the money on ‘don’t ask what’ and as I had finally found a friend who had agreed to lend me money (Yes, that’s what I call people who lend me money), my motorcycle coughed outta gas. As a guy with the golden luck would have it, it started to pour down like the Niagara had Viagra (I promise I won’t try to write poems), and half an hour of protesting against the showers, I was at the petrol-station.
I was almost run over by a smart-derrière auto-rickshaw when I first saw her. She wasn’t like the other delicate darlings I saw there. She was like… Maggi Tomato Ketchup; you know, it’s different!
I conducted a symphony of my own. There were bells ringin’ in my head! And violas and trumpets and saxophones and… and car-horns?! Whaddaya know! The people behind me were playin’ along too! I wonder why they had that pissed look on their face though.
That’s when it happened. She looked at me, and then she smiled!
It was magical.
I was smooth as satin, cool as a refrigerator, suave as an eagle! In fact, I was the James Bond of suaveness! (Yes, I stood there and scratched my head.)
‘Pump it or move it.’ (This was the petrol guy.)
‘Wha..?’, I scratched my head again.
‘I said, pump it or move it!’
Never had I thought I’d hear such words of wisdom from the gas-guy. I muttered a thanks, set my bike aside, and walked towards her.
Did you ever have that sinking feeling in your stomach? (No, not the kind when you eat a stolen lunch-box sittin’ in the front row of physics class. It’s the kind o’ feelin’ when you’re about to make a pathetic speech at the morning assembly and you don’t even remember it. And standing there you’re wonderin’ which is worse: recallin’ that pathetic speech and gettin’ screwed by the other kids in return? Or gettin’ screwed by the other kids for gapin’ at the mic like it was gonna start talkin’ all by itself?)
Well I pretty much had the same feeling, except my stomach felt like Pearl Harbour. And by the time I realised this, I was already standing in front o’ her. I didn’t even have a freakin’ speech to recall!
So I just said hi. She gave me a blank look. (Normally when you’re a stranger and you say hi to an Indian girl, she either burns you down with her stare and make you wish you never walked up to her in the first place, or, give you a ‘WTF-why-are-you-even-talking-to-me-you-pathetic-lonely-creepy-stalker’ look. That applies even if you don’t fall under the ‘pathetic, lonely, creepy, stalker’ category. That’s just the way Indian women are built. You could just be saying hi to the girl you know, standing behind our women and you’ll still get one o’ the above. In my case, I get stares even from the woman standing behind.)
‘What’s your name?’ I asked. (What’s your NAME? Smooth move, Casanova. Why don’t you ask her which grade she’s in while you’re at it?)
‘Cinderella.’, she said without even lookin’ at me now. (See this is another thing Indian women do. They give you all the right signals, but they blow you off when you approach and brag about the same to their friends. They’re satisfied just by knowing the fact that they attract men! No wonder God made Indian men sizably-challenged in the condoms department; their women’re satisfied before they even buy it!)
Clearly she wasn’t interested anymore than that so I started to turn away.
‘What about you?’, she popped a question from behind.
‘What about me?’, I grumped.
‘What’s your name, silly?’
‘Rumpelstiltskin.’, I said.
‘Good to meet you Rump.’, she smiled. ‘And now that the small talk is over and that I’m about to leave, what’re you gonna do?’
Good question. What was I gonna do?
‘Uhh... look for your glass shoe?’ (Way to go Prince Charming The XIII! And then what? Spin it into gold?)
‘Well, good luck with that.’, and she turned to walk away.
I watched her glide towards her scooter. Damn, she had that poised walk! Too bad my magic show had to end before it even began.
She got on her scooter, and drove... only to stop right in front o’ me!
‘Put out your hand.’, she ordered.
‘What? Why?’
‘Come on! You ask too many questions!’, and she reached for my hand, pulled out my wrist and wrote something.
‘There. Call me when you’ve found my glass slipper.’ She’d written her number down! I felt like the manliest guy on the planet! (Before you think I’m over-reacting, here’s the thing about Indian women and their cell-phones. They’re more secure than Guantanamo Bay. Only they can decide who goes in and out of their cell-phone. See, asking an Indian girl for her number is like askin’ a girl to move in with you on your first date: a) you’ll freak her out, and b) you’re never gonna see her again. I must mention here that asking a girl to move in with you on your first date gets you a free membership to the ‘Pathetic, lonely, creepy, stalker’ club. Now, if our girls don’t wanna talk to you, they’ll accidentally delete your number. Yes, they’ll accidentally hit the ‘Contacts’ menu, accidentally select your name, accidentally hit the ‘delete’ button and accidentally hit ‘yes’ when the phone prompts to delete it or not. Oh and they don’t answer calls from unknown numbers so don’t get all dramatic if they don’t pick up your calls.)
‘Say hi to your cruel stepmother for me!’, I yelled as she drove off.
I called her the next day.
‘Found it already?’, were her first words.
‘What? No ‘hello’?’, I asked. ‘How’d you know it was me?’
‘Who else could it be at 8 in the morning?’
‘Oh. What time do you get up?’
‘As of today. 8!’
When I got off the phone, it was 11; which was a bit out of the ordinary, because my calls never exceed 19 seconds. 31 seconds at the max if it was anything serious. I had no idea what I had spoken to her all this while, but it felt great! The time I spent on the phone gradually increased until it became a routine. We were cuttin’ down on our sleep to stay on the phone. She said things I’d never heard before and she made me say things I never thought I could say before. As for Dad, he was always smellin’ somethin’ around me, ‘cause I sounded happy all the time. Mom must’ve suggested that I could be under the influence of the holy ‘spirit’.
On her birthday, I bought a Cinderella Barbie, and gifted her the glass shoes she’d been nagging about ever since we’d met. (Just the shoes guys, not the doll. Stop lookin’ at me like that.) She felt the shoes were a couple o’ sizes too huge but she said she could manage with whatever little I could provide. Life was a hell of a ride when I was with her.
She’d make a big hue & cry and all along she’d make me sigh. She laughed & hugged and got me high. She’d wake me up to say goodnight and end up tellin’ me to get out of her sight. I’d make her wait an hour ahead, just to see her nose get red. She could kill me without a knife and always bring me back to life. She’d get stoned on a bottle of beer and she won’t even let me near. She’d bite me, she’d fight me and challenged that she’d right me. She talked me out of me sometimes and slammed the door on me sometimes. She found herself lost in me sometimes and kicked the shit out of me sometimes. She’d mother me sometimes, brother me sometimes, and when she was done she’d colour me sometimes. She was fun, she was a pain, and I loved it when she ran her fingers through my mane. She talked and never stopped; she got me into trouble and stood & watched. She said a thousand words with her eyes. She struck, she amazed, she knit, she gazed, she smiled, she cried, she winked and she lied, she pinched, she gnawed, she sneaked, she cooked, she hugged, she missed and of course she kissed, she leapt, she slept, she wept... and then she left.
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