The Last Call

She looked around. The place was beautiful. She was at a hill station in North India. On one side of her were a lot of tall cliffs and on the other was a forest of tall pine trees. It looked like the view of a European hill station from the 90's Bollywood flicks. Even though it was summer and the middle of the day the weather was still cool and pleasant.

She had come here with her husband for a week’s holiday. They needed the break after the hectic two weeks they had just had at work. It was the March year end rush at office and they had slogged and burned the midnight oil to complete their targets. After the workload had subsided they took a week off to come and relax at the hill station which was famous for its breathtaking views and its adventure sports. Her husband and she worked at the same office and that is how they met. It was not love at first sight or anything; they got to know each other; she found out that he is a level headed, hardworking and ambitious person. Slowly they started liking each other and they ended up marrying in a beautiful ceremony. There was a lot of love between them at the starting but the romance had slowly died out. He was too much involved in his work, even now at the hill station he was constantly on his phone talking to work. He was a good husband, he took care of her well, but they didn't really have any common interests, he didn't challenge her on an intellectual level. This trip was sort of a rekindle the romance trip also. Fat chance of that happening with him being on the phone all the time, she thought. They haven’t had had a conversation of more than 2 sentences that day.

She got a call on her phone. She was expecting this call and for the first time in the day, she smiled. To be honest she was expecting this call much earlier in the day and she was pissed at the caller for calling so late. She still answered the call with a smile on her face.

“Hey, Look to the top of the cliffs” said the caller

She did and he continued “Do you see a man standing at the top of the cliffs north east from you?” She said she did. 

“Well that is me and I am going to jump” The caller cut the call

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He was standing on top of the cliff. He had wanted to do this for a long time, and it was would be poetic and anti climatic for him to do it in front of the woman he loved the most, and the one who has broken his heart in an irreparable way. She was always afraid that he would do something like this.

As he stood on top of the cliff, he started reminiscing about his time with her, one of the happiest years of his life. He remembered the first time she met her; he had fallen for her beauty at that very moment and their first conversation after which he thought she was an arrogant bitch and she thought he was a pretentious, stuck-up nerd; oh man! How wrong were those first impressions? He remembered the first time she took his hand in hers and asked will you always be there for me, all the time they spent talking about technology and other stuff, all the time she listened to his lame jokes, he remembered their first date, the flowers he had got her for it, the numerous outings and all the fun times they had. He remembered all the fights and the small break ups that they had, he remembered their final breakup when she said he was too egoistic and angry for them to have any real future. Well, she did find a person who is not egoistic and can control his emotions; he hoped that she was really happy with this guy, because she deserved all the happiness in the world. He remembered how he had cried in front of her begging for her to take him back. But most of all he remembered the love they had for each other, a love which he still possessed for her.   

  He had paid good money to a photographer with a telephoto lens to take a picture of him before he jumped and give it to her. He could see the photographer as well as her standing at the bottom of the cliff. Even the photographer didn’t know what he was going to do after the photo was taken, but he had made sure that irrespective of what happens the photographer will hand over the photo to her.

The time had come. He saw the photographer focusing his camera and taking his picture and then walking away to get it printed on his handheld printer. He took his phone and dialed her number; he still knew it by heart. He asked her to look up at the cliff at him and cut the call. He was ready to jump, everyone told this was the scariest part of all and what came after that was easy. But he felt no fear whatsoever, he was feeling unexpectedly calm, maybe it was the feeling of surprising her again as he always did. He took a deep breath and he jumped.

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She was shocked and had lost all the ability to think. As she was looking up at him jumping she was approached by a guy who handed her a photo. It was a photo of him just before jumping; he was smiling ear to ear and was holding a placard which said Happy Birthday. He hadn't forgotten it was her birthday after all, even though her husband had.

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As he got nearer to the bottom of the cliff he could see her face and see that she had gotten the photo. As the bungee cord became taut and his jump came to a stop he couldn't help grinning at the look of surprise on her face.       

The Last Chapter

A blast from a fishing boat’s horn woke him up. Sunlight was streaming in through the window. He looked to his left; there she was; sleeping peacefully looking as beautiful as ever. Sometimes he still couldn’t believe that he ended up with such an incredible girl. It has been 5 years since their relationship started, it had taken a lot of courage from the both of them to bring it this far. They had come a long way from the highly emotionally scarred couple they were in the starting, together they had successfully climbed the mountain of insecurities that they both had.

Life had been good to them. Both were working in Bangalore in good jobs and they lived together in a beautiful apartment overlooking a park. A year back they had bought the place they were in now, a one room house on a cliff overlooking the sea in a secluded beach 5 hours drive from Bangalore. The other end of the beach had a small fishing community staying there who were really friendly and welcoming and the place came quite cheap. I was just a small room with a bed, table, couple of chairs, a kitchen counter and sink and a bathroom but the view was amazing. About a 10 minutes’ walk down the cliff was the Arabian Sea in all its glory. They came down here often on weekends and other holidays; currently they were here for a 3 day weekend. Today was the last day of the weekend, they would return back to Bangalore the next morning.

He was awakened from his lazy half sleep by a wet slobbering at his feet. It was Dexter, their Labrador pet dog. When people asked why the dog was named Dexter they would say because Dexter’s lab. It was just one the many jokes they laughed together loudly when they said it irrespective of it being the thousandth time. Sensing that he had woken up, Dexter wanted to go down to the beach and play. He loved playing football on the beach and chasing the waves. He was dead afraid of crabs but, one sight of them and he would run away with his tail behind his legs. He dropped a ping on her phone telling he was going down to the beach, picked up the football and ran down to the beach with Dexter in hot pursuit.

 They played on the beach for almost an hour. They also met Laxmi, a fisherman’s wife who provided them with good home cooked food. She informed them that everything was ready for the night. He was planning a big surprise for his beautiful lady that night, after years of writing he had finally completed his first novel. It was a crime thriller set in Bangalore featuring two cops from the Bangalore crime branch, Raju and Radha. A romantic relationship between Raju and Radha is a subplot of the novel. She always criticized him for writing a ready for Bollywood novel rather than something with good substance. But he knew that to get a book published from a respective publishing house he needed to have some mass appeal and indeed it had worked out; Rupa had agreed to publish the book and a sample first draft of the book was with him now. He was going to present it to her during dinner. She had already read the entire book except the ending and the last chapter. He had been working on the last chapter for almost 4 months and finally about 3 weeks back he got a really good idea and he completed the novel.

He came back to the house; she had woken up and was already taking a bath. They had plans to visit an old rundown fort some 50 kilometers away. They both got ready and armed with directions from the fishermen set off for the fort. They stopped to have breakfast from their regular hotel on the way, a small little shop which served hot tasty idli, dosa, vada, sambhar and chutneys. They also got some idlis packed for lunch. 

They reached the fort an hour and half later with him inevitably getting lost twice on the way. The fort was beautiful; it was made of red sand stone and the green moss covered a lot of it. It was overlooking the sea and you could see the fishing boats coming back with the day’s catch from the fort. They found a nice spot in the shade and settled down there. They sat there enjoying the nature, the peace, the quiet; talking for hours. His misgivings that she might not find him funny one day proved wrong, she still laughed at the silliest of his jokes and still called a lot of them lame. Her passion for technology still fascinated him. They could talk for hours about it. The sun setting was a beautiful sight from the fort. They went down to the beach and took a long walk along it as the day cooled off.

The journey back to the house was much shorter as he didn’t lose the way again. They stopped at their hotel for hot chai and snacks. After reaching back at the house they packed their luggage and cleaned the house as they had to leave early morning the next day. He told her that he had told Laxmi to make dinner. They will go to Laxmi’s home and eat and will sleep early so that they can wake up early and set off for Bangalore. They started walking along beach at around 7.30 to go to Laxmi’s house. Dexter was running up and down excitedly along with them.

Just before reaching Laxmi’s house was an abandoned boat which was kept on the shore inside which he had asked Laxmi to set up the dinner and she had outdone herself.  The boat was lighted by a series of oil lanterns kept on it. Two small chairs were waiting for them in the middle of the boat. Dinner was set already in the middle of the boat. The moon was shining the perfect amount, not too bright and not too dim.

“I have a surprise for you tonight babe.” He told her

She looked so happy and surprised to see the dinner setting. She said it is really romantic and they sat down to eat. Dinner was delicious; rice, prawns curry, fish fry and semiya kheer. After dinner he presented her with the first copy of his book.

“I finally finished it.” He said

The excitement on her face on the seeing the book had no bounds to it.

“I like the cover page design and it is much thicker than I thought it would be.” She said checking out the book

“Oh, that is because they bound it along with some blank pages because I was rushing them for a copy before we came on this trip. There are like 50 blank pages in the end. Go on, read the last chapter.” He replied

She started reading the last chapter out aloud; you could see her expression changing as she read it. She came to the final line of the book; Raju and Radha are sitting in their favorite restaurant after solving the case, Raju presents Radha with a ring and asks “Will you marry me?”

She turned the page, there, embedded in the pages was a ring; she looked confused for a moment and then looked at him. He asked “Well, will you?”’

Incomplete

My thoughts started drifting as I sat in the back seat of the taxi that was taking me from the airport to my village, my hometown, the place I was born in and spent my childhood in. I am almost 35 now, working in a large MNC far away from my village. It had been a long time since I visited my village; my last time was almost 5 years ago. A lot had changed during this time. I knew 5 years was not such a long time but I couldn’t recognize the way to the first place I called home; everything was different. I couldn’t see any of the familiar landmarks that marked my route to home. The route used to be covered with lush greenery that was synonymous with Kerala, a river or a backwater would make itself visible every now and then, and even though you couldn’t see the sea, there was always something about the air, about the thin film of sweat on your body caused by the humidity that made you sense that the waves were not far away. I was sitting in the back of the taxi with my window rolled down but I couldn’t feel any of these; the green cover was gone, it had been replaced by concrete buildings. The backwaters were no longer beautiful, they were polluted and the water was black. I asked the driver to stop at the next junction; there was a small hotel called Pai hotel there which served the best dosas. I got down and went to where the restaurant was, only to see that the place has been converted into a CCD. This wasn’t turning out to be the trip of revisiting my childhood that I hoped it would be. I got a large cappuccino from the CCD and got back in the car. 

      

 The drive was not very long, just over an hour, but memories of the entire seven years I spent in the village, the first seven years of my life, started playing through my mind. My house in the village was old and big, it would be more than 70 years old now. It was painted white and had brown tiles for the roof, which were typical of the Kerala houses of that era. It was situated in the midst of paddy fields and lush coconut groves. There was a cattle shed in front of our house which housed more than 10 cows when I was a kid.  There were 10 ponds situated in the coconut grooves that provided irrigation to the numerous coconut, cashew, mango, jack fruit and other trees that were situated in the compound. Small streams of water marked the boundaries of the land. The streams were quite narrow, even I could jump across them with my small legs but it was deep enough to submerge even a grown man. These streams connected all the paddy fields and the ponds and ensured their proper irrigation. There were no concrete boundary walls, weaved coconut leaves connected together formed an eco-friendly and recyclable boundary wall. Out of the 10 ponds one was used for bathing and another for domestic purposes like washing dishes, the other eight were for irrigation. It was in one of the ponds that I learned how to swim; dad would just take me to the pond with him and throw me in the water. I taught myself how to swim while my dad stood nearby keeping a watchful eye on me. Every morning started with a run and dip in that pond, however cold it was.  The cashew trees were easy to climb, even for the small kid that I was. With some leg ups from the children of the neighboring homes whom I played with, I would climb the cashew trees and pluck the fruit for everyone, mangoes were also plenty, guavas and other fruits and berries kept the stomachs of me and my friends full while we were kids. The kids in my neighborhood were mostly the children of people who worked in the paddy fields and coir factories that were abundant in my village. I was the like the leader of that gang, it had nothing to do with my abilities though, it was just because I was from one of the higher caste families. My family even owned a temple, we still do; only that it is run by a group of the villagers now. I used to run around the temple when I was a kid and light all the lamps and sing the hymns along with my aunts albeit well out of tune. The gods in that temple are the only ones I still pray to. I was a spoilt kid, I got everything thing I wanted, I only had to say that I needed coconut water and someone would climb a tree and get one, cut it and give it me, people ran around to fulfill my wishes. 

A loud screech of the breaks of my taxi and a shower of abuse from the driver to a biker who had jumped from the left side without looking bought me back to the present. This is one thing that hasn’t changed, people jumping from the left side of the road without looking, it used to be cycles earlier, now these people seem to have graduated into motorbikes.

I slipped back into my flashback as the car started moving again. The story of my childhood will never be complete without her. It has been so long that I have even forgotten her name, but I still haven’t forgotten her cute round face, her naughty smile, her sparkling eyes and the way in which she called my pet name. It has been so long since anyone called me by that name. I saw her first while she was standing in the queue outside my home’s kitchen waiting for the milk. Only the upper caste families had cows in their homes at that time, there were only two households including mine in that area that sold milk and others houses bought it from us. I would have been around six at that time, I was standing alongside my grandmother who was distributing the milk to everyone, and there I saw her, almost the same age as me, wearing a red skirt and a blouse, looking nervous and tagging behind a lady who looked like her mother. Later I asked grandma who the family was; she told it was the sister of the “lower caste” people who lived across the paddy fields. The lady’s husband had passed away so she along with her daughter had moved back to her brother’s house. My grandmother also told me I should keep away from the mother but I can play with the daughter if I wanted to. Grandma was like that, a little weird. I never fully understood why she said the things she said. She loved me, adored me and gave in to all my whims and fancies. Ever since grandpa passed away almost a year ago, she seemed to live just for me. I don’t really remember grandpa, he was bed ridden from the time I can remember; people told me he was a very powerful police constable in his youth and a lot of people were scared of him. To me he would just always be a person who was so weak that he even had to pee in a weird looking white flask which I realized later was a bedpan.

That evening while I was playing with the kids from the neighboring houses, I enquired about the girl and asked the kids to bring her also to play. Minutes hadn’t passed and she was present there, that is how all my wishes were carried out over here, it took only minutes for me to get anything I wanted, I was the undisputed prince of the area. After some initial shyness and silence she started playing with us, she was a very talkative and playful girl and gelled in with our group very fast. As darkness started falling we stopped paying, I was angry with her, we were playing hide and seek and she had just betrayed me to the seeker. I looked at her with anger; like every spoilt child my rage was really infamous. Every one there started cowering and moving away while she just looked at me, gave her naughty smile and called me by my pet name. All my anger evaporated in a second, I told her to come the next day also to play and we said our goodbyes for the day.

We became close friends over the next one month; you couldn't see me outside my home without her tagging along with me. She talked a lot, kept asking a lot of questions, most of which I didn’t have any answers to. We sat on the edge of the pond, on top of cashew tress, near the paddy fields and kept on talking. It was mostly her talking and me listening, she had something to say about almost everything in the world, why the sun was so bright, why plants grew, why the water flowed; she talked about anything and everything. I started treating her like a princess, she got the biggest fruit when we plucked them, when we were breaking badams she got the most perfect one, when we were doing the annual cleaning of our ponds she went home with the biggest fish that was caught. My parents also noticed the way I was treating her, not only did they say anything about it, they played along as well. When a new flower blossomed in our garden, my parents teased me if I am not giving it to her; perhaps they didn't view it as anything other than the innocence which could be present in a relationship between two 6 year olds. Even my grandma who usually didn't allow people from lower castes to enter our home didn't seem to mind her, she allowed us to sit in the veranda of our home and play. One year passed, my parents decided to shift to a city about 4 hours away from my village. I didn't really know how to feel , I was sad to leave my friends, sad to leave her and sad to leave all the space I had to run around and move to a small house in a congested city, but I didn't have any say in it, my parents had decided to move and I had to. During the last weeks of my stay in the village I hung out and talked less and less with my friends and her. On the day I was leaving I didn't even go and say goodbye to her, all my friends had come to say goodbye but she didn’t come. As the car pulled away leaving my childhood memories behind I kept looking out of the window to see if she came but she didn’t. I reached my new home and for the first few days I thought about her and I missed her, but in the excitement of the new school and new friends I soon forgot all about her and my other friends from the village.

I went back to village after almost 6 months, this time for my grandma’s funeral. I saw her nowhere around when I was standing around watching the ceremony of my grandmother’s body being wrapped in a white cloth with a very peculiar feeling in my mind which at that point I couldn’t fathom. I asked around only to find out that she had moved back to her father’s house with her mother. I felt sad; I had wanted to see her again. I didn’t know what is the felling that I had for her, I don’t think it was love, I don’t think I was big enough to comprehend or feel love at that age. After completing the last rites for grandma we locked up the house, as there was no one left there now, and left for the city. I haven’t seen her since.

I woke up to the calls of “sir, sir” from the taxi driver. He told me we had reached our destination. I had dozed off slightly. I got out of the car to the place I had been thinking about all this while but it was barely recognizable.  The house was no longer white, it had become black from the water dripping from the roof, vines and termite mounds had grown from the bottom. The garden was overgrown with grass and bushes which reached almost to my height. I waded through the grass and reached the house, and sat on the veranda for some time. I didn't feel like opening the house and going inside. After some time I started walking around the compound, the cashew and jackfruit trees were long gone, the coconut tress looked like they would never again bear nuts. Nobody did any farming in the paddy fields anymore; all the ponds had become almost dry due to negligence and what little water was left was dirty and stagnant as there was no longer any water circulation because the farming had stopped. I stood at the side of the pond in which I had learned swimming, this too had dried up. Right next to the pond I saw the reason of this visit to my village after the long gap. Some neighbors had encroached into my property and built a boundary wall over there. In order to end the property dispute and to keep them back I had to get a certificate from the village officer saying it was my land. The village officer was creating problems for me. I had tried to get the issued resolved through a relative of mine who still lived near the village, but the he was not budging, he wanted the owner of the land, which is me, to personally come and talk to him. I even asked my relative to offer him some bribe but the officer didn't accept it. He seemed adamant on wanting to see me. I was getting really frustrated with it, so I talked to the collector of the district who was an old friend of mine from engineering college. He talked to the officer and resolved the issue, but I still had to go down to Kerala and sign some papers.

I entered the village office and to my surprise I found that the village officer was a woman. Now that I think about it no one told me that it was a man, the sexist in me just assumed that only a man could be this adamant. I entered the cabin only to find the same familiar eyes and cute face smiling at me. Her eyes hadn't lost any of the sparkle and she still had that naughty smile. She called me by my pet name and asked me how I have been. After some catching up we got down to business, she handed me some papers and said that the only thing I had to do was sign them. I went through the papers only to find that they were half completed.

“You have left these incomplete!” I said.

She replied “Well, so did you when we were seven, Mr. Nair”           

P.S: This short story is inspired by the short stories of Ruskin Bond. I have always been a fan of the way he writes about hill stations and rural India. After a long time I read some of his short stories again and got the idea for this story. 

  

P.P.S : The photo is not my actual home, it's something I found on the internet although it looks a lot similar.           

Thou Shall Not Crucify Sreeshanth

More than a year has passed since Sreeshanth has been arrested for alleged spot fixing during IPL matches. During this one year he has been shamed, ridiculed and been the object of many a meme and cartoons. I am fed up with all this; it is finally time for all of you to know the truth. We mallus have known this truth all along but we didn't want to tell it to the people of other states who don’t have 100% literacy yet. I have finally decided enough is enough and have decided to exonerate Sreeshanth.  

I am not saying Sreeshanth didn't do spot fixing, he indeed did it. But it was not for his selfish greed as you all have thought, what he did was sacrifice himself for a lot of other people so that us Indians could have a better future. Confused? Don’t be, I will explain in detail.

Sreeshanth has always been a very self-less person. Even when he was in school he used to give up batting first even though he owned the bat and would choose to bowl instead. This is how he got into bowling. Sreeshanth was a pacey leg spinner when he started playing, but he shifted to fast bowling because he didn't want to break all the records of Anil Kumble. Fast bowling was not an issue because the only records Indian fast bowlers held were for the most runs conceded and for the best mustaches. Even after he came into the Indian cricket team he continued sacrificing, when the Indian team played badly he played worse so that the entire team would not come under focus but just him. When India were getting killed in South Africa he did that dance after hitting a six of Andre Nel just to shift the focus to him and save the others from blame. What you guys didn’t know is that it is a step from the Kathakali show Keechakavadam which is done by Bhima after killing Keechaka and is used to suck all the energy away from your enemies. And whenever it came to world cups he made sure that he didn't ruin India’s chances by playing really badly in the starting itself and hence getting out of the team and coming back for the final to take that all important catch. I really don’t understand why you guys still don’t have a life size statue of him made out of gold outside the BCCI headquarters.

Now coming to the spot fixing scandal,  Sreeshanth only did it because he wanted to save a lot of things in this world that were on the verge of going out altogether like IPL, Rajasthan Royals, Blackberry, towels, Tihar jail and Carter road. I will explain each one in detail.

Let us be honest, the IPL was not interesting any more, everyone had got bored of it and no one was watching it anymore. Moreover with the addition of Danny Morrison the viewership had reached the same level as Kim Kardashian’s IQ. The future of the series was doomed, but Sree would have none of it, he stepped in and put the masala which was badly missing, back into the IPL. Everyone started watching IPL again to see if the players were raising their towels more than what is needed or if they were wearing red underwear and things like that. Sreeshanth saved the IPL from extinction.

The Rajasthan Royals, both the team and the family were being forgotten by everyone. The team had won nothing since winning the first IPL and the last time the Royal family won anything was in the 12th century or something. The royal family had reduced to people who put up the pic of the Udaipur lake palace on Facebook with the caption ‘Mah grandpa used to live here’. Sreeshanth made sure that the team became famous again and also by marrying someone from the royal family made sure that they came back to prominence again.

Now coming to Blackberry, we all know that the Canadian Smartphone maker which was undoubtedly the world leader once was running on fumes, and then comes along Sreeshanth who uses the phone for talking with his bookies and it was because the police couldn’t intercept these conversations and messages that the arrest got delayed. After this news the sales of Blackberry have shot up like anything in rural Pakistan, Afghanistan and near the parliament in Delhi. This shows that Sreeshanth is not just self-less on a national level but on an international level too.

Towels are those sweat stained pocket dwellers which were going out of fashion. With new AC offices and cleaner armpits thanks to Anushka Sharma, people were not sweating as much as they used to. So the usage and sales of towels were coming down. The fact also that Rafael Nadal keeps wiping his face after every single point with a towel also lead to the towel losing its dignity when it came to sports. Sree with his innovative method of using a towel to signal that he is going to throw an over brought back the glory years of the towel hence saving the towel industry and the millions dependent on it.

Tihar jail was also down in the dumps after all the infamy it had been getting due to the hundreds of politicians getting jailed there. Tihar had been trying to sign a good brand ambassador for a long time. They were waiting for Salman Khan to come but the wait seemed to be never ending and they finally decided to approach Sreeshanth to help save the face of Tihar. They decided on this after seeing Sreeshanth’s dance after thumping Nel for a six which is also the perfect technique to knead the dough used in the making of the famous Tihar chapattis. Sreeshanth readily agreed to this proposal as it would help regain the image of one of India’s most important national monuments.

Sreeshanth was arrested on Carter Road. This was very good for Carter road as the road was getting a lot of bad press because of all the South Mumbai people coming up to the suburbs to partaaay and saying stuff like “Oh you live in Navi Mumbai? I never come there as my passport expired”. Carter road required a new lease of life and needed to show that high rollers still came there and Sree did just that.

All these will not come even close to the biggest sacrifice he did, which is give hope to billions of people out there. Sreeshanth was paid 60 lacs to bowl badly. That is like paying a fish to swim or Rahul Gandhi to be stupid or Arnab Goswami to be loud. He showed to all of us out there who think that we are not good at anything that the only thing we need to do is to leverage it properly and we can make money out of it.

I hope from all this you have understood the innocence of Sreeshanth. He is not a dancing idiot but actually an inspiration to billions. I end this post with a humble request to the new government to declare May 16th, the day Sreeshanth got arrested for spot fixing, as national sacrifice day.

Losing my …

One day, about couple of months back, I had come back to my hostel room from my college after a day of classes. My phone was out of charge, so I looked in my bag for my phone charger as I had taken it to college with me. It was not there in my bag, I was using it in college and I thought I had forgotten it there. So I called up a friend, who was sitting next to me in campus and who was still sitting there and asked her to check if my charger is there. She said it wasn’t. So I checked for it again in my room only to find it plugged in my multi-plug. Apparently, I had already taken the charger out, put it in the multi-plug and was searching for it in my bag again. This kind of thing happens to me all the time. Half my life is spent searching for something because I cannot remember where I kept it. I lose a lot of things and I also lose my way very often. This blog post is about some incidents that happened in both these areas.

I was going to write this post much before, but I lost the paper in which I had written down the title and points for it, twice.

I lose so many things that when I play the “Which song best describes you?” game on Facebook I get "pichle saath dinom me maine khoya". I sometimes even manage to lose things in a manner that even my mom can’t find them. 

Keys are number one in the list of things I lose. My losing keys habit can single handedly sustain the steel industry in India. I lost my hostel keys so many times that my roommates stopped giving me a key, so I ended up losing the lock. My first week in MBA college I lost my room keys, I searched for it only to get it back it from the bag of a friend who lived in the opposite room to me. I lost the key again couple of weeks after, by this time my friend who had the key earlier had moved to some other college. Nevertheless I still called him up to make sure that he didn’t have my keys. I haven’t found the keys since. Once during a trip with my friends, we managed to lose the horn in our rented car. It didn’t just stop working, we lost it. The horn was working fine one moment and suddenly there was no sound, we thought there was some problem with the horn and took it to a mechanic only for him to tell us that there was no horn in the car. I once managed to lose a SIM card from inside my phone. I lost my customized sweatshirt which has my name on it, twice. Luckily both times it came back to me as it has my name on it. I once lost every proof that I had a bank account including the passbook, the ATM card and all relevant receipts. I lost an assignment once, searched for it for two days and couldn’t find it. I went to the faculty to tell him that I had lost my assignment and that I need more time to redo it only for him to tell me that I had already submitted the assignment.

If I just kept writing about the stuff I lost it would never end so I will now switch to the instances when I lost my way. 

1. There is a drive-in beach in Kerala called Muzhupilangad. A drive-in beach is one where you can ride a bike or drive a car right on the beach. If you are ever in Kannur in Kerala, this beach is a must visit. Take a car or bike (Preferably not your own as the beach stinks up your vehicle) and then have awesome fun driving up and down the beach. If it is low tide you can even drive to an island in an SUV. My friends and I were once on the beach in two bikes and a car. It was almost 7 in the evening and the vehicles were parked on one end of the beach, me and my friend Roshan took one of the bikes and went riding up the beach, when we came back we couldn’t find the car, we searched the entire beach two three time and still couldn’t find the car. We didn’t have our phones on us so we took a phone from a stranger and called one of our friends only for them to tell us that they hadn’t budged from where they were. And indeed when we went back to the same spot they were there. To this day Roshan and I believe that they lied and that they had actually moved away from there. 

      

      2. Like Batman has The Joker, Superman has Lex Luthor, Spiderman has green goblin and Rahul Gandhi has, well himself, mine is the Pune- Bangalore Highway. You would think it is hard for a person to get lost on a straight road but I have managed it, thrice. The problem with this road is that it doesn’t really have proper exits, so I always get lost trying to find one. The road is quite near my college and this is where you get buses to go to Mumbai, so I go there quite often to drop and pick my friends who go to and come back from Mumbai. Once while coming back after dropping a friend I didn’t want to take the right turn back from where I came from as it was not allowed. As a good citizen and somebody who follows traffic rules I didn’t take the right but instead went to the left to take a U-turn. Turns out there wasn’t one, so I kept going forward to find a U-Turn. I would have gone ahead some 4 kilometers and still hadn’t found one, I finally ended up turning around the bike around at a break in the divider breaking about 5 traffic rules in one go. Since then I always took the first right turn back, better break 1 traffic rule than 5.

Not even a week later I found myself lost on the same highway again, this time in a car with some friends. We had set off towards a dam which was on an inner road nowhere near the highway. But somehow we ended up lost on the Bangalore-Pune highway again. At least this time it was not my fault.

The third time was on the eve of my birthday. My friend was coming back from Mumbai and he wanted to attend my midnight birthday celebrations. It was just an hour before my birthday and I was waiting to pick him from the bus stop. He calls me up at around 11.30 and says that he has got down about 5 kilometers before the bus stop as there is some problem with the bus. I asked him to start walking from there and that I will come on the bike and pick him up. I picked him up on the highway and then got on to the service road so as to go to the other side through an underpass below the highway. After going for about 100 meters the service road stopped abruptly with a 5 feet drop. The road had ended. I had to turn my bike and do some risky off-road riding to get back on the road. It was well past 12 now and my phone was constantly ringing from all the friends waiting to celebrate my birthday and not finding where I am. I finally reached back to college at about 12.30. My birthday bumps where a little harder than normal that day.

3. Another time I was going to a college in Lavale, some 20 kilometers away to pick up a friend. The straightforward route was through the Pune-Bangalore highway and there was an alternate route through some inner roads which was about 5 kilometers shorter. Because of my history with the highway and the distance saved I decided to take the latter one. I had gone only once previously on this route about 6 moths back and I didn’t really remember it exactly. So I called up a friend of mine who was with me when we went on this route 6 months back and she told me the route. One of the turns was at a junction where there was a huge sign indicating that Lavale was to the right. I was not supposed to go right here but go straight to get to the college I wanted to go. She reminded me this particularly as we had made that mistake the last time and ended up being lost. But indeed at that junction I ended up going right and getting lost again. 

4. This was the night after my CAT exam in 2012. My centre was in Kochi and I was hanging out with my friend Roshan and it was about 2 in the night. We were both really happy as we thought the exam had gone really well (Roshan made it to IIMB so I guess his actually went well). I suddenly got the urge to go to my ancestral home which was about an hour’s drive from where we were. It was in a proper village and no one lived at that home anymore. So we took off in Roshan’s car towards my ancestral place. Now about this home there is a plot of land that belongs to someone else next to the road and beyond that is my ancestral home. You have walk through this plot of land to get to my place and there are no fences or boundary walls or anything. But when we got there, there was a long boundary wall right next to the road before the plot of land that I was supposed to cross to get to my place, there was no opening in the wall and you couldn’t even see my home from there. Being a village there were no streetlights and being the middle of the night there was nobody around who we could ask.  Unable to locate any way to get in, we left the place. Roshan to this day doesn’t believe that my ancestral home is there and thinks I took him to a random place. Then I said let us go to my family temple which was a couple of kilometers from there. To reach there we had to go through a maze of small village roads and again we got lost. We kept circling in the small roads, there was no Google maps or anything to help us and we were unable to find a way out. Finally we somehow made it to the main road and went straight back to Kochi for the fear of getting lost again.

These are not the only instances of me getting lost or losing things but these are the more absurd ones. So next time you ask me directions or give me something for safekeeping think twice before you do it. 

A Friend Indeed

About a month back I was at home for a week of holidays that I had between finishing my first year of MBA in Pune and joining for my internship in Delhi.

One evening I was out shopping with my folks and I ran into an old school friend of mine, Arun (Name changed or even if I haven’t I have like 50 friends named Arun, so you can go figure out which one it is). I had not met him for a long time and we started chatting. Our parents were in touch as my parents used to consult Arun’s dad who is a doctor. We chatted and caught up for some time and when it was time for us to leave he asked if I could do him a favor. I said sure and he told me that his parents want him to get married and they were going to a prospective bride’s home to see her next day. He was feeling really nervous and wanted me to accompany him.

I was surprised and a little taken aback actually. Sure, the guy was a close friend when we were in school 8 years back, but since then we had drifted apart. We had kept in touch with the occasional message, chat and call but it is not like we were close friends anymore. This was actually the first time I was meeting him after school. After school we both went to different cities to do our engineering and for the first one year or so we made plans to meet each other when we were back in our home town but it never materialized and eventually we stopped trying. I wanted to ask him if he hadn't made any close friends during those eight years. Also to be honest I was at home for only 7 days and I was so busy running around that the next day was the only time I was getting to stay at home fully, do nothing and relax. But out of courtesy, the fact that our parents were close and that my parents would never forgive me if I didn't go I agreed.

One of the other reasons I didn't want to go is because I am never good at these traditional family kind of situations, I am clueless of what to do and also I had no idea what advice to give my friend if he asked for it the next day. But now that I decided to do it, I wanted to do it right. So I called up a couple of my friends who had recently got married and asked them how the exercise went. They gave me some general idea and said that it is not a big deal as everyone makes it out to be and that the movies and all exaggerate it too much so that we have a huge misconception about it. I was relieved and confident from the knowledge I acquired was all set to handle the next day.

So the next day, Arun with his parents came to pick me up in the morning. During the 45 minutes car ride to the girl's place I understood why my friend had asked me to come along with him. His parents apparently thought very highly of me because I had got into high ranking engineering and MBA colleges which their son had tried to get into unsuccessfully. So I guess if something went wrong during the process like if he didn't like the girl and his parents did he was expecting me to take his side and convince the parents otherwise.

During the car ride he showed me a photo of the girl and asked my opinion about her. Now this is a question that always puts me in a very awkward position, whenever someone shows me the picture of their prospective bride or fiancée and asks me what I feel. I am always lost trying to find that answer which says that their choice is good enough without sounding offensive or inappropriate by saying something like oh yeah, she is a hottie. I played it safe and said she looks nice and she did too, she was good looking. But honestly she was all dressed up in a sari and going to some function in the photo and everyone looks good when you are like that. She also looked vaguely familiar but I couldn't place from where.

Finally we reached the girl’s place and were invited inside by her entire family. Apart from the girl’s parents and their younger son who studied in some engineering college the girl’s dad’s brother and his family consisting of his wife and a daughter were also present. After a round of mutual introductions the girl was called to the hall. Her name was Lakshmi( I called the guy Arun, what did you expect me to call the girl?) and she was an engineer from a decent private college in Kerala and has been working for an IT company in Kochi for two years. I also realized where I knew her from. The photo didn't make me remember her but when I saw her in person I remembered who she was. She used to be the girlfriend of one of my friend’s in college. There used to be a photo of him and her together in his room. I remember this because when they broke up we went through the ritual of drinking a lot to drown the pain, calling her a lot of profanity and eventually burning the photo. I really didn't know the reason why they broke up also, I was just part of the ritual for a friend. I didn't know if I should tell this to Arun because I didn't know the reason why they broke up, it could have been a genuine reason and to be honest my college friend was kind of a douchebag and also I didn't know how Arun felt about marrying a girl who had a relationship in the past. I didn't want to ruin what could be a perfectly good marriage because of this.

Lakshmi’s cousin sister was also there, she was her father’s brother’s daughter and about the same age as her. After the pleasantries and some tea and snacks, Arun and Lakshmi were left alone together for the ritual of talking to each other in private. This practice always dumbfounds me, how the hell are we supposed to say if we are ready to spend a lifetime with a person after just 10-15 minutes of private conversation with them. Anyways, after Arun and Lakshmi left, I was sitting there in the company of a lot of adults. Lakhsmi’s uncle was talking to me and asking me a lot of probing questions about myself and what I planned to do in life and all. Out of the blue he asked me if like them I am a Nair (A caste among Hindus in Kerala). Putting together the fact that he had a daughter of marrying age and the probing questions he asked I knew what he meant with that question. He was coming to me with a marriage proposal for his daughter. With a smile on my face and having already formulated a polite reply for rejecting the proposal I said yes, I am a Nair too. Before he could ask any more questions I got a call on my phone. I excused myself and stepped outside to take the call. I took my sweet time on the call as I didn't want to go back and answer the question that I was sure that was going to come.

I finished the call and turned around only to see the uncle standing right behind me. I was startled and then he asked me if he can ask me a question. I already knew what the question would be and mentally preparing myself to say the answer I said yes. He asked me “How would you like to marry Lakshmi? Me and her parents had a talk among ourselves and decided that you would be a much better match for Lakshmi than Arun.” I was left speechless for some time. I wanted to roundhouse kick him where it mattered for bring a proposition to me for a girl whom I had come to see for my friend. But I was too much in shock to say or do anything. As I was preparing an answer for this question which felt like a trick question that had come in the exam for which I had prepared something else he continued saying that Lakshmi is coming here now to talk to you in private, you people talk and then tell me a decision. We are bringing her from the other side so that Arun or his parents don’t see this. Before I could say anything Lakshmi came there. The situation reminded me of the placement week in an MBA college where you are sent to the interviews of different companies who have come to the campus on the same time without them not seeing each other.

The uncle left two of us alone and after adjusting myself to the situation my first question to Lakshmi was that why did you agree to all this? She said she is just doing what her relatives told her to do and went on speaking like this was a normal situation. She started talking about herself in what looked like a well prepared answer like the sort MBA students prepare for the “tell me about yourself” question in interviews. When she stopped talking, out of habit I almost asked her ‘Why MBA?” I stopped myself in time and then she went on to describe how she selected the dress she was wearing right then. Getting really tired of this I said “I am Rahul Menon’s batchmate” (Rahul Menon is her ex and my friend). That stopped her, she took a moment to regain her composure and said “yeah, we were together and we broke up. Do you have a problem with that?” Before I answered this I was luckily saved by her mother’s arrival who announced that lunch is ready. She asked me to come in and Lakshmi to come in through the back door. I made a mental note to pass on their contact on to my college’s placement team. They could maybe take a couple of pointers from these people on how to operate during the placement week.

I went back in. Everyone was already seated on the dining table. The uncle asked me loudly “Oh, that was a long phone call, huh?” and then winked at me. I tried really hard to act normal but I was not very successful. I am sure Arun noticed this and he gave me a dude, what happened to you look. Laskhmi entered at this time. Arun’s parents were beckoning for her to sit next to him but her family made her sit next to me. After a very awkward lunch (Sambar was awesome, rasam was not good) I rushed Arun and his family to leave saying that I had to be somewhere. They said their goodbyes. Lakshmi’s family said they will call them. I was fighting really hard to control my laughter on the analogy of this statement to what an HR person says to a rejected candidate after an interview. As we were about to leave the uncle caught me again and said that he will call my parents to talk about this further. I didn't say anything as I knew I hadn't given them any phone numbers and I knew that the matter would end there. That is when I remembered that I told them that my mom worked in BSNL and I gave them her name and designation. Then uncle had told me that he had a neighbor who also worked in the same department and will ask him about her. I cursed myself for telling him that and got in the car.

In the car Arun and his parents were very happy. The aunty was saying that she liked the girl very much and that she thinks that the girl’s side likes Arun also because they said to her that he is a very good boy especially in the area of having good friends and keeping a good company. She added that she was so glad that I come along and if the marriage gets fixed it is because of me. At this moment I was seriously contemplating suicide by jumping out of the moving car. Finally they dropped me at my home thanking me profoundly all the way.

After I reached home I told my mother the entire story. She almost fell down the chair laughing. I asked her to expect a call from the girl’s folks and she said she will take care of it.

I thought that was the end of it until Arun calls me couple of days later and tells me in a very sad voice that their family approached Lakshmi’s family and they rejected him and didn't tell the reason why. Apparently his parents are very upset and he was wondering if I could talk to the girl’s family because they thought very highly of me. This was getting really out of hand and I decided to put an end to it once and for all. I told him that I had been inquiring more about the girl and I found out that she had a really serious relationship with a batch mate from my college. I even send him a photo I had with me of me and some of my college friends taken in my friend’s room which had the aforementioned picture of him and the girl in the background. This pacified him and he said that then them rejecting him was for the best and that he didn't want to be married to such a girl. He thanked me again for all that I had done for him. I ended the call saying what are friends for. His parents called me an hour later to thank me again for all that I had done and for saving my friend from being married to an “immoral” girl. Aunty went on to add that she wished I was in Kerala for longer so that I could accompany them on all the “girl-seeing” trips. I left for Delhi the next day vowing never to come back to Kerala again.

P.S: I know this is a much longer and very different from the “own goals” I usually write. I just wanted to try my hand at writing a story. I was reading a post about funny incidents that happened during arranged marriages on Quora and this idea struck me. Don’t worry, a totally own-goally post is in the process of being written and will come up shortly.                                        

               

A Serious Post!!!

For a long time the fans of my blog have been telling me “Gokul, you have so profound and relevant philosophies about life. Why don’t you write a serious post about it in your blog along with all the insanely hilarious posts you write that we love to read again and again?” One particular fan was very adamant and voracious about me writing a serious post “How do you expect me to find a girl for you if all you keep writing about is hating coming gold shopping with me? Write some serious posts or I won’t give you coconut cooked in coconut oil along with coconut chutney”’ “Shut up mom, I am searching the blogosphere for blogs that will ‘inspire’ my new post.”

Finally I caved into the pressure and decided to write a serious post. The biggest reason for this is that something has been troubling me deeply for the past few days. I have a deep pain inside me the cause of which I can’t find out. It’s like whenever I go to sleep I get this feeling that someone is backstabbing me. Every day when I wake up it is like my heart is paining. So I decided to write this blog post to introspect about what is happening with my life.

Oh, nevermind, turns out one of the bed springs from my mattress had come loose and was poking me while I was sleeping.  So I really don’t have any deep seated pains in my visceral organs after all, other than what the indigestion is causing. Darn, I was looking forward to writing a serious post.

Anyway now that I have started, I will finish this post in my usual manner.

Recently one of my friends had a serious mishap while travelling. She missed her plane as she went to the airport at 7 pm to catch the flight only to realize that the flight was at 7 am and that she had misread her ticket. Not wanting to waste any time, she got on a horse, chased down a bus to where she wanted to go on the highway, overtook it and heroically jumped in to it, reached the place she wanted to go in time and saved the entire world. At least that is what she wants us to think happened. What happened actually is that she chased the bus in an auto, got in at the next stop and reached her destination well after the event she had to attend was done.  

This got me thinking about all the incidents that have happened to me while traveling. I love travelling and have travelled a lot and along with it have come a lot of weird and funny incidents.  I have once been stranded in a Maruti 800 in front of a wild elephant in the forests of Northern Kerala, me and my friends set off for Gokarna with half an hour preparation only to find ourselves stranded on a beach that was literally filled with excrement and once during a trip we found out that we have somehow managed to lose the horn in our rented car, got lost on a beach on a bike and ran into a old man who was rushing into a liquor store. And all these don’t even make my top five.        

  

So what are the incidents that actually make up my top 5 travel incidents? Well, here goes

1. Once during a bus ride, I ended up sitting next to a black money distributor who told me all about his operations and gave me his number and asked me to call him in case I needed any money. Still keeping his number just in case.

2. Once while coming down from Bangalore in a train, I was sitting next to this man who was travelling in a train during the day for the first time. He was literally squealing with excitement when he could see the front of our train coming round a corner. He asked me to look at it every time, the first couple of times I did it out of politeness but then I had to tell him I had travelled on a train many times before during day time and I had seen it may times. He still kept annoying me. It was a pretty empty train, so I tried moving seats but he kept following me. Finally I had to get down at a station some 3 hours before I was supposed to get down and take a bus for the rest of the journey.

3. I was once seated in a local bus with a guy who pointed at a girl, told me he loved her so much, but she was ignoring him and now he was thinking of murdering her. Needless to say I got down at the next stop and took an auto to where I want to go.

4. I was once in a train and a gorgeous girl came and sat next to me. I started talking to her and we really hit it off. She has been my girlfriend ever since. Oh wait, that was just a dream.

5. And worst of all, recently while travelling on a bus I had to sit through a back to back screening of ‘War chod na yaar’ and ‘Grand Masti’.

So when you plan your next trip and want it to be ‘interesting’ and ‘eventful’ you know whom to call. And if you really want to know my life philosophies, girls inbox me your numbers; I would be happy to give you one on one lessons and boys float an excel sheet or something; I will give a power point session sometime.