four years of fiction summed into one evening of facts

Prologue:
They say, never argue with idiots, because they’ll first bring you down to their level of intellect and then defeat you with sheer experience!!! You lose!



The day had been tiring, to say the least. For the last 6 hours I had been busy developing a rather intimate relationship with the toilet, similar to the one that the loose motion had developed with my sphincter muscles. When the number of tiles on the bathroom walls, on my seventh trip, almost matched that of the previous count I finally insisted on staying back while the rest of us folks took a tour of the northern fringes of one of the most beautifully exotic places that there can be, Goa.

The rest of the morning was busy but boring. By half past four I had had a bland lunch, completed the local bulletin, taken a nap and more importantly the now-so-important muscles had started holding again. So I WAS prepared to spend the evening sitting inside watching television, in a place such as this…..

By the time I had put on some clothes, popped in another pill, called my folks and vacated the apartment it was quarter to five.


Luckily the apartment that housed us was only half a km from the nearest beach, Miramar. In another ten minutes I had left the pavement and entered the beach premises. About a km of soft sand now separated me from the waters. The first thing that struck me tonight was there were a lot more people around than I had seen on my previous visits. I continued walking at a slow pace; killing the distance one step at a time….every beach looks its best at dusk and Miramar didn't disappoint .

The light breeze got stronger with ever step and the light thinned by a fraction. Unlike the other overtly overcrowded beaches, the perennially near-empty Miramar somehow always held its own to me. That is one of the reasons why I rate it my all time favourite. Finally I chose my spot some five or six meters from the water and settled down.

The beach calms me down, every one of them…..They sooth the frayed nerves and always give me some new ideas to ponder over and take back home with me, every one of them……I had to take out the ice-cream before it melted on its own, before I was gone too far to remember. I felt like a spoilt child …..


A lone trawler (perhaps returning after the days work) was all that looked solid in the never ending stretch ahead. Just ahead of me was a young couple trying to break the ice between their child and the sea. By the look of it I could judge that neither had met the other before. There was fear on the child’s face but the little waves remained patient and enduring. As the little man struggled to keep dry as the father tried to immerse its little legs in the little waves, one such little wave touched my feet …..as if to wake me up from the trance. The waters had advanced while I had been lost.

When the trawler finally cut the setting Sun’s path I could feel goose bumps intercepting my insanity. Unadulterated emotions are exceptionally evanescent!



By the time my gaze strayed back to the nuclear unit, the child was on his own. It now stood like a Colossus, resting the little hands on the little waist, the little waves flowing peacefully under the little legs as the proud parents stood at an arms length, beaming. The ice-cream stick was now completely dry; I buried it in the sand.




I found myself staring at nothing in the distant nothingness….. Whenever this happens, it’s a signal that the job is done and my time is up…. time to go. I got back on my feet; my trousers were now wet at the back, the sand would remain adhered to it for a while. The walk back would be longer.


When I turned my head, one last time, I couldn’t locate the trawler. It was gone, so were most of the people.



Epilogue:
I almost always wonder … are they right ?

just one more year remains... hope i find out before that......

Pretty Neat , huh ?

I am boring by default .Sometimes less boring, but boring nonetheless. And I know it. So I suffer from this tremendous urge to do something out of the blue thing every now and then to break the monotony. I always keep finding new ways to vent out all this pressurized energy in a little this way or that. Sometimes when the favourite comic strip or the occasional football match isn’t enough I tend to give-in and let myself be tamed to this urge. This usually results in amazing disasters and embarrassments prompting me to resolve “I’ll NEVER do anything like this EVER again”, and everytime I do, I end up bettering the previous one!


Last night I thought about all the crazy things I have done and had a good laugh. Then I thought people should know about some of them. Here are three of them that I can share; the others I assure are too off the wall to be included in a public domain.




The craziest things that I have done ( in order )

1 walking semi-nude on the beach
2 using the toilet of an express while travelling by a local
3 writing a love letter to a girl I didn’t know


1. Walking semi-nude on the beach

Before THIS happened, I had never been to a place that was entirely devoid of human presence. Yes! Such a place does exist , and not very far away . It’s this place they called Taal -sari , and its a half hour ride on a motorized-rickshaw form Digha.
It was five in the evening when we reached the place and we had an hour before the dusk morphed itself into darkness . As the sun gently lessened its intensity the beach looked stunning form where we stood. All we had to do now to get to it was CROSS a river! Yes we were definitely on the wrong side. It was well past the (peak) time to find a boat to ferry us down to the other side. There was another way though ….. in the next couple of minutes we had taken off our clothes and started crossing it on foot ! I wonder what a bunch of crazy morons would have looked like crossing a chest-deep river with hands held up high clutching dry clothes and other valuables (namely wallets, phones, fags and matchboxes).
When we were finally on the other side we realized if we had done one thing right in the entire day ….. it had to be this . The sand was a shade softer and lighter and the waters were different ( like the grass is always greener on the other side ). It was the best beach any of us had seen , ever .The next thing we knew we had tossed our clothes, wallets ,shoes ,caps , and shades (the phones,we hid carefully inside our trouser pockets before we flung them) and we had started running for the waters … I have run 100 mt. sprints before but this one was special , very special … I knew I would be remembering this for the rest of my life .. those 12 seconds or so …. The air was crisp but the water was cold. We couldn’t have lasted longer in the water. Only human! Aren’t we ?

We didn’t have towels with us …so we had to let the water dry itself off ourselves; we waited. In the mean time Mari had discovered this bunch of Red Crabs.... we chased them for a while and even caught one ….and of course we let it go after that, we couldn’t have eaten it for sure . Dusk came almost uninvited, we had to go back. We crossed on to the other side but this time it was only half as fun. It was a day we all agreed not to forget…..

A week later I got to know that a photograph had been leaked in college, it had a boy on a beach ….





2. How to travel Local but use an Express' Toilet

Whatever has to happen has to happen, but it is this impeccable timing with which this "whatever" hits , that upsets me !

Asansol is a good 220 kms from Howrah and it takes approximately 5 hours to cover the distance in a local train. Locals aren’t the preferred trains for most, they are inconvenient. One has to break the journey into two parts. Asansol to Burdwan ( 90 odd kms) and then boarding a Burdwan to Howrah connecting local.
It’s rarely that we choose to commute by a local that too in the wee hours of the morning. But we did, that day. When the train finally started moving we had bleary eyes , empty stomachs, full intestines and no topics to keep us from sleeping. These trains … they jerk and oscillate and create a to and fro motion which is sometimes undesirable … half way into the first of the two hours I knew this journey would be a little different … a little difficult perhaps. This was the hard way of discovering that when Nature calls … it calls …and IT is pretty good at calling.
So why talk about this stuff when you can help yourself to the toilet.... Yup ! That’s the problem…. no toilet onboard a Local ….. actually just a urinal would have done fine in my case , but there I was stranded on a train with half a dozen sleeping friends and no toilet!
So there were two options. One was to get down at the next station , use the toilet, and take another train .The other was to hold up for another hour or so till we reached Burdwan and then use the toilet there without missing the train and company.
By the time our train entered Burdwan , I had 6 excited friends cheering me on to the finishing line and my eyes out of their sockets. But as soon as we got down on the platform a creaky voice from inside the loudspeaker declared that the Connecting train would be leaving from the next platform in another two minutes ! Double dilemma … I followed them to the train with my eyes desperately scanning the place for a loo . When I found none I did what i would describe as CRAZY even by my standards .

Even as the others boarded the Local I darted for the Express parked on the other side of the platform, entered it , found the toilet, unlocked the door, locked the door and helped myself. Halfway through, the creases on my forehead had just started to un-pleat when suddenly the train broke into a series of jolts and jerks. It had started moving! What timing! Impeccable ….. by the time I could put myself back in order for another two hour hold-up the train had picked up considerable speed and I didn’t even know which way it was headed !

Some 30-35 metres of the platform was left , by the time I finally hung myself off the door. No I’m not talking about a time and distance problem here ….. just that if I decided NOT to jump I would be reaching Durgapur in about an hour, without a ticket , belongings , money or ID ( which would be bad-luck even by my standards ) . I jumped and somehow made it without scratches or fractures .Yes I caught the Local too. Its all about TIMING, they say.


So its not entirely surprising that after this incident my system just wont accept water on a day I am traveling.








3. Writing a love letter to a girl I didn’t even know


This one has got to be the craziest yet. Oh God ! What was I thinking?

Come August , with the arrival of the new batch , its open-season at college . All guys remain specially active during this time. Even the King of Lazeland would brush off the snow and polish his skies! This activity is mainly due to the fresh batch that has just come in. The boys are taken for a ride and the girls are asked questions. This is the time when a popular three syllabled sentence is used rather indiscreetly. I got entangled in one such story ……

The guy just couldn’t muster enough courage to speak out his mind and the girl in question refused to pick up the subtle hints. So the boy decides to write her a letter conveying his feelings. But since he is not too sure about writing one himself, someone else must do it.

If you ask me why I agreed to write a letter ..sorry a love letter, on behalf of a friend ,that too to a girl I hadn’t even seen , I would give you a shrug and said “dunno” any day .

I’m not a romantic , neither did I have prior experience with this stuff so as unexpected it took me two days to actually come up with something that resembled half prose , a quarter of poetry and a quarter of philosophy all somehow fitted into a framework of an informal letter’s format ….. I had doubts of its working but that’s the best I could do , both to the letter and to the friend .

The letter was copied by someone else and finally delivered by another someone else. ( I shall be least surprised if the next Ian Fleming is an Indian) ….. Anyways it didn’t work out for the poor guy and he held me partly responsible …. I only got to see the girl in another two weeks or so , about the same time that I got news that this “poor guy” was now happy with another girl who ( thankfully) I didn’t have to write to.



Well just ahead of another open-season I found out that some people had found out…. That did make me feel a little awkward but then what the hell … its not everyday that you get to write a love letter, that too on behalf of another guy , to a girl you haven’t seen … I doubt if I can better this one …

Through The Looking Glass

It’s nearly been seven years since I put on my first pair of glasses. I was pretty excited when I chose the brown shellac frame from among the twenty odd designs that the dealer showed us. In another two days I had the final thing in my hands. I put them on and life changed, forever!
For the first couple of days it was pretty cool … everywhere I went, everyone noticed change …. I personally thought I looked better wearing them … They were more like a fashion accessory. I took them off every now and then to clean the lenses and as directed, handled it with care. By the third day or so I had started having headaches whenever I had them on for more than two hours at a time. And by the end of the first week I’d grown tired them. But wearing them meant that now I could now make out the digits on the wall calendar from the other end of the room and my nightmares of failing to read the bus number had stopped haunting me. But with this new corrected vision came some not so pleasant experiences. Little involuntary chores now seemed frustratingly difficult ... every now and then I would find myself washing my face without having removed them ,and misplacing them every now and then … and later to find them in odd places like inside the wardrobe or inside the washbasin ….. I finally broke them halfway through the third week … I had put them inside the pockets of my track-pants and had just bent down to pick up the ball when I heard a noise that I know only too well by now …….
Since then I have seen quite a lot of this world , quietly literally, through the glasses of course. I have had a lot adventures and misadventures with them and while wearing them… broken them , had them mended and then broken them again … I love them so much that I never take them off even during a football match and still have eyes unscathed …and I still find brand new ways to have them broken ….

At the end of the day when I finally take them off to call it a night , I know they would be the first thing I’d LOOK around for helplessly , come the following morning … Cant imagine what I would do without them … wouldn't be writing this blog perhaps ….