Nov 12, 2009

Ut tensio, sic vis*

I was in a very bad mood. It was not because a crow had somehow got into my house and proceeded to seduce me my bringing garbage from all over the country and redecorating my kitchen. It was also not because I threw a newspaper at it, that totally missed it and fell out the window over an old couple who were making out in the verandah below and made the old man let loose a few expletives. The factual reasons were totally simple and somehow totally irrelevant to whatever happened that day.

The 3-point roster of my FMLs for that day;

1. I slipped in the bathroom and almost lost my virginity. Forever.
2. I discovered only that day that my door had a self-locking mechanism. With my keys inside.
3. It was Monday morning.

Making a mental note to de-select two of them to twitter about, I set off for office. The Mumbai-local ride was anything but abnormal. Re-discovering my ancestor's genes by swinging from one pole to another, each time inhaling a new, fresh dose of masculine sweat hardly improves one's emotional disposition. I got off the train, with my trousers dangling somewhere around the second half of my rear football field and quickly built up a stride in the direction of my office building.

The huge glass doors came into view and I ejaculated a teenage-girl-watching-Grudge 2.0-shriek. It was my reflection. Sweating ravines, tousled black-green-yellow hair with a groundnut sticking out of nowhere, askew glasses and a drunken look: I painted a rather pretty picture of Ranbir Kapoor. I quickly hurried to the elevator and started thumping the close button before anything tragic happened. There was just one other, middle-aged female in the elevator who gave a dont-even-think-about-it look that teleported my spine to the Tundra. I retorted with a please-buy-a-mirror look. When she found that she was losing the war of misshapen looks, she took it to the next level and slowly, silently started mouthing words at me. But I was not going to fall for the same trap again. I could faintly see the flint of her jazzy mobile phone, dangling from one of her ears, hidden behind troll-like locks of hair.

The doors closed and a god-awful bhajan started playing as we rose. 1, 2, 3, 4. Finally, the eskimo got off. And who should come peeping in the next second? A six-pack. Literally, a six-pack. Six giggling, half-gorgeous girls. My guess was the HR department but Finance came a close second. Anyway, given my organisation, seeing any female lesser than 35 years of age is nothing short of a water-turning-wine episode. Drunk with my good fortune, I decided to make good hay out of the chance. Hip-hopping in the best 50 cent caricature possible to the corner where that middle-aged hag had been hobbling, I struck my Clint-Eastwoodish pose; winking a 240W smile at them girls. Surprisingly, all of them smiled back. "NAILED IT!!!", I yelled silently to myself, blasting my tympanum. My deranged libido finally managed to kickstart the sputtering scooter and grinned at me. I was on a metaphoric high.

And then my floor came. I had to let go of my copyrighted pose. Noetically saluting, "Respect, Mr. Harry Callaghan", I walked out of the lift. What happened within two seconds after that just screwed me. It took my dignity, squashed it with a sledgehammer, ran it through a Bengali's paan-chewing mouth and threw it out of the sixth floor window.

elastic:  /ilastik/
adjective: able to resume normal shape spontaneously after being stretched or squeezed.
noun: cord, tape, or fabric which returns to its original length or shape after being stretched.
Derivatives: elastically adverb elasticity /illastissiti/ noun elasticize (also elasticise) verb.
Origin: Greek elastikos ‘propulsive’.

As I walked out; to be more specific, as I moved out of that corner, there was a long pink thread-like thing that clung on to my shirt. It followed me until I walked out of the elevator, giving a short crash course in elasticity. The elevator(now more read than a Anna University ECE graduate) played along and slowly went up, dragging it until it got cut off and I was left with a long trail of sick-looking, masticated bubble gum. I stood there, horrified, staring at the off-pink line that ran from the lift. I could almost hear the guffaws get louder along with clouds of gossip, as the lift ascended. My dreams of giving birth to twins, buying a Honda Civic, taking them to an Anglo Indian school in Ooty and pinching the cheeks of smart looking grandson-chimps; all looked distended and mangled like that wad of bubble gum.

Wad of bubblegum. Thats when it struck me and I yelled like a sleep-deprived, wounded pig. That middle-aged fiend..!!

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