Shail's Nest

I lay awake in the darkness, unable to get back to sleep. The sudden cramp in my leg was what had awakened me. The pain had been excruciating. Rubbing my calf vigorously I sat up for some time till the pain had abated. But getting back to sleep was a different story.

It was pre-dawn time when defenses were at the lowest and awareness heightened. Things were clearer and could be seen for what they really were. Details that you never noticed or refused to during the waking hours of the day appeared in all their clarity during these early hours. The brightness of the day seemed to make them scurry and hide in some hell-hole were no light could be shed on them. So you inevitably missed them.

Misery filled me. What a coward I was. I had made all the wrong decisions and now I did not have the guts to face the truth. And what was the truth, my inner self seemed to ask me, do you really know what the truth is? My eyes moistened as I thought of my strange predicament. I was loved and yet I was not. Is that what I wanted??

Why was I taking this emotional abuse?? There was no reason I should. Love is not reason enough for that. I tried to summon up hatred to give me the fillip to make that final break. No, sadly I was incapable of feeling that. Love did not have a place for hatred in it. I had only one way left, to silently leave. I would, I decided.

I looked out of the window at the sky. Dawn was here. I sighed. I knew the rays of the rising sun would dispel my misgivings along with the darkness. Decisions would be forgotten. I would welcome the day and hope would once again fill my heart. I would go on believing, till another pre-dawn caught me unawares and forced me to face miserable truths.

Written for 3WW CXCIX

Words for the week: abuse, cramp, hatred

Dear Airtel,

Real friends they say are hard to come by in this world. Friends who are there for you 24×7, who stand by you in your hour of need, who patiently wait for you to return from wherever it is you have disappeared to…. Yeah they are really hard to come by. So I am ever so thankful to have found a good friend like you. I know just how genuinely you care for your customers. You only have their welfare at heart. If in the process of serving your customers your coffers get filled that is only incidental. How mean of anyone to think otherwise.

You are so altruistic; you take the time out to inform us of the various services available so that we can make informed choices. Of course you send them over and over again because you have been told your clientele are on the slightly retarded side and are incapable of understanding the contents of the message unless it is constantly repeated to them. I am sure this idea of ‘overkill’ to get things across was the suggestion of the morons whiz kids who did the market survey and you just took their word for it. Well I guess they know what they are doing and so I hope do you.

You certainly have no clue about my appreciation of you. Let me illustrate my point with a conversation I had with a young friend. Sometime back this boy told me about the services being offered by other networks and asked me to choose wisely from among them all. I needed no time at all to reply and certainly did not think twice before answering him. Do you know what I told him?? I said,

‘Thank you, but I will stick with Airtel.”

“Loyal customer huh??’ he asked me, to which I replied,

“I am quite satisfied with Airtel and find no reason to shift base”

From the above you can easily deduce the high esteem I hold you in. This is in spite of the fact that you behaved like a bally parrot when I made a trip to Gujarat last. You went on and on like a broken record; Imagine saying ‘Welcome to Gujarat’ a dozen times in the thirty days I was there! This is also in addition to the ‘Hello tunes’ you so aggressively promoted and still do.

Since we are on the subject, let me tell you one more thing. I am NOT interested in posters of Mallu movie heroines however sexy or skimpily dressed. You see, Kerala is quite advanced and it is not just Mallu men who own cell phones. We Mallu lasses have them too. And as a lass I am not interested in other lasses. Now if it were George Clooney…. Oh well. By the way, I don’t need granite or marble either. As soon as I begin the construction of my house, I will let you know.

Yet, none of this is really a problem, let me hasten to add. Heck, sometimes you even send me messages asking me to visit the nearest Airtel office to drop my cheque when you know I pay my bills via ECS. And do you know when some of your over-enthusiastic minions call to check whether I have paid my bill I try my utmost to be patient and explain to those morons efficient guys what ECS means?! I know it is a tough thing to grasp, but I’d be much obliged if you would educate them a bit about what ECS is and how the payment is all automatic and all that. The next time I may not be able to stop myself from bursting their eardrums.

Anyways please don’t take it that I am in any way displeased with your services. Far from it. You are my ally and I am indebted to you in more ways than one for all the help you have given me and continue giving me and I am sure will do so in the future. Recently, I was especially pleased to see this message from you.

Dear Customer, thanks for being part of the Airtel family! We truly missed you in our network. Continue to use your mobile and enjoy Airtel supreme network.

I was so overcome with emotions (there were tears in my eyes) when I read that part about you missing me. I swear, no one, absolutely no one, has ever told that to me before. And who would have thought you with your millions of customers would not only miss me but tell me too. Yes, it is true I was away to visit my son abroad and hadn’t used my cell phone for over a month. To think that you noticed my absence on the network, to think you missed me enough to say so!! You really did, didn’t you?? I guess that’s why you sent me the message a few more times.

Well I do understand your feelings. I am like you, you see. When I miss someone badly and they are back I never tire of telling them how much I have missed them. So when I received your message saying the same thing, over and over again, I sort of guessed how you must be feeling. But, it is now almost a month since I have been back from the US. Your ‘we have missed you’ messages are beginning to get on my nerves. Would you mind PUTTING A SOCK IN IT??!!

As you must have noticed, the first thing I did on landing in India was make a call through your network and I have been continuing making calls just as you have suggested. So I fail to understand why you persist in sending me the message. I am sure there are others in your customer base who have been missing from your network and who are now back. It is time that you gave them enough of your attention. So till the next time I go missing, please get off my back.

Always your loyal customer,

Shail.

There were diamonds in my eyes

Pearls in my smile

You took them all away….

To pave the courtyard of your home.

-  Shail Mohan (2009)

“I stumbled upon the net one fine day a few years back and have felt like Alice in Wonderland ever since.” – Shail Mohan.

There is something about the internet that’s curiously magical and uplifting. Where else can you, at a sedate fifty, with hair beginning to gray at the temples and wrinkles making their stealthy appearance find, on opening a social networking site you are member of, waiting for you a message with a simple query, “Will you marry me??” Below is an example and believe it or not, this is the very first communication from this particular netizen.

As you all know I am your typical (well maybe not that typical, but still typical enough) bharatiya nari whose life has run on predictable lines. I was born into a traditional home and palmed off to the guy the parents thought was the right one for their daughter. On the lines of ‘if winter comes can spring be far behind’ as asked by the great poet P.B. Shelly, ‘if marriage happens can kids be far behind’ asks the very tiny-in-more-ways-than-one poet Shail (that’s me, in case you were wondering). This is especially so in the Indian scenario where the arrival of said kids is awaited with bated breath by the whole set of nosey-parkers (“Any good news??” they ask) that go under the name of well-wishers.

Anyways when the little pitter-pattering feet finally make their appearance, your world turns all topsy-turvy. Time is at premium. All you have on your hands are busy days getting busier, till you are spinning like a top not knowing when a day begins or if the night comes at all. Sleepless nights due to the baby bawling give way to more sleepless nights spent wondering about the uncertain future of the know-it-all teenagers. But somehow you survive it all to find to your utter surprise that your kids, against all your misgivings, have turned into rather decent sorts. They have gotten into their chosen fields and don’t need you now except when the odd hunger pangs hit reminding them they do have a mother.

Finally you are there; reached the time in your life you longed for. You stretch yourself luxuriously and look around at the world with new eyes. You are now a free bird with lots of time on your hands to do as you wish. You now have time to ponder on things other than what new filling to use for sandwiches for the boys or how to remove the ink-stain from their white school shirt. You remember long forgotten causes that you used to talk of animatedly. You now have more time to espouse and hold forth on topics close to your heart. And one day the kids in their youthful exuberance impressed by the Mom (or perhaps to remove her from their hair, your guess is as good as mine) decide to introduce her to the internet.

Mom aka yours truly, meets the internet and takes to it like duck to water. She is enthralled, like Alice in Wonderland. Blog-world and like-minded people make her feel she has found her niche. She connects with a lot of friends on networking sites where she finds an outlet for her weird sense of humor. But something happens that she had never ever bargained for in this very virtual world. She finds suitors for her hand, yeah you heard right, suitors for her fifty year old hands.

Now it is a mystery to me, what exactly forces certain people to propose marriage to absolute strangers on the net, strangers whom they do not know from Eve?! Is it some as yet undiscovered and nameless compulsive disorder against which they are powerless?? Or is it something similar to the philosophy behind the Mallu saying, “Kurudan maavil eriyunnathu pole’ which literally translates to ‘Like a blind man throwing stones at a mango tree’. You see, the sight impaired man only has to persist in the stone throwing and eventually he is likely to hit a mango and make it fall. provided the tree is fruit-laden of course. Do these proposal-senders operate on similar lines?? Do they think that if they persist with the ‘Will you marry me??’ long enough, it will be met with a resounding ‘Yes I will!’ some time or other??

Anyways why should I bother my head with such questions??! I am actually amazed and thrilled to the core that, compulsive disorder or not, some actually asked for my hand, yes the same fifty-year old one. Wowee. Honestly speaking, who would have thought I would get an opportunity of this sort again in my life?? Not me, not by any stretch of imagination. Apart from the fact of the six-footer in my vicinity acting as a deterrent to aspiring suitors and dampening their enthusiasm in ‘real’ life, there is this other matter, rather small but important nevertheless, of the enormous courage necessary to ask a tigress in baa lamb’s clothing ( who else but moi??) for her hand.

Yet such is life that what can never happen in ‘real’ life does happen in the ‘virtual’. It is something to do with the flickering of the computer screen methinks which somehow momentarily stupefies the person sitting in front of it, enough at least to mislead him into thinking he has it in him to aspire for the hand of the tigress (though in lamb’s clothing). Bless the flickering computer screen. Woohoo. What a boost to the shrunken ego. The plummeting self-confidence now is back in business and working on all six cylinders as Wodehouse would say. It struts around, reasserting itself.

I peep into the mirror and find the gray hair and wrinkles mysteriously missing and conveniently forgetting to make allowances for my failing eye-sight, I come away pleased. Who needs all those botox injections or surgeries, the tightening, the nips and cuts that are so popular these days, all for the sake of a smoother complexion and a better figure?? All one needs is an account in a few social networking sites with a name that sounds feminine. Now tell me, how can I not find the internet magical and uplifting?? Nothing like a few proposals in your middle-age to boost your sagging …errr… morale.

- a small tale

I put the cap back on the pen and laid it on the table slowly. Her eyes moved from me to the pen and then back to me. Hope flickered in them. The tear drops on her long lashes shone like dew drops on the morning grass. Her eyes never ever failed to bait me. Each and every time they lured me into doing her bidding without fail.

I was a man hopelessly in love, a victim to her charms. She only had to gaze at me with those lustrous eyes and I was like putty in her hands. Yet, on some days I held on for a little longer or at least tried to. Not now, I would tell her, I have work to do. She would pout and look at me through her long lashes and I would weaken. Yes, the man who could by a look, send the minions scurrying in all directions to do his bidding, when it came to her, danced to her every tune.

They think I have softened since she came into my life. I know they laugh behind my back. I don’t put my mind into my work the same way I used to before. Just the other day, they caught me grinning like an idiot in the board room in the midst of a meeting. I had been thinking of the call I had just attended and what she had said. I had promised her I’d meet her for lunch. It was only when Ms. Jenny cleared her throat discreetly that I realized I had been daydreaming.

Tomorrow is an important day for me. I have tons of papers to read and points to note down in preparation for it. My competitors were going to rip me open if I were to present myself unprepared. But how could I refuse the plea in her eyes?? I tried my best. Very gently I told her, not today sweetheart, I have lots of work to do. My heart lurched as I saw the hope in her eyes about to be extinguished. What the heck, my competitors could have my job if they wanted. She was more important to me than anything or anyone.

She had half turned and was about to walk away when I made my decision. I quickly got off my chair and went down on all my fours. Her pout disappeared in an instant. She clapped her little hands in glee and jumped on to my back. I was now her Elephant and she my royal rider, the Princess. I trumpeted loudly, swayed and started on my journey around the room. I love you Daddeee Elephant she said hugging me tight with her little hands. Well, tell me honestly, what else does a guy need??

*****     *****     *****

Written for 3WW  CXCVIII

This week’s words: bait, jump, victim.

It did not rain the day we met

We had hoped it would make us wet

Instead the sun shone bright

And then there was love-light.

- Shail Mohan (2008)

Overt feelings

in my eyes

grow naked tendrils that you dread

they stretch and touch

the chill making you gasp

inviting you deep

into dingy darkness

a world so different from your own

you squirm, look away

something gnaws your insides

like it does mine

yet… in different ways…

a covert hand finds a coin

the musical tinkle as it drops into the outstretched bowl

fills your heart

as it does mine

yet… in different ways…

– Shail Mohan (July 2010)

Written for the OSI prompt 124: ‘overt‘

Now who would have thought being late and last would win me a trophy?? That’s just what happened. I won the  Super Fun Scrambler Golden Trophy that you see above, for being the second last person to come up with the answer to the jumbled word/sentence that Pal had posted here.  Winning the trophy comes with a catch. I have to post my own jumble quiz and pass the trophy on. After all isn’t it a ROLLING Trophy??!

So here we go….

klise tno seooacclht ot vrneeyeo eta

That’s pretty easy, isn’t it?? I am sure all of you have un-jumbled the words and put them in their right order by now. So I am going to make it a little more difficult to take that rolling trophy away from me.

Relax… I was just joking. It’s not anything difficult at all, just something different. Do you see the picture below?? Stupid question, I know. Unless there is something wrong with your browser or the net or whatever, it is even now gazing right back at you. Now here is what you have to do. Frame questions about what you see in the picture, as many as you can.

The three who ask the maximum number of right questions (not just about anything, but related to the picture, but not the one of the trophy) along with giving the right answer to the jumbled sentence above, gets to walk away with the rolling trophy. Could anything be easier than that?? None I am sure….. So go ahead and frame the questions.

Errr…. I nearly forgot to mention something. The questions CANNOT begin with WHAT, WHY, WHERE, WHO, WHOM, WHOSE, WHICH or HOW.

Comments are moderated for the post. The answer comes up on Sunday with the name of winners as an update to this very post. Don’t start throwing things at me if it doesn’t. Okay??  Just have a little patience. I have plans of watching Inception and roaming around Bangalore on Sunday.  So it might just be postponed to Monday.  Please feel free to come back and write down the questions if new ones come to mind. They will all be counted.

Click the picture in case you want to see it better. Good luck. Let the fun begin.

Updated at 12-19 p.m. 17/07/2010 to add the word ‘WHICH’ in the not to be used list. Thanks for pointing out my lapse Maddy. And since no one as yet has used it in their questions, I can easily add it here now.  But of course magnanimous that I am I will let your that particular question remain in the fray. But no more ‘WHICH’! 

Updated 1-00 p.m. 19/07/2010.

I am late I know. I am still reeling under the effect of watching the movie Inception. Besides, had a long day and a late night. Now the excuses for my tardiness are over and done with, let me get on with the matter at hand.

A very poor poor response. Maybe it has something to do with the weekend. Yeah, I know just like everyone else that working days are when the hits to blogs are maximum. Weekends are dull times.

There are only 4 people who got the jumbled sentence right. So they are the ones considered for the trophy. After all, it is a F-un-crambler Golden Trophy!  So sorry Shilpa, you had asked 20 questions too!

Uma with the right answer and the maximum number of questions (28) is the unquestioned winner of the rolling trophy, one of which she already won some time back.

Indian Homemaker comes a second with 18 questions.

Govind a third with 15 questions asked.

And I give away the trophy to Comfortablynum as a special gesture. She was the very first to leave the right answer and leave 6 questions.

Ok thats it. Thank you all for being such sports and joining in the fun. And do check the comment space for my own questions!   Looking forward to seeing your own posts!