message in a bottle (02.2003 - 09.2008)

Yesterday was a good Sunday, which was superbly welcome after the terrible Saturday (we clean on Saturday.) A couple of friends, who are also a couple, surprised the husband by dropping in. From India. Awesome. Merriment ensued.

Now that I finally have a girl to walk around with in this shopping heaven, I must get down to doing all things girlie. We shall begin with a manicure; while I get tiny stars painted on my nails, she is opting for fish.

In other news, I tried octopus yesterday. Cannot say I am a fan or even close but well, it is now on records that it has been done.

Now I meet another friend, who is red and has newly arrived in the seafood land, for lunch. What’s more, she is here to stay. Happiness.

I totally feel like a teenager these days. An American teenager, no less. The feeling of course is as far removed from the reality as can be given that I have never been to America, and I exited teenage almost a decade ago. 

This feeling comes from my two main occupations at the moment. I have been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer and reading The Princess Dairies. I know, I am not only too old for these but also too late as the years go. But as I said, these little things do not seem to matter.
 
Watching and reading so much high school drama made me think about my school days, which had very little in common with Buffy and Mia's. Yes, I too worried about exams and boys back then but I was neither a vampire slayer nor a princess of lesser-known European country bang in the middle of Italy and France. But thinking of school days, what I remember most is my close bond with those five other girls. It was strong and beautiful. I am still in touch with four them today but we have all drifted apart and have very less in common, which is very disturbing in a certain way.

Friend one: We shall call her Dolly, which happens to be her pet name. She was the prettiest girl in our class – the one with big brown eyes and thick long lashes – beautiful in every conventional way. Her dad, sadly for her, was the Geography teacher, which meant that she had to take an extra subject (Geography, duh!) in plus two and slog longer hours than the rest of us. Now Dolly was always under pressure to perform well because most kids whose parents were teachers in our school were slackers and Dolly’s dad did not want his daughter to live up to this reputation. I think this is the reason she never realized that the cutest boy in our class (who read Atlas Shrugged and Gone with the Wind during the free periods and wore songs and poetry!) had a thing for her. Not like Dolly never did anything but study. She always found the right excuse and the time to catch every movie that starred Saif Ali Khan (Ew! I know he is quite decent now but I am talking Aashiq Aawara and Yeh Dillagi days.). The rest of us laughed at her because she chose Saif over Shahrukh, but she did not care. I liked Dolly a lot; she tied up with another girl for the position of my best friend.

I remained in touch with her during my graduation days, despite us being in different colleges and then we did our PG together. Only, by then she was married and also had a kid. She used to talk about her kid during our weekend classes and then drag us along to meet him and her husband at the end of it. At 21, I did not want to spend time listening about diaper change and stuff. She is the only friend who I am not in touch with anymore.

Friend two: She was the Cool Chick, the most adventurous of us all. She always had fun things to talk about and obsessed about Shahrukh Khan when she was not balancing a P/L account. She claimed that she had never had a crush on anyone but Shahrukh Khan, and needless to say I found this very disturbing. Yes, there was a time when I thought that she would turn out to be a lesbian hiding behind the façade of SRK fandom. However, this thought was misplaced because as I write this post, she is carrying her first baby.

Friend three: She is the Surprise of our group. Yes, this girl was mostly quiet, though when she did talk she was very opinionated. Her mum was also a teacher in our school and that too of Sanskrit. If you have ever been to a school that teaches Sanskrit, you know that those teachers are the nastiest and the meanest and the strictest. Her mum was no exception. She even chided me for speaking in English in her class. Hello! How on earth am I supposed to ask someone to pass the book in Sanskrit? I can only recite shlokas and shabdroop in this language, remember? Anyhow, I digress. So this surprise used to work really hard, and laugh at us for talking about Shahrukh Khan so much. She also asked me how I could manage to top the class while all I ever did was watch movies. 

I say she is the surprise of our group because we all thought she was the kind of girl who would study literature and then get married as soon as she finished college. However, Miss Surprise went on to be faculty of French in an MNC in Bangalore. And also a mother of cute baby last year. We talk once a year now.

Friend four: She is and has always been the Housewife. Well, she got married only in 2006 and has been working for a few years now but that does not matter. Another kid of a teacher, Miss. Housewife had declared in class two that she wanted to grow up and become a housewife. So there. Things like these stick. Forever. She was one girl who despite having a teacher for a parent managed to stay normal. I never saw her whining about how her mum wants her to do better in Accounts or Math. However, she was always the one to point out where our actions rated in her Morality Chart. Yes, she had this Morality Chart in her mind. She would rate everything we said or did accordingly. So when I decided to handover a valentine day’s card that a boy had slipped into my bag to the most feared teacher, she gave me an A+. That I scarred the boy for life, however, is another story.

 Miss. Housewife recently became a mommy and is blissfully happy. I am happy for her.

Friend five: She was, is, and shall always remain the Weirdest of us all. Her knack of attracting trouble is impressive. She lived right next to the school (hence, got home first), so was always the one I called for homework when I was sick or missed school for some reason. During lunch hour, she would make us stand on our toes to peek over the boundary wall at her neighbors and tell scary stories about them. I have always maintained that she lives in a freaky neighborhood. Her happiest moment was when she got a crank call and the caller insisted that she looked like Sridevi (there has to be a limit to suspension of disbelief, right?). During our college days, she repeatedly came to me for advice on her love life (or lack of it) and when I asked her what made her think that I, who had never been on a date, could give her good advice, she blinked and said, “But you read novels.” The fact that she never did get around to talking to the guy she had a crush on says a lot about the knowledge I gained from my novels. But that does not stop her from coming to be for advice till date.

Each one of these girls was a gem of a friend, in her own way. I treasure the moments (however insane they may seem now) I have shared with them. Just because I point out their weirdness does not go to say that I was superior to them in any way. I was equally weird, with a dash of extra whims.  It is only fair I describe myself next.

Friend six: That would be me and Nerd is the only name that comes to my mind. The only time I liked to be center of attention was when the exam results were announced. I would shun every opportunity to participate in extra curricular activities like nobodies business. I would avoid talking to boys as much as I could help so that no one talked about me. (This did not help at all though. People took me to be a snob with a superiority complex and talked about me all the more.) I hung with a group of girls who always talked about Shahrukh Khan and refused to go any place where these girls were not invited. I tried very hard to be in the good books of my teachers without running errands for them, because that would make me bad in my classmates’ books. Yes, I was a people pleaser. Or maybe, still am.

I say discs because that is the term that comes to my head. Here, in Hyderabad, we call them pubs. Three huge rooms, called level 1, 2, and 3, white upholstery, white balloons on the floor, minimal to zero furniture, absolutely no place to sit, lots of place to stand. That is Touch for you at 9:30 pm on 31^st December. What am I doing there, well, that is a question we should address to arunjeetsingh. Maybe he should make an LJ post in reply.

 It took a lot of time, ample jostling skills, and many buckets full of money to be standing on the white floor. Because that is exactly what I was doing at 10 pm. Standing. The rooms (dance floors, if you will) were full of dolled up chicks and dandy boys by now. A jumbo plastic glass poised in everyone’s hand, loud remixed music filling the room, and everyone standing. It took another hour and a lot of alcohol to get most people dancing.

 Disappointed by the very first look around, most of us friends roamed from one level to the other in search of good music and maybe a place to sit. Found neither, however, found a dark level with comparatively good music and a lot of balloons on the floor, shady people lurking around the corners. Make out level, we called it.

 At 11 pm, I asked the husband if he thought we would be served any grub. He seemed doubtful. I interested him in the dark level but he is shy. So with nothing better to do, we started to dance (or rather to wave our arms up n down and left n right, considering moving ones feet would have been an impossible feat). A couple of our friends were having a gala time by now. Another two were just happy to be out on the 31^st, and I was simply thankful for my cute and comfy dancing shoes. I chose them over my sexy bronze heels but looking around at skimpily clad women concentrating hard on not falling on the dance floor, I was glad I made a sensible choice.

 Every time the husband wanted to give up and try to find something better to do, he would find something that would send him back to the floor. For example, the puke outside the dance floor. It was amidst such weirdness and sweat that I rang in the new year. The only saving grace of this non-fun night was friends. I am officially off the dance floors. If I am in Hyderabad and you want to take me out post dinner, Ten Downing Street is the only place I am going.

 Maybe I am aging but I would vote for the cozy dinner n drinks at Punjabi by Nature or Bukhara over the madness called Touch any day. Or rather, any year.

This trip to Delhi has been very surreal. No friends getting married, no festival to be celebrated - just me back to my old work-home-work routine for a week. It is almost like the three months in-between never happened. Every morning I wake at wee hours of the morning, take a hot bath, and rush to catch the bus to work. Same old faces greet me on the way. I sit at my old workstation, lunch with my old pals, and get stuck in traffic jams on NH 8 just like old days. It is only when I take off my woolens at night and see those innumerable red bangles on my wrists that I remember that things have changed and the person traveling to China is not my boyfriend. He is the husband.

And I met a couple of friends for a drink the other day and reminisced about old days.

( Poor Quality Cellphone Pictures )

Passive smoking, as described by my dear friend: "While she smokes, I am supposed to stand there and inhale what went inside her lungs and came out of her nostrils!"

Ewww.

For almost three years now, I have been ranting about the distance I cover to get to work. If you have visited my page even twice in your entire life, chances are you already know my sob story of long commuting hours. I often think that there must be a strong force that drives me to work (no, I am not talking of the Qualis engine here) every morning despite the traffic, long hours, and monotonous work.

Yes, I have tried to add variety to my work with moderate success. I have been reasonably excited about what I do at frequent intervals but what makes me look forward to seemingly endless hours every morning are my friends at work.

( They & the happy memories we have created together )

The other day I went to my college. The atmosphere and the experience can be best described as surreal. It has been many years since I finished my graduation and the building has changed a bit over the years. The students still crowd the corridors but they appear stylishly different. Ringing of cell phones is something that I do not connect with college. The oily spring rolls have been replaced by sugar coated doughnuts and Nescafe iced tea has replaced the bottled cold coffee. But some things, like attending lectures, do not change.

I sat in the last row of the classroom trying my best to blend into the environment. Girls walked in slowly; some murmuring greetings, some looking disinterested, some absorbed in themselves. The sound of chairs being pulled back, ruffling of sheets, and screeching of pens as they hurried across the lined pages of the registers taking down the notes was nothing less than what can be called déjà vu. However, what differed was my interest in the lecturer.

She stood there trying to explain the steepness of slope and the multiplier formula to the girls. In her floral kurti, colored beads hanging around her neck, she looked every bit like a Macro Economics teacher. She pushed her hair back and encouraged the girls to speak as she discussed the GDP in a closed economy. I sat there admiring her, almost in awe. The fact that I was able to solve a numerical in her class after years of gap of studying the subject is totally credited to her simplified explanations.

You can call me biased because this lecturer is my best friend but hey, it does take a lot to cover the distance from the benches of a classroom to the blackboard. And sumthn2say has covered it beautifully.

I made this post almost a year ago.

And the following picture was taken last week.



Same shirt, same flipflops, same expression. Different city but a similar backdrop. Different friend but a similar shirt.

Two observations:
1. This is curious.
2. I need a new wardrobe.