"..." this sorta nothingness after pressing the “C” button on my cell to end a call, seemed like “BOOOOOM” to me. I stand in front of the ECE department dazed..with the “yeh sapna hai ya sach?” look. A startled senior walks by and inquires about the look on my face. [People are only used to my so-called vainglorious look]. I feel like telling her to pound sand up her ears. But with the most uber cool – sang-froid tone I could manage, I tell her the head of the department has refused an auditorium for a college event. She looks at me like I’ve told her the most amusing lie, smiles wryly and pushes off.
I decide its time for a lil’ ‘I-to-I’ talk. I make for the rest room. Much to my chagrin, I run into some juniors, overly awed by me, who tell me I’m this prodigious lass and blah blah...I generally enjoy panegyric, praise, encomium… in all its forms, but then I was pointedly apprehensive at this juncture, I grin my approval with what more seemed, a painful effort to be minimally courteous. [Unfortunately I could see myself in the mirror]. Knew “Chehre ka rang ud jaana” as a muhavra [idiom], I studied in the 7th class, I was only cowed to see “how the rang actually flies off”. I frivolously wash my face to do away with the odd colours on it, till the giggly girls finally leave. I rub my face to my hanky savagely, and then the I-to-I talk… “What’s happening to me?” Scram….! A line from a self-poetry…and before I try to shove it off my mind, the next uninvited lines spout... “That strange temper, that queer feeling of new, earlier unknown senses and emotions…Mutter in my mind...” leaving me feel even more miserable. I cuss myself for ever writing poetry and decide against introspection. I leave the comfort room with an even odder look.
My worried friends look at me like they would’ve pulverized me for my disappearing act. I confide in my friends and they tell me, I’m sweating like a pig, undone; I slump into the watchman’s chair.
“Relax!”, “Oh, come on- don’t be a sheep”, “What the hell?”, “You are over reacting”, “Ah! Big-deal!” and other such hazaaaaaaar make-you-feel-better-things seemed to have a radically antithetic effect on me.
My friends tell me, “Sing a song, sweetheart, that’ll help release, the heebie-jeebies”…and I break into “Lage tumse man ki lagan”.
They give me this bizarre stare, and hoot, “Don’t push yourself to do something if you are NOT capable of doing it!
“Oh! Thank you, now my competence is at stake!”, I retort with a scowl.
“Then, do the godamn thing and be done with it!”, bellows my friend.
“Very well!”, I contend with this basti-mein-sawaal type voice…
..and then I clear my throat a hundred times, work on my accent a zillion times, and senselessly also on my countenances.Then we decide, I’ll rehearse. To my utter disbelief, I’m at loss of words, a rarity that….an absolute rarity. What loss of words, I sound like an expatriate whose sucks in English from A to Z. My friends let out a vindictive cackle. [Quid pro quo Ms.Purist, they must’ve thought!].
The myriad of rehearsals seemed never-ending. Piqued with the rigmarole, I cull writing it down on a piece of paper. Now, [a now that came after what seemed like aeons], I resolve to finally do it.
“Chutzpah!”, I tell myself…I take out the paper, [it looked like litter now], see the phone number and after intermittently dialing; and dialing a “series” of wrong numbers..
..what I see on my cell screen is “dialing…9*********”,
“Tring…Tring!”,
..and then a rich baritone voice answers,“ Hello?…”
