A group of us were talking about nothing in particular when the issue of ‘yesterday and today’ came up. Someone suggested the people we disliked earlier in our lives were indeed angels given the people you come across these days. Maybe we were a bunch of have-beens who don’t have the bile to face up to reality. Maybe it was us who have jumped the rails. Either way the consensus was that the spoilt pages of yesteryears weren’t, well, as spoilt as we thought!
One fellow fumed saying a blood relative who claims to brush shoulders with political bigwigs treated him with the meanest disrespect. That got me thinking of a brief incident sometime back. I bump into some guy I haven’t seen for a couple of years. Without even proper greetings he gives me that toe-to-scalp scan and his face turns into a Frankenstein bust! I must have felt like an unwelcome refugee from some distance planet. What was all the ‘king of kings’ posture for?!
“Is something wrong?” he says. Sorry! Something wrong about what! Why does he say that! How often do you start a conversation with such a question? I mean a proper “Good morning;” wouldn’t have depleted the figures in his bank book!
“No, absolutely not!”
“Are you feeling alright?” Yes, I’m feeling like some court ruled I should be given an entire month’s income of Las Vegas casinos!
“Of course, I am. Why do you ask?”
“You look so skinny!”
What! I look ‘so skinny!’ So what? I mean overeating is not a national problem around here! Seven of the ten people I know are skinny; and he says I am skinny!
“Are you on a diet?”
This is where my first OMG comes. OMG!
Yes. Yes, and you just hit the bull’s eye. I am on a diet. I have been on a diet since as far back as I can remember. The only thing is that I don’t call it a diet; I call it two meals a day.
“I think you have become a vegetarian;” Oh! What cardinal sin did I commit to deserve this! Ok, wise guy; maybe, I have joined the vegetarian species. Maybe, I had a ton of cabbage for breakfast and my dinner which consists of another ton of lettuce or something is waiting for me back home! I was itching to come up with a response to put him in the place he deserves when he says;
“You should eat meat. You know, you can’t live only on leaves.”
Time for my second OMG!
All this time I was trying to figure out what his name was! (Maybe too much vegetable does tricks to one’s memory.) I couldn’t even guess. Incidentally, when I meet people I haven’t seen for a while, I don’t mention names. No, “Hi, Abera; Long time no see.” Why? Well, I’ll tell you why. The chances are the guy’s name is not Abera. I have had more than my share of embarrassments. You call the wrong lady “Hi, Darimyelesh; where have you been for so long?” and you would literally roast under the glare of her eyes. The lady has ‘upgraded’ her name to Meron years back and who do you think you are to call her Darimyelesh!
So, this guy tells me I am ‘so skinny.’ But, it was not about flesh and bones. It was about the way he said it. He acted as if he was on some Cloud Nine looking down at us unfortunates down here. What in the world was he trying to make me do! Google for ways to flee this world the painless way! Send me to some boat headed for Yemen or whichever nearby country with inhospitable ports!
I later learned the guy has hit some financial jackpot and was already living on the fast lane. No one knew how he got that rich. Maybe some genie planted the money tree in his backyard. One thing sure about him was he has traded his brain for whatever stash of money he got.
So we were there talking how inhumane people have become and yesterday’s Hell appeared to be today’s Paradise. There was the girlfriend whom you were about to call a wife. You were debating with yourself whether to have two or three children when the blow came out of the blue; and what a blow it was! One day your Cleopatra tells you, “It’s over.”
“What do you mean it’s over?”
“Our relationship is over.”
What! Just like that! You never get a real explanation.
Later you realize it was you who blew the whole thing! You thought you were irreplaceable, a fist-sized gem in a pile of rocks. You weren’t. As confirmation to that she booted you all the way to the nearest pub. You would have been a Freud or something with a comment like, “Well, that’s life and I can do nothing about it.” But, there was one problem. She dumped you for your best friend! He even sent you wedding invitation! You look at your present amorous adventures and instantly your girlfriend-snatching best friend and your wife-that-never-was become wingless angels. You almost miss them!
Then there is your very first boss. That man! You knew Stephen King meant business when he wrote all those horror stories, because that boss of yours was a Stephen King material; the incarnation of a ‘Coonan the Barbarian’ sort of villain. Somehow you felt his only mission in life was to push you over the cliff! He even had that fearsome mustache!
Well, compared to your current boss the other one was the perfect claimant for a front row seat in Heaven. Your present boss doesn’t have a mustache. But, he messes with his hair dye and the edge of his forehead looks like a Juventus FC shirt. He messes with your life and you have started reading the scriptures if only to keep yourself from some personal Armageddon. This one was actually doing everything to push you over the cliff because of your political belief or even ethnicity!
Yes, the mustache fellow was a saint!
And the memories flood you brain. In your earlier life you thought no one was nice to you. Every other guy had the dagger behind his back and was waiting for the moment to make you cry out loud, “You too, Brutus!” You could even have written on your bedroom wall, “Everyone hates me:”
You have carried over “Everyone hates me,” through the years and you now feel they have set up the electric chair waiting to make a barbeque of your skinny, two-meals-a day person. But this time people are really NOT nice to you; “Period!” as the hapless Spicer guy would have told you. And people don’t beat around the bush to make you know that they don’t like you. What have you done to them! Nothing, absolutely nothing!
And that landlord! You really had some chemistry with that guy! He even invited you over for holidays. Of course, be sure for rent raise notifications every year, and he did it with the broadest smile. And your present landlord! Well, simply put, he is the human version of a CCTV camera. The moment you put on a new shirt he knows; the moment you replaced your pillow he knows; the moment you have your radio fixed he knows. And as compliment he slaps you with rent rises every three or four months.
You are told, “Hope for the better, prepare for the worst.” Isn’t that nice! The problem is that, many of us feel there anything better to hope for. Everything looks bleak. ‘Bleak’ is the order of the day. But then, maybe bleak might also work for how we are looking at life in the first place.
