Graduate Life

There he was, grinning his face off, looking outside the plane window. "I am going to the United States of America, yoo hoo". He glanced beside him and looked askance "Why did he have to come?". Of all the nutty things in the world, his dad had to accompany him till Mumbai. As if he is going to miss his flight to USA and start making his living selling peanuts at Chandni Chowk.

Meet Madhushekara Sarvanathan alias Mads, previously seen in Coimbatore looking at the half broken mirror in his house, staring intently at the redness of his cheek. But why is his cheek red, the reader might ask. Look no further, this is going to be it. An hour previous to the looking at the mirror(70 mins to be exact, but the exact details do not matter, do they?), Mads was standing at a bus stop with his close friends, Prashant and Avinash. To give a short description of his friends, Prashant was vertically challenged and about the nicest thing that could be probably said about him is that he was a fool. Avinash was probably dropped on his head when he was a baby (his mother swears not, but you can't trust mothers, can you). You would think that a thing that happened about twenty years back, could not be noticed now, right? Wrong, anybody looking at Avinash would go, "Now there's a guy who was dropped on his head when he was baby". Unerringly and the first time too. Anyway, we digress, the reader is probably asking "Could we please continue with the red cheek?". Cutting to the chase, standing at the bus stop, Mads espied a girl walking to the bus stop. As their usual wont, a Rajni song filled the air accompanied with numerous beats on the columns of the bus-stop. The girl as girls go, was not a girl who Wordsworth would say "Ahh.." and then launch into a poem about lilies and daffodils. Anyway, you can't trust these poet chaps. They espew some lines and there is a queue of girls bigger than than the crowd in Kumbham Jathra fighting for every inch of space around them. Contrast this with a non-poet chap saying some Vijaykanth songs, you would be guaranteed to have space larger than two blocks, unless of course some animals decide to join in. Anyway, Meen's hopes soared as the girl seemed to be approaching having a smile on her face. Well, it happened quicker than you could say Missisippi. Our hero's cheeks had a beautiful imprint of a hand with 3 rings. 3 rings and the reader would go, "So that's why these Indian girls wear so many rings". Mads' face undeniably had an imprint of a hand on it, but there was no mistaking the wounded expression. Prashant and Avinash seemed to have mysteriously disapparated. Just like those Genie folks, one moment you are chatting pleasantly about your 3 wishes and the next moment you are alone as the moment when you unintentionally shared your biological weapons in the class room.

Our hero walked home with a thoughful expression. He went straight up to his room, ignoring his mother's cry of hot dosa availability. An hour later, he was still thinking about the words of the girl with 3 rings. Goes to show why girls should be banned from watching movies. Before, a girl slapping a guy would be content saying "Loafer, don't you have a sister/mother" stuff. But now, with seeing all those movies, the girls seem to be relishing an opportunity to explore their oratory skills. Looking at a skinny Brahmin Tamil girl with stripes on her forehead, the reader would go "Now there's a girl who knows her Vedas" and then be tangentially off-path. But anyway, the more Mads wondered about her vocabulary and thought about her, the more he was sure that he recognised her. Finally, he had it, she was his father's friend's daughter at the religious concert. Now, there was going to be trouble, he felt it. Sure enough, he heard his father's voice downstairs asking his mother about him. As he slowly walked down the stairs, he formed a plan.

When his father spoke to him, it was a tone of acerbity. As Wodehouse would have put it, he spoke with a certain why-do-you-do-these-things in his voice, and Mads could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled. Some people seem to have a gift, whether it is picking up the ripe tomato at the super mart or winning dumb charades. Mads' father had always seemed to have a gift of sarcasm, but that day, he surpassed himself, raising himself to unparalleled heights. Smelling the burnt dosa from the kitchen, Mads could see that his mother was deeply moved. Seeing no way out, he outlined his plan, "I am going to USA". The next moment, his mother was uttering "Hallelujah" and doing her best imitation of Jayalalitha dancing. Now the reader would go, "does Jayalalitha dance"? Well, that is a moot point and so we move on. His father thought it over and being the sort of father that he was, he could see the advantages afforded by his fool of a son going to America. "America had to suffer one day", he thought and nodded his head.

Now we rejoin Mads on his flight.