Recently Mail Today asked me to write an anecdotal article for them. It got published on 31st Jan’10 (best viewed in IE).  Here’s the unedited version of the article (which has one anecdote extra). Awaiting bouquets/brickbats in comments.

It’s a Woe-Man’s world

“Some husbands are living proof that a woman can take a joke”. How else does one explain the umpteen number of smart, intelligent, independent women getting married to chauvinists & changing their entire outlook for that mandatory milestone in life that we call “marriage”? They believe they need to either do that, or get slotted into the “failure” category. I see some of them living double lives – one when they are outside the home and one when they are under scrutiny of their in-laws.

Gone are the days when the typical matrimony setup had the boy’s family visiting the girl’s with the girl coyly handing out tea & demonstrating her obligatory culinary/sewing/singing/knitting (take your pick) skills. Cut to the present – now families meet in public places a.k.a. crowded cafes where the ‘boy’ & the ‘girl’ are given some time alone after both parties size each other in noisy environs & wonder who’ll foot the bill. Most such meetings end up poorly (literally) since there’s hardly any interaction before the two parties meet, no picture exchange, the only conversations on phone being limited to the “elders”. The entire premise is based on the concept of suitable “bio data” where almost everyone writes things like “hobbies – listening to music” and at most horoscope matching. The ‘boy’ & ‘girl’ in question usually squirm under the scrutiny of the opposite party, utter obligatory nonsense and return back with the real picture getting clearer much later with a phone call. One figures that the only “type” one would meet under these circumstances are “mama’s boys”.

A better method still, some “boys” & “girls” and sometimes even entire families, hang around on matrimonial websites a.k.a. glorified dating sites (& other unmentionable terms in a family newspaper). The goal for at least some of us, is to meet educated, employed, decent AND available men (the last being a very important attribute since most available men lack the first three qualities). But the assumption that one would meet such men beyond the realm of their mother’s pallus, shatters soon enough with the kind of experiences one faces on such sites.

Take for instance the typical “orkut fraandsheep request” type users who flock the site, spamming anyone with a profile, after all it takes only a click. Or the freeloaders with a daily income less than the cost of a peanut butter jar, who can’t write to save their life. I’ve been contacted by men between the ages of 21-62, with professions as varied as “Sweeper” to “Zamindar”, marital status ranging from divorcee-with-2-kids to got-married-a-month-back-now-separated. Some weirdos give reasons like “I’ve no problem with the age difference of just 6 months but my parents want an age difference of at least 3 years” as if its the parents who were going to wed me. Some (including the weirdo category) forget having been written off via a previous profile of theirs & reconnect anyway, when they create a new profile all over again. The online world does give freedom of expression but seemingly the parental pallu extends here too at times! Right from being called up early one morning by an NRI who was ensuring that I was female, thanks to a bad experience with a gay masquerading as a girl on a matrimonial site, to hearing about how one “profile user” stole another’s credit card when they met, to people plagiarizing someone elses pictures & passing them off as their own forgetting that SOME day they’ll meet people they contact, to the people one rejects stalking one on ones social networking profiles – I’ve seen it all!

But don’t take me to be “choosy” just yet. I went through the matrimonial process for many years, putting in my entire free time into the search & approached it very methodically. Taking a cue from another “organised user”, to make sense of the information overload, I maintained excel sheets for the various people I contacted & those who contacted me. The sheet got updated daily with the meticulousness & dedication I would assign only to my finances. Talking of finances, I might as well add, working in the IT industry for several years put me in a decent salary bracket & allowed me to possess my own car and house. With time, I moved out of my parents place and started living independently in the aforementioned house & swooshed around the city in the aforementioned car. Now that is considered a very bad move as far as the marriage market is concerned. I instantly got typecasted into the “fiercely independent” category and I could imagine the rejection thought process of the parents of prospective grooms – “live in boyfriends”, “can’t adjust into family”, you get the picture. Having a head between my shoulders, that actually does think & opine, does not help matters either. With time, taking cue from some online matrimonial profiles which stated clearly that they were looking for people earning as much or above their salary level, I added something to that effect in my profile as well. As expected I received mixed results. Some people could identify with it, whereas a lot of others contacted me on the sites only to harass me for the “attitude”. One guy wrote “You have such proud (sic), just coz u have lakshmi ki kripa.” That response was just begging for a reply & got it. I wrote “Yes, I am blessed with Lakshmi ki kripa, but you aren’t even blessed with Saraswati ki kripa — you can’t even write properly!”. Another user with misplaced patriotism contacted me just to tell me “You Pakis! Just go back to your country!” because my profile stated that my grandparents had migrated during partition from what is now Pakistan!

Even the traditional methods like matrimonial ads in newspapers or getting details of eligible matches through family friends & relatives yield similar results. In one particular instance the family seemed great, the “boy” seemed charming & possessed the four above mentioned attributes. Everything seemed just picture perfect. The family wanted to meet me & my parents at their place. Eventually we met & they instantly adopted me as their would-be daughter-in-law. The “boy’s” mom couldn’t stop fawning over me and kept gushing about something or the other. So much sudden love completely freaked me out. But it all fell into place when the hyperexcited mom of the boy in question took me aside & gave me a short lecture about how men are always careless, fickle minded, naughty and give in to temptations and how it was up to “us women”, the honourable creatures who could hold fort in such situations. Later the “boy” confessed to having been caught by his parents in a compromising position with a, well … friend. Ekta Kapoor’s serials had not started then, else the gushing mother in law, would have been quite the perfect caricature!

Even if one ignores the rotten apples, it’s a fact that most men in the marriage market have their expectations arising from the typical image of a wife who is “gharelu”, submissive, doesn’t talk back and “obeys”, perhaps created by the way we are brought up. Didn’t some elders say, TV is the root cause of all evil? It certainly rings true in this context.

Is it a crime if a woman is more successful or smarter than her better half? Well most men take that as a sign of their own failure. Some of my classmates from engineering, well educated people with good family backgrounds, actually wanted a wife who would NOT work after marriage! Strangely they never had a problem dating their own ambitious classmates from college but when it comes to the “wife search” it’s perhaps more about the apprehensions of these men than about the attributes of the women they look for! Surprisingly having a sister who also aspires to be independent doesn’t make any difference when the search for another female family member commences. The hypocrisy continues. I have observed that parents who believe in stereotypes mostly impose them on their progeny too. Someone who has the freedom to make his/her own choices is the kind of person who would also respect his better half’s choices & not get intimidated by them. The search for that kind of someone is still on, but till the time, the elusive groom who fits required attributes and does NOT get intimidated by me, comes, I go by what Carrie Bradshaw says “Why get married and make one man miserable when I can stay single and make thousands miserable?”

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Here’s the red wine for those who didn’t get to have it at my place.

For the lovely combination of fire and wine,
and all utterly beauteous things divine,
On this valentine’s day,
I asked all lenses and cameras in sight,
the eternal question – “will you be mine?”.

I just love the combination of the red wine held over the bright fire. It is so visually appealing. Clicked at Sonapani. Quick 2 minute poem by self. Much merriment.

Made it to explore #276, 9Feb’08

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In the sweltering summer heat,
when even the roads are asweat,

I feel my legs are liquefied so,
this summer heat is going to make my body flow,

Like a tired old flower I wilt,
I try collecting myself together before I melt,

Cool cool icy water is a respite to my body,
but what about my eyes which feel so groggy,

Before I can liquesce any further, I spot you standing there,
Without meaning to, I begin to unabashedly stare,

You look so inviting, you are a pleasure to my eyes,
I feel as if for endurance of this heat, you are the prize,

Aah, looking at you makes me feel so fresh,
I peer futher into that yellow mesh,

‘Cause yellower than mustard and brighter than brass,
are your pretty petals – Amaltas.

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The “City of Djinns” doesn’t need any introduction. Neither the book nor the mystical city. William Dalrymple, born in Scotland, visited India around 1989 and stayed for 4 years during which he penned the book – ‘City of Djinns’. This book won the Thomas Cook travel book award. This is the story of one year in our very own city – Delhi, the city of Djinns. Djinns are supposedly another race like us, fashioned from fire, spirits invisible to the naked eye – one needs to fast and pray to see them.

William Dalrymple describes Delhi as “Full of riches and heroes, a labyrinth city of palaces, open gutters, filtered light through filigree lattices, choke of fumes and whiff of spices”. He unveils the ’seven dead cities’ of Delhi in his book, the current being the 8th. Some even count the number as 15. These are nothing but a representation of the number of times Delhi has been destroyed and rebuilt. There are pieces of history lingering in every such city. Different areas of Delhi, preserve different centuries, even different millennia. Punjabi immigrants (form the recent day Delhi), old majors in Lodhi garden, old city eunuchs speaking courtly Urdu, Sadhus at Nigambodh ghat (depicting Indraprastha – first Delhi from Mahabharat) all form Delhi. Indraprastha was invaded & burned and yet it rose like a phoenix from fire, like hindus believe.

WD’s landlady for these 4 years was Mrs. Puri, a sikh from Lahore, expelled during partition, lost everything, rebuilt from scratch (like most punjabi immigrants). Her husband who was intermittently senile (he went crazy since 1984 Sikh riots), firmly believed that Mr. William had kept some mules ‘upstairs’. WD’s book talks about his experiences as a foreigner in this city – unused to domestic help and traffic snarls, his trysts with MTNL (which he called ‘an empire dedicated to beuracratic obfuscation), Delhi marriages which go on throughout the night, festivals like Holi, Diwali, Id, Dussehra and the fervour with which these are celebrated. WD goes on to talk about the 1984 riots, the partition and how these incidents affected people. The account is interspersed with amusing wit where his sikh driver – Balwinder Singh – points out ‘eye candy’ on the streets (clearly something WD is totally unused to) or tries communicating in his limited english resulting in some humourous misunderstandings. WD describes Shahjehanabad – the city established by Shah Jehan. He also visits Karachi where they asked him about certain ‘gullis’, or whether the streets still looked the same as before partition, (through whatever was left of them in their memory). There he meets the author of the book ‘Twilight in Delhi’ – a very good and accurate account of Delhi before the partition. Karachi itself looked very similar to Delhi – reconstructed.

People in Delhi believe in a certain prophecy that whosoever builds a new city, consequently loses it. History vouches for the same. Pandavas, Prithviraj Chauhan, Feroz Shah Tughlak, Shah Jahan are all examples of that. WD moves on to describe Lutyens Delhi and specifically its architecture. He gives accounts of someone who had seen it being built as a child. Events like the persian massacres of 1739 and the British recapture of 1857 are woven into his historical account. He writes about Nadir Shah and the British Resident – Sir David Ochterlony – who lived like a Moghul. He beautifully highlights the cultural amalgamation that followed in terms of the architecture in this era in ‘Dehlee’ and ‘Hurriyana’. Till date, the British residency supposedly retains some part of the mughal architecture (the moghul ruins on which it was built). WD also happens to read the letters from one particular British Resident – 183 years later at the same desk at which the resident wrote them. He writes about Angloindians, who suffer the worst racial prejudices of Indians and the British Both.

His culturally rich, amply researched and historically lush account mentions a lot of aspects of all cultures that Delhi has seen – for eg. Kabootar Baazi – a sport prevalent in old Delhi, Eunuchs and the way they exist. He talks about historical figures like Shah Jehan, Dara Shikoh, Aurangzeb, Roshanara Begum, their related history and their associated establishments – Shahjehanabad, Aurangabad, Roshanara Bagh, Shalimar Bagh etc. He writes about how Aurangzeb ousted his favoured brother Dara Shikoh and crowned himself in Shalimar Bagh, beheaded Dara Shikoh and sent his head on a platter to an imprisoned Shah Jehan just before his prison meal. The barbaric nature of the Moghuls is clearly evident through several tales.

This book also brings to light several interesting things to the unaware reader. Apart from the cultural, historical, architectural narratives, it contains things which I am sure many of us never knew. He mentions that the Britishers are to blame for diverting the ‘Jumna’ and laying in its place a main road so that the Mughal pavillions in Red Fort look out not to a source of water but onto a road – MG Road, one of the most noisy and polluted stretch of the Ring Road! WD also interviews Fakeerah Sultan Begum – the great grand daughter of Aurangzeb(!) who’s still alive and talks about Delhi as “her” city.

A ‘must read’ is a mild description for this book. More than a book, it is a time travel machine which takes you back several years and several centuries without never really leaving the present. It makes you realise that you were unaware of such treasures in your own backyard all this while. This enriching and informative book makes history look like an interesting dream where some bits are still fresh in my mind, bits where I experience the thrill of discovering something, some bits are sadly erased permanently and I am unable to recollect them and then there are still some, which I am trying to recollect, by digging deep through my memory. I want to know more by exploring whatever I have today. Something that textbook history could never achieve. Go ahead and read this book for accounts of Ibn Batuta’s travel adventures, Yunani medicine, Hakims, Hindi Gaalis!, Nizamuddin saints, Elusive eunuchs, Djinns which got captured, Kaurav’s capital – Hastinapur and many more interesting things while I take a copy with me to revisit Shalilmar Bagh, Roshanara Bagh, and Begumpur (On way to Mehrauli) where Mohd. Bin Tughlak had his palace. Not every city has a spirit of its own, but djinns or no djinns, Delhi does.

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Warning: a little amateurish

“You are invited. You must come.” The loud comment made in my general direction by that old man in a crushed kurta pyjama, silver hair matching it, broke my train of thoughts as I stared out of the balcony. “Yes uncle.” My sister managed to stutter, as I looked at her in despair. How could I tell him that I was not willing to. He would just brush aside my unfounded fears, so unexpected of someone educated. If I repeated the fact that years ago an old lady was murdered here in the kitchen, her throat slit, her body decaying when found, and that this repulsed me enough to never enter that house again, he would just give me a ‘you know better than to be scared of an unfortunate incident of the past’ look. But I couldn’t help it.

“There would be so many people around. Ghosts don’t lurk in crowds”, I chided myself. “It’s a moment of festivity and I must go”, I reasoned with myself, looking at the string of lights that decorated the ’shaadi wala ghar’ right opposite my balcony. The vision of an old red brick house surrounded by complete darkness, with just one torch light bobbing up and down the kitchen, made me break into cold sweat. “I must replace that old vision with this new one. See the festive look, the gaiety, and the cheer. That episode is all over now.” I felt a little comforted.

The d-day came and I, trying to suppress my unfounded fears, put on a gorgeous lehenga and a plastic smile to go with it. I was welcomed to the sound of ladies sangeet with a dholak, all of them sitting on the floor. I was given a spot on the duree. Just when I was getting a little comfortable with the feeling that there was no ghost bursting through the roof, I realised to my horror that I was sitting at the spot at which the body had been found. The kitchen had long ago been refurbished and made a part of the sitting room. With an instant jerk, I got up and excused myself to go to the toilet. “Relax. Just stay for half an hour and discreetly pop in back to your house. After all it’s right opposite.” I looked at my own house out of the window and pictured a little girl, scared stiff – me about 20 years ago, looking at the murder spot with horror.

As I opened the tap to splash some cool water on my perspiring brow, I deliberated with myself, “Enough, for how long can you fool yourself. It’s high time this place got some justice.”
I walked purposefully to the pooja room where uncle was now doing his final prayers before coming out to join the ladies. It wasn’t everyday that his daughter got married.

I stealthily tiptoed from behind and shaping my dupatta like a noose, tightened it around his neck. My hand covered his nose and mouth, blocking a scream as well as the air his lungs screamed for. When I felt his body going limp, I let go. I walked out coolly as if nothing had happened, having sought vengeance at last.

With satisfaction I watched as the scene changed from celebration to mourning. No one could understand how the old man got asphyxiated.

“He met his deserved death if what we heard was true”, whispered one visitor to another. “It is believed that he murdered his old mother for the property. Curiously enough, even a little girl aged 6 in the opposite house was also found dead. The police were speculating that she might have been a sole witness to the incident from her balcony. Till date no one could prove anything against him.”

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Another one bites the dust. Literally. I witnessed the death of yet another house. This was the third one in a week. It’s a depressing sight. Seeing the carcass of what was once someone’s home. In some time, the skeleton also becomes visible. One can see each and every intimate detail of the house, without ever having visited the place. The bedrooms, where the residents would have slept or shared a private moment. The almirahs which would have cased clothes, jewellery, nick nacks and what not. Only this time, they have a deserted, ‘final’ look about them. Some posters on the walls are still there. The walls have dust patterns depicting rectangles which shows where the family would have hung paintings or maybe portraits of an ancestor. The kitchen looks naked, devoid of its usual utensils, jars, gas burner and the like. The lady of the family would have cooked here. The bathrooms lie bare. It becomes almost embarassing to watch as the ‘private parts’ or rather the sancta sanctorum of the house get exposed to the world. The terrace and the staircase where the children would have gamboled about is almost about to collapse. The occasional tree and the plants if any, are almost gone and forgotten. They bear the look of orphans left behind by their parents. In a few days all this is reduced to dust.

But this isn’t all. Unlike human lives, houses live forever. They rise like a phoenix from the ashes. No soon has the house ‘bitten the dust’ than another one resurrects. This time with a better look about it. A modern architecture. More capacity. Stylish facades, porches and arches. Portruding terraces and balconies. Modern mousetraps, all. Soon it will be inhabited like nothing happened.

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“I Love You”, he said with all the courage he could muster, his heart pounding so loud that he imagined his words to be lost in the thumping sound.

“What????!!!!”, she said. Her reaction wasn’t quite unexpected.

“I am not expecting anything in return…I just wanted to let you know of my feelings.”, he blurted.

“Forget expecting or not expecting anything..do you even *know* what you just said? How can you even *say* that to me!!! Just how long has it been since you have known me?”, she asked.

“Errr.. not even a month”.

“Exactly!!”

“Do you even *know* what love is?”, she asked rhetorically.

“Have *you* experienced it?”, he volleyed.

“What do you think I am talking abt then?”. His sinking feeling sank even further. He knew he couldn’t expect her to love back. He knew that she was never to be his. But for her to have loved and been loved by someone else was more painful than he had imagined.

“Well, I think of you all the time. You are on my mind whatever I may try to think of and I can just not let you out of my system, however hard I have tried.”.

“Oh! So that’s what you think love is? That’s called infatuation for your kind information. Go take a vacation for a month and let see if you still remember me when you come back”.

“No, it’s NOT infatuation”, he vehemently added..steaming up a little. “I know that it *is* love. And it is unconditional even if it is unrequited”.

“If I could, I would have married you”, he added.

“Whaaaaat??????!!!!!!”. Her reaction was again not unexpected at all.

“Marriage? My GOD! You have really gone far in this imaginary world of yours.. haven’t you?”

“Well to tell you the truth.. I even thought about the kids…”, he added sheepishly as he saw her almost choke and her eyes pop out in reaction.

“Gosh!! Please stop it! I have had more than the-number-of-shocks-I-can-take-in-a-day”, she spluttered.

And they both laughed. It had lightened the obvious tension a little.

“But seriously.. what’s wrong with you? Have you forgotten that I am at least two years elder to you?”, she came back to the point soon. “What is this that you have suddenly started. Ok, the joke was funny.. now can we get back to work. This has been one hell of a tea break!”

“The age difference doesn’t matter to me.”, he justified. “I know what love is. It is *me* who has been experiencing it so strongly. I can do anything for you. You can try me. Go ahead”, he added.

“Oh please! Stop being filmy and all that. What you feel is simply infatuation. Mark my words. Grow up. And to reiterate, had you really been in “love”, you wouldn’t have made these silly claims of doing *anything* etc.”. She was beginning to lose her patience. Seeing his pained expression she added hurriedly, “Look.. ok.. I know how it feels.. I have been through it myself..it’s not as helpless as you seem to think.. not being able to think of anything else except me.. believe me I am not half as nice as what you are imagining me to be. You are looking at me through rose tinted glasses. Wake up to reality and it won’t be so difficult any more. That’s the way it is.”

“Well, to me you seem as nice as what I think. Anyway I am not forcing myself on you or anything. Just wanted to express myself and I did”.

*********

“Why are you smiling to yourself?”, she heard her husband asking. It broke her reverie and she tried to disguise the startle as her own movement.

“Oh…err.. nothing.. just that someone looked familiar…”, her voice trailed off as she saw that guy from her yesteryears going with a lady, a possessive arm around her and a sprightly looking kid prancing around them.

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Sitting at my window,
I can see the dark cloud,
I notice the silver lining for the first time,
it has me completely wowed.

The cloud keeps changing shape,
and looks different each time,
The darkness it seems to drape,
reminds me of a dilemma of mine.

The silver lining beckons me again,
only this time it seems to be clearer,
I realise too, that the problems are but small,
The main thing is the attitude of the bearer.


PS. Excuse the philosophical bent of mind as I composed this one minute poem.

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I look out the glass window,
The sky so azure and blue,
A fluff of peppered clouds wafts by,
Oh! How I wish I could float too…

On the wings of nostalgia I fly,
and remember times gone by,
The scent of fresh air, the crystal clear panorama,
all remind me of an evening with you.

The way we were caught in a spell of rain,
huddled like sparrows were us twain,
In dearth of umbrellas, a tree was our shelter,
To prevent ourselves from soaking, we only huddled closer.

Times have gone,
The rains did too.
The rains have come again,
and I still miss you.

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As I made my way through the bustling city peak hour traffic in my new swanky ferrous coloured rocket wagon, my audio perceptron tuned into a painful cry. What was so noticeable about it was the excruciatingly painful manner of it. I tried to make out the source of such agony, using my audio digital locator binoculars, (capable of focussing automatically on a sound source, if pointed in the general direction), and I noticed in the view panel that the usual barren and vast Geological Pathway – 8 had lush green things on its either sides.
It was an amazing sight, not having seen so much green together in a bunch my entire living period. The word ‘trees’ was flashing on the holographic panel inside my wagon. ‘Of course! That’s what they are! I must pay more attention to my primitive-history lessons’. I also noticed that the ride had become unusually bumpy. I decided to check whether the bottom panels showed any signs of rust as even the slightest fleck of dirt on the panels could hamper the smooth aerodynamics of my rocket wagon. After all it was supposed to glide on a water path. The ‘fluid amplifier’ seemed to be non-functional. As I peered down at X069, I uttered a cry of surprise for there was no water under my wagon but I was actually hovering over hard, tangible earthly surface instead of fluidic surfaces like I had always been! No wonder the air cushion wasn’t uniform. It didn’t even look algaec or slushy as a result of being under water. Rather it looked very different and sunkissed. Till now the DA322I dial was not reporting anything intelligible on a quick reconnaissance of orbital data. Slowly but surely, my audio binoculars showed me from that hovering height, where the cry had come from.

Some creatures that looked like people from some ancient epoch were standing near those things called ‘trees’. They looked pretty outdated. For one, their hair was mostly the same color – brown or black. They were also holding some outdated contraption – it looked like an electric saw of yesteryears that we had read about in our online lesson of primitive-history just the other day. They were not using any mechanism, which supplied oxygenated air to their respiratory tract. What was surprising was that the pitiful cries of the trees failed to make any impact on those outdated people I saw. I wondered if they could even hear the cries. I guessed not, since they anyway looked so primordial, it was quite probable that they had never set their eyes on the extra sensory auditory nerve chip, forget getting it embedded in their ear for that extra range of frequencies.

I pressed the button labeled ‘transparent’ and my wagon soon turned into a gust of wind, with me cocooned inside it. I could have pressed ‘smell’, ‘fire’ etc too but decided not to take the risk. After all I had to observe what was going on. My aeriform wagon now made its way to the tree that my audio binoculars had zeroed in on. The tree tried flapping its limbs in a last bid to save itself from those people but probably the last of life had seeped out of it and its massive body fell with a big thud on the pile of its already mutilated limbs. The atmosphere seemed sombre and grieving as I witnessed the murder. The looked up info had shown that the trees had life in them. So this was nothing short of cold blooded murder! The other trees seemed to be mourning the death of this mate of theirs who had stood with them through sun and storm alike for so many years. I could see them shed leaves probably the same way a human being sheds tears, all the while knowing that the next one in line could be anyone of them. I noticed some ‘X’ like red marking on the trees. It looked like blood oozing out of trees. I checked up again – ‘trees don’t have haemolymph’. Then I saw one of the people marking all the trees with the ‘Red Cross’. Ironically this Red Cross was earmarking them for impending death.

The air was becoming thick with the screams of massacre and was getting unbearable. It was worse than any cataclasm that I had ever heard. I wondered how those people could be that callous. Suddenly the rocket wagon gave a lurch (or so I thought) and I found myself toppled from the couch I was resting on. Realization dawned on me as I stared at one of the screens on the video panel, my online lesson on primitive history was showing me the text ‘Trees – now extinct’. I looked at panel XO2 displaying the outside view. I could again see the familiar Geological Pathway – 8, barren and vast. My wagon was smoothly cruising on a bed of water. As usual, I was on my way, through the bustling city peak hour traffic.

PS. Note from the writer :
Hope you liked this amateurish attempt at sci-fi. If so, another one can be read here. This was written much before the Mars rovers actually landed on Mars

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Warning: 1. For 18 years and above.
2. Written in college with a fellow benchmate during a sleepy lecture, I dont even remember who it was. Both of us took alternate turns to add lines to the nonsense, the italicized ones being mine.



This is a story,
of a thin, young man.
So thin, he ought to have been fed,
quintals of horse gram.

A teacher by profession,
well, would just pass for one.
A thin creature by constitution,
he would often faint under the sun.

But the queer thing about him was,
he had no bulge out *there*.
And a very obvious part of it,
was a lot of hair.

What happened to his wife,
we all did wonder.
Everytime seeing that patch,
did nothing to make her feel fonder.

Alas! what a pity,
’cause his wife was pure gold.
And one fine day,
her macho neighbour was a bit too bold.

A week or two all was well,
but two months later it began to swell!
One night when it was coming too much in the way,
She cried, ‘Oh Hell!!’

Her shriek awoke her husband,
And he shrieked even louder.
Not having fathered any kids,
a STRONG baby made him prouder.

He looked between his legs,
and then he looked at the sky,
He put 2 & 2 together,
and then began to cry.

Having been burdened,
all his life by ill fate,
Seeing the baby’s bulge,
He forgave his mate.

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© Twilight Fairy for Twilight Fairy, 2004. | ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Do not copy contents or images. If you like a post then link it back with an excerpt instead of copying it. Permalink |

Whoosh.. bump.. screech.. ow.. ow… ow.. glide.. phew.. there..managed a safe landing.. Hi Folks, I am back from my date with Mars and boy… was it heavenly!! As I had said I would be reporting about my adventures soon.. so here I am. So let me get straight to the point..On 27th night, I was watching Mars intently, waiting for an indication.. to be beamed over. I sat concentrating on the red dot in the sky.. till the time I could see nothing else but the red dot..(Something like Arjuna) With time I started hearing some inviting beeps and blips and suddenly felt as light as a feather.. I realised I was being *beamed* over to Mars!! From a distance, everything there, seemed to be bathed in red. On actually landing on Mars, I realised that it was very much like our planet, in terms of geographical surroundings. I mean there was *land* that I could feel and not a mass of gases or molten lava or anything like that. I could breathe easy.. and I suddenly felt an unexplainable calm descend over me. I wasn’t apprehensive about the idea of being on Mars anymore. I decided to get a li’l more adventurous and explore the vast expanse of land in front of me. All around me, I could just see just land and no inhabitation. Seemed weird, .. since I had been beamed there, someone must have been doing it! But there was no sign of anyone.
Suddenly realisation of various other differences in our planet and this planet on which I was a guest, dawned on me. The land didn’t have any greenery! There were no trees and no grass..It seemed to be night there but it wasn’t absolutely dark. There was a reddish hue to everything. I couldn’t see water anywhere and set out to find something to quench my thirst with. Almost as if someone could read my mind, I spotted something that looked like icicles hanging from a rock. Albeit my apprehensions, something made me decide that I should try it as a substitute for water..In fact I could almost hear a voice in my head urging me to try it. Weird again, I *dont* hear voices in my head but this time I was sure I did!!
So try I did, and it turned out to be cool ice after all. By now, I started wondering about why or how Mars was the way it is and what made it so barren, yet not unwelcoming. Maybe, there was life on the planet at some point of time..but signs of existing life were definitely not there. Maybe long before the Earth got inhabited, there did exist a whole spatial colony out there, and maybe because of the heat of the Sun dwindling down, the conditions were not favourable enough for life on it any longer. But then, since someone had beamed me up there, there must be someone controlling the whole episode. As I thought about this, again a voice popped into my head and gave me an affirmative indication! I swirled around but there was no one I could attribute the voice to. I looked up and saw the same familiar stars that I could see from my balcony every night.
It was time to be getting back to bed. And just as I thought about it, I heard another voice bidding me adieu. Again, no one! I went back to where I had landed and I could see a tunnel of reddish light extending up in the sky. As I stepped closer to it, somehow I seemed to have the answers to all that I was wondering about. Men are from Mars… that just explained the absence of intelligent life on the planet

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© Twilight Fairy for Twilight Fairy, 2003. | ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Do not copy contents or images. If you like a post then link it back with an excerpt instead of copying it. Permalink |