About the awesome moments in our lives…
You are driving. With little foresight you had emptied pitchers and pitchers of water before the journey. Blame yourself. If water goes in, it must find a way out.
See. It finds it out.
You hear it trickling in and sloshing inside the check dam deep below. The alarm rings now. No problem. So long as there are roads, there are road sides too. You only have to switch off your environ-conscience for a few secs to pull over your car, jump out and take a metre-long leak.
So, all your systems are alerted and the senses are locked on the roadside to pick a proper spot to pull over the vehicle. As peeing is not a communal activity you have to zero in on an isolated stretch on the highway, far away from the madding crowd.
The game heats up now.
The moment you locate an isolated patch and jump out, some bloody beggar loiters in from outside the screen. Had it been a photograph, you could have cropped him out. But this, no.
You throw yourself back in the car; dash off to find the next spot. Even the car now moves at an angle with its bumper looking anxiously on the roadside to find a patch of earth, devoid of human presence. You don’t mind the cows and dogs anymore, so long as they don’t chuckle at or report what they see. But people!
Deep below your belly, things are getting out of control. The shutters dent with the pressure of water. Would this car become your coffin, you wonder. What would be the newspaper reports of your demise be like, in the morning? It will be one great laugh for the forensic doctor and the police. Even your wife would laugh herself to death in the bathroom when nobody watches her grieving.
Do you want such a death? No.
Another couple of turns, you find an empty stretch. You slough the car off and crawl towards the thicket waiting for you. Hey, freeze! Tuck it back. The thicket moves, and the grey hair of an old woman bobs up. She has a machete in her hands, her eyebrows in question mark.
“Hi ammoomme…just enjoying the beauty of nature. How wonderful this place is, alle?” You say with a silly smile, suddenly looking around to savour the stunning nature with dreamy eyes. Dirty heaps of leaves, rubble of metal, spittles of various sizes, shapes and complexions, cow dung, new, old and archaic, veg and non-veg waste, overfilled gutters – you cannot complain.
The old woman shakes her head and continues hacking at the thicket. This woman has attained moksha, you are so sure; she will go straight to the feet of Vishnu with her mission accomplished, the moment you drive your car off the spot.
You zip off to the next spot. The tank deep under is bursting to its seams. But hardly any empty stretches: schools suddenly disperse, shops disgorge more people than they consume, old men prattle about the meaninglessness of life especially in their old wives…all are on the road for no reason.
Paulo Coelho, you grind your teeth now. You messed up the old saying, Coelho. If you have a strong desire, the whole world conspires against you. Try peeing, you’ll rewrite the book.
You start thinking about the good things in life in a vain attempt to snag yourself from the nagging thought. But a filled urinary bladder is all brain. Inspite of all the clutter on the road, it picks up a dog with one leg perched on a milestone, oblivious of the world going by (And they say you are leading a dog’s life!), the temple cows on the roadside peeing even while walking, the birds doing it in mid-flight, the worms doing it and not looking back beyond its last compartment in shame.
But you, homo-sapien! You are at the pinnacle of life forms, and you cannot even pee!
And at a moment you feel giving it up, an empty patch of earth appears in a turn. You throw your car to a nearby ditch. Jump to the bushes like Tarzen. Flip it out like Clint Eastwood. And turn yourself marble like the heroes of G. Aravindan. Your vision blurs. Enlightenment….
Ah! Awesome! Bliss is in this place to be alive, and to be peeing is very heaven.
Earlier Awesome Freekicks: All for Chicken
My sister told me that if it was a girl’s version, it would have been a longer and a more painful one. I agree 😀
😀 😀 😀 LOL 😀