Wednesday, June 15, 2011

A Budweisered Day

Four hardy soldiers standing resolutely against the vast forces, it was a show day.
Ansin (the fearless), Abhimanyu (the invulnerable), Kobir (the immovable) and ofcourse I (the legen’dary’) were out there to create history at the sandy battle field of chowpatkshetra the previous day. Ok, let me alert you it is not simple and trivial. Blessed with a futuristic vision, we all carried our armaments despite that there was no sign of assail ... apart from petty drizzle I admit. We had nothing except corns to feed us since past thhhirtttyyy minutes and were somehow dragging our bodies on miniaturely-Huge sand dunes. Guess what! ... Suddenly we were totally skirted by Nimbus, whose numbers outweighed us by thousands, well prepared to bang us with pointed spears. It was dead silence all over, the moments resisted to pass by, but i had to make a decision for my men and our glory, either to bow down and beg for life or to fight until martyrdom... my hands trembled for a moment, the shield went heavy and the spear fell down... and after a pause, my fists clenched rock hard... shield clutched to hands as if it were part of me and the four of us, exactly in same fashion as in movie “300”, screamed the shibboleth “WE ARE SPARTANS” and took positions close to each other and guarded ourselves up with the umbrellas ... OK yeah am talking about getting struck in a rain, but this wasn’t any other simple rain ..It was THE RAIN.
It was the most ferocious rain i ever seen and truly, we enjoyed out being there on the chowpaty beach. The sea water was so desperate to break the borders and so were we to stand firm against the raging tides. We did this activity for fifteen/twenty minutes until one huge tide misbehaved and... wet my cell phone right there in my jeans’ pocket. But everything comes at a cost and so did that terrific experience of facing the high tides with friends... in rain and on beach, annddd being followed by unblinkingly curious eyes of pretty girls (well, i am not stressing the last part though).
After having both salty and sweet shower (in sea followed by rain), we moved on to grab some beer. Few minutes of maundering on streets, rain still singing its shower, and we holding our folded/packed umbrellas in hand (actually we four were having only three umbrellas so we thought why to leave odd one out... let’s all get odd and get wet), reached a beer shop. We were greeted by dubious gaze of red coats, also known as waiters. Oh! Come on have you never seen “aquatic creatures”? we’re just extra wet, so what? Our leaking clothes do not disqualify us from having beer here dude...this was what I would have said if they did not allow us in, but nothing of that sort happened and infact we were offered one beer free on purchase of three (rainy discount).
It was a perfect wet day, we were completely wet both from outside and inside. As the time passed, the equation became inversely proportional, the more our clothes run dry the more we run wet. As the saying goes, “if the rate of change outside exceeds the rate of change inside, the end is in sight”, we truly believed it so we consumed faster than our clothes dried up. Have you ever felt this flaky tendency of sticking to multiple of a certain number and if that multiple crosses by even marginally, you just rush through all other numbers to reach the next multiple, as mostly happens in the morning while leaving bed that you watch time clock and commit yourself to wake up at exact multiple of fifteen. So, after having four, Abhimanyu called for the fifth one and hey... the wheel could only stop at multiple of four in this case (3 + 1 free), so we ended up at eight. The faces at our nearby tables kept changing every half hour but we stayed there for long until we could not take any more hit on our pockets... yeah the bill also went in multiple of four and in four digits... what an irony!
The beach, the rain, the beer all are mundane until friends are around, may be because friends pretend/prove to be good listeners when you are drunk. That’s why i came back to room all happy and empty headed that day, am sure I dumped all my cheesy thoughts in front of three good listeners... and apparently, SO DID THEY. But who bothers, this is what friendship is.
Friends ON THE ROCKS.