Loonville

Author’s note: No, the author isn’t a lecherous-good-for-nothing male who goes around plying his trade in crowded PTC buses.

It is after a long period of inner conflict that I decided to make this public. I could have chosen to let this remain in the closet with no soul any wiser (well, an evil acquaintance, a dozen strangers and a couple of waiters don’t actually count) but since I have never denied my readers a good laugh, here we go.

A fortnight back, I and a certain CAT cramming friend of mine spent a week traveling across Raj Thackray’s stronghold, pretending to be a bunch of nonchalant marathi youth with a propensity to foul language. The marathi act failed miserably. Atleast half a dozen people called Pachu ‘medrasi’, an honour that wasn’t bestowed upon me *shamefaced*.

“Macha seruppu enna pannurathu”

(what do we do with the shoes ? )

Pachu jarred my reverie. We were in a cramped hotel room, fifty feet and two minutes away from an over-crowded temple in Pune. It was darshan time. We decide to scurry along, given the rains and the muck on the road or even worse the over-friendly room boy who was eying my brand new phone.

Ten minutes of acrobatics later, we land up near the entrance of the temple and find that our footwear must go.

At this point, let us digress to look at the state of our very soiled “chappals”

SiDo – a six month old extremely comfortable FILA slip ons.

Pachu- brand new designer shoes he tells me.

We make a real quick decision. Rather, the irate security guard and a mob threatening to bite our heads off, make it for us. Leave it right at the entrance with another hundred odd pairs. It can’t be that bad. Or so we thought.

Three hours of queue-walking, harried darshan , trinket buying and a long tortuous journey back to the place where we left our precious footwear, what the readers had guessed five minutes earlier had happened. MY CHAPPALS GONE. Pachu slips on his shoes with a wry smile. Why would somebody want my worn-out footwear when shiny Pachu shoes were right next to it, in fact right on top of it? Half an hour of searching in the rain was to no avail. It was gone. I was tempted to flick a very cozy looking pair like the queer old man next to me did. But my conscience, okay, Pachu gave me this self-righteous glare which I would have most certainly given him; had the tables been turned. In a darkly lit street of a remote village in Maharashtra, I find a seedy shop where i buy a pair of regal looking chappals after much hilarity and haggling in broken marathi/hindi/tamil/mandarin. I strut around the next couple of days in Pune wearing my new, a tad uncomfortable chappals.

A week later, back in Tamil-land, with my three day ‘designer stubble’, unkempt clothes but regal chappals , I give an extremely sleepy Pachu a ride back to his place. The Fruit Shop looked inviting on the way back and in minutes I am comfortably plopped into my favorite corner with a glass of Spitfire. Uncharacteristically, there were a bunch of nubile young things on the next table. My swank phone is immediately out and I proceed to decimate the English language in what I believe is a Texan drawl. Ah, but the heads turn. I do a backflip ( in my imagination, of course) The tawdriness quotient increases exponentially. All was fine till Zaheera walked in.

“Hey babe”

” What the fuck? Why are you wearing ladies’ chappals? “

Laughter all around.

Quite regal I must say..

PS – If you run into me anytime now, please don’t look at my feet.