Fueling Thoughts

  The voice on the phone delivered a phrase most men dread hearing from a woman, “Ravi, I have something important to tell you!”    In this case though, despite being completely smitten with her during that period and even entertaining the rose-tinted fantasy that she was the one who got away, I had nothing to worry about. My strict code of not getting involved with married women kept me safe.    I was, however, totally unprepared for what followed and even less how to visualise it.    “My third eye has opened,” she announced with absolute seriousness, then launched into a ramble about Shiva Lingams, visions, stream of consciousness and pre-Columbian Hinduism as evidenced by how a US state, made famous by fried chicken, was actually named after the Sanskrit word for thorns "Kanthaka". It is usually not very easy to unsettle or surprise me with things spiritual, bottled or otherwise, and her cosmic revelations too barely moved the needle. Well, except f...

  I first tasted deep shame in 10th standard, delivered personally by a girl’s mother, who kicked me out of their house like some neighbourhood pervert. The irony - I had never touched the girl. We were just friends. Soon afterwards, my friends in her school, some gleefully to cause hurt, others as a word of caution, filled my ears about she was caught with some boy in the school toilet. They faced disciplinary action.  While, I inherited the silent disgrace.   The second blow came when I confessed to a friend’s girlfriend, who thought I was a Casanova, that I never had a girlfriend, or touched a girl, and that I was completely inexperienced. In contrast, she had been sleeping with her coach since school, followed by a relay race of men, eventually devirginized my friend, then when he left for higher studies, helped his best friend become a man. A few more years and bodies later, she married a gold digger from the back end of nowhere - that's decades before Soci...

The only thing feminine in “luck” is its fickle nature. The down-on-his-luck (so he said) builder came to me through a mutual friend, clutching his tattered horoscope. My reputation as a seer was not built on the “says what you want to hear” charm of Asterix’s soothsayer, nor on the absurd serendipity of that old Persian tale where everything a false prophet uttered came true, a story recycled across countless Asian folklore. It exists only because of yarns spread by people like the friend who brought him, who once laughed that the builder had already consulted 5,000+ astrologers and tantrics. “What’s your bloody problem?” I growled, looking at his smudged, dog-eared, cello-tape-stitched astro roadmap. “You have more than enough money, your family is healthy, your children are doing fine, and the only one straying is you.” I knew him from college. Back then, he was the least likely man to end up driving a three-pointed-star car. Just a tall, fair chap who loved gossip...