Mishmash

Friday night - went to bed with the most terrible headache ever known to man. You know the kind, it starts from your eyes, slowly moves up to your forehead before winding its way to the back of your head, right at the spot where your neck meets the skull, can you feel that little groove there? yes, right there. That’s the spot that hurts the most. You have this throbbing pain that feels like someone had planted a bomb in there and it is going off repeatedly, sending painwaves all over your head, the deadly tentacles reaching to every cell in your body. You can feel a stinging pain in your eyes, not just your ordinary eyeball-hurting kind of pain, but actual physical pain that feels like someone had pinched the inside of your eyelids. You feel dizzy and weak, like you are going to throw up any minute but you don’t have the strength to get up and walk to the bathroom. I thought I was having a migraine attack. I’ve been plagued with headache all my life, but all the doctors I've consulted always assured me it wasn’t migraine. Take rest, pop a few pills and you’ll be okay.

Saturday morning – woke up hoping to feel refreshed and clearheaded but to my dismay found that traces of headache still lingered. Got up, took the newspaper inside and went back to sleep until noon. Got up again, but was too lazy to do anything, ate lunch, and decided to read in bed. I know reading is not the best solution, but there was nothing else to do. Opened the latest Chetan Bhagat but before I could read a sentence closed my eyes and found myself drifting off…. Ouch!! That could only be an ant stinging my leg. I reached down and found the offender and crushed him. Is that something crawling on my stomach? Another ant, no doubt. Groped a bit, caught the scoundrel before he could make his escape and sent him packing to ant hell. Or heaven. I don’t know if he was a good ant or bad ant in his lifetime, so he could go either way. Another miscreant stung me on the arm, and I found myself committing another murder. Sleeping was out of the question now.

Got up, removed the bed sheets, and started The Hunt. The best way to go about hunting is clean your room inside out, crawl on your knees and inspect all the corners, making sure all squatters are evicted. And when you are finished the room smells of insect spray, a far cry from your regular room fresheners, but you are alone in the room again and that was the goal, wasn’t it?

Speaking of ants, have you noticed that they are most active in the summer? Makes me think of the story of the ant and the grasshopper. You know, the ant working in the summer while the grasshopper sings away and in the end the ant was the guy with all the food while the poor grasshopper could only watch with envy and a hungry stomach. No, I think he died. Make hay while the sun shines and all that rot. But if it was today’s world the grasshopper would be the richer guy (and with a fuller stomach) because we all know how much money a good voice could bring. If you are still unmarried I would strongly recommend you find someone who could sing, thus ensuring children with beautiful voices and their future taken care of, purely because of their heritage. But if they end up with your voice you could only pray that they are smart and good in studies. But still, there’s a 50% chance of them being born with a good singing voice. Life (and marriage) is all about taking chances.

And when is this temperature planning to go down? Of all the hot summers I've lived through, this year seems to be the worst. Met officials say monsoon will hit Kerala on May 3l, that’s tomorrow, but I'm not living in a fishing boat in the backwaters of God’s Own Country, am I? So it’s probably another two weeks before the much awaited rains, showers of blessings, so to speak. Then maybe I could write about happier stuff.