For Apoo

100 Things That I love (in random order)

1. The kissing scene at the end of a movie. Right before the closing credits. Accompanied by a cheesy song.
2. Explaining to people as to why I love Kurkure more than Lays. (More chips in a kurkure packet.)
3. Dancing to Bollywood music.
4. The fifth glass of whiskey and coke.
5. Celebrity hook-ups.
6. Facebook photocomments!
7. Dancing to Lady Gaga.
8. Singing really loudly. In the car.
9. Smudgy kajal.
10. Celebrity Break-ups.
11. Pigs.
12. Pigs as bacon.
13. Foggy mornings.
14. Considering Grey's Anatomy dialogues to be the ultimate advice with regard to relationsips.
15. Considering Entourage to be the ultimate handbook on dealing with men.
16. Colonel Sander's pretty pretty face.
17. Little puppies learning how to walk.
18. Manicure and Pedicures.
19. Facials and Oil massages.
20. Unexpected compliments.
21. New Years Eve kisses.
22. Post-its.
23. The sound the ATM makes before spitting out cash.
24. Overeating.
25. Fluffy Quilts.
26. Stalking the exes on social networking sites.
27. http://www.gofugyourself.com/
28. The sound of the phone ringing.
29. Hot pizza and the cardboard delivery box it comes in.
30. A friendly auto driver who takes you home at a reasonable rate.
31. Mills and Boons. Watching Dirty Dancing, over and over and over again.
32. Giving relationship advice to the girlfriends.
33. The last day of exams.
34. CCDs in general.
35. PVR nachos and cheesy dip. SIGH.
36. Mark Wahlberg in the Italian Job.
37. My mom and dad, close-dancing. awww.
38. Birthday parties!
39. Gifts.
40. Eating my burgers in the grossest way possibly- consuming the bun first and then the filling.
41. Eating my samosa in that exact same manner.
42. My eyebrows, when they are perfectly shaped.
43. Earrings and nose-pins.
44. Vengeant Alanis Morrisette break-up songs. (Does she know how you told me you'd me hold until you die/ But you're still alive!)
45. Linda Goodman's astological precision.
46. Books.
47. Smoke mingled with the smell of cologne.
48. Holding hands for the very first time.
49. Sylvia Plath poetry.
50. Watching mom giggle like a little girl every time she listens to a John Denver song.
51. the words, "I love you"
52. The "getting-back" after the "breaking-up"
53. New seasons of Grey's Anatomy.
54. Harry Potter Books.
55. LOTR movies.
56. Abba, Carpenters and Boney M.
57. E-mails.
58. Pithoo.
59. Secretly being in love with Edward Cullen.
60. Planning my wedding cuisine. (KFC and beer.)
61. Acting a little too feminist to scare my mom.
62. Crazy Relatives.
63. The successful completion of a diet.
64. Being told, "You've lot weight"
65. Eye liner.
66. Pouring my heart out to my best friend on the phone.
67. Watching Patrick Swayze MOVE.
68. Falling in and out of love with Shahrukh Khan.
69. Breaking up repeatedly with Americana. And then ordering the crumb fried chicken in the next two days.
70. Losing self control.
71. Giggling like an idiot.
72. Talking in the middle of movies.
73. Waking up to his voice.
74. Falling asleep to his voice.
75. Bitch-fights.
76. THE WEBCAM
77. Dad's suitcase when he comes back home after 6 months of sailing.
78. Saag paneer chawal.
79. Stray dogs.
80. T-shirts that are cut up around the collar.
81. Short shorts.
82. People who are funny.
83. Truth and Dare
84. Never Have I Ever.
85. Drunk Friends trying to dance.
86. Judging people.
87. Trying out clothes that I secretly know will never fit me in this lifetime.
88. Horror movies.
89. Disneyland!
90. Parantha with a blob of butter in the middle and then watching it melt and spread all over.
91. Mangoes.
92. Swearing on people to prove my innocence.
93. Googling stuff and then wikipedia-ing it for more in-depth knowledge.
94. People who share my enthusiasm for food, or dieting.
95. Hating people who are too smart.
96. Intimidating people.
97. New haircuts. And bangs. :)
98. Licking off melted chocolates from the wrapper.
99. Dancing drunkenly to "I Love Rock and Roll with Apoo and then suddenly singing in unision at the "He said can I take you home...." part of it!



100. The butterflies in my stomach when I am excited.

The Joke

THE JOKE still haunts me. I live with it every day, its poltergeisty appearance not leaving me for one waking second till I just wish it would lock me up in my T.V. and then GO AWAY. I’m familiar with it, THE JOKE, so I talk to it. Basically it makes Chandler-esque sarcastic comments like, “Could that Sub BE anymore cheesier?” and I ask it to shut up. THE JOKE, that happened so long ago that I have forgotten its origins, its incidence and its basic geography, has come to define me and the woman that I will turn into one day (-most probably my mother, but I blame the THE JOKE and not THE GENES which I shall talk to you about in a separate story.)

[THE JOKE- 199?-200? – THE JOKE was introduced in the late 90s, it entertained many people while it was alive (and thriving). It brought smiles to the faces of adolescent pimply boys and bitchy long-legged girls.
The JOKE is a part of the genre that combines the power of the ordinary joke (building up of the tempo that culminates into a thundering climax) and the one-liner. THE JOKE needs no tempo and yet it is no ordinary one liner- it is itself, the very punch-line, a punch line being far more superior to a mere one liner.
Once the cool kids grew up eventually, and turned into what most cool kids turn into i.e. the world asks them to get over themselves (if I am lucky the girls even become fat.)- THE JOKE fell from the glory it had enjoyed in its former heydays and it transferred from the lips of a well meaning friend into my heart and soul and began living parasitically within me. I was feeding off the drama; it was feeding off my misery.]

It’s just A JOKE, she tells me. Me, I’m the Fat Kid. Every group on the playground has a Fat Kid. My personality is defined by that title. See, once you’re branded the Fat Kid, they call you names that pertain to your “Fat Kid” status (fatso, moti, etc). It’s not a mere title, it is your persona. You subscribe to all its prejudices. You live by its commandments-

1. Thou shalt forever be branded a glutton because well...everyone knows that Fat Kids eat a LOT. Every bite of food you eat shall be judged, and dare you be viewed eating an orange bar in public, thou shall be humiliated by the calling out of names aforementioned.
2. Thou shalt NEVER be asked out by a boy. It is below any normal weighted boy’s dignity to be seen with a fat girl. Your name, shalt however come up regularly, linking you to several boys so that well, they get very very embarrassed and say, “Shaat app!!! Why would I date HERRRR??!”
3. Thou shalt be picked last for every team. Because well...who are thou kidding, everyone knows Fat Kids cannot run.
4. Thou shalt be ignored at all social gatherings, gossip sessions, dance-parties and that’s because thou art not cool enough.

Sometimes I was not invited. I think that’s when the THE JOKE began to be circulated.
It went like this, “Imagine Bubbles in a BRA.”
I am Bubbles. The butt of several, “I enjoy watching Bubbles in the bathtub” jokes as well but NOTHING, nothing in the world (not even the 2 out of 100 in MATH, which, according to my mother should have been my first priority at that age and was the biggest disgrace this family had faced since the hush-hush wedding of a barely legal cousin), could make me cry like THE JOKE.
“Imagine Bubbles in a bra?” I screamed. “How could she? That WHORE!” (I doubt I used “whore”, must have been more like “that IDIOT!” at that time but it betrays the magnitude of rage that was in my heart.)

I wanted to prove to myself that they were wrong. So I went to the bathroom, stripped off my shirt and looked at myself in the mirror. The fact that my mother was making me wear ugly, conical bras to “make my breasts develop the right shape” did not help. No one told me that I should be glad that my breasts were growing rapidly out-of-control while those girls, almost four years older to me, did not have any. The point being, what I saw in the mirror that day, confirmed THE JOKE.

From thereon, every time someone laughed at me during a game of hide and seek, I freaked out, are they imagining me in a bra?

People I did not know very well, people I had just met, people I passed on the street- I looked at them and I wondered- Are they too imagining me in a bra?
The fear of not being bra-worthy plagued me all my life.
We’ve grown up. Barely anyone calls me Bubbles anymore. I am hardly in touch with my childhood frenemies. But every day I stand in front of the mirror in my bra and the ghost smiles at me tauntingly; I know it will never leave.

Bad Toenail Day

Hello. I am back home. Tonight was a good GOOD Nigh-a-aight. (Woo hoo Fergie. RESPECT) Currently applying black nailpolish on toenails, that never behave. They curl...proudly..disgustingly. My grandmother's heritage, or thats what my mom likes to tell me. I always seems to inherit the worst of the family. My dad's skin allergies, my grandma's toenails, my mom's weight problem's and general paranoia AND her stinginess. Except your values. She reminds me. Don't worry you're like a peacock. Beautiful with ugly feet.
Try telling that to other people. And then watch them laugh. Hmph.

I hate boys sometimes. When I am being all feminist. Hypocritically putting on a push up bra and then judging them for staring at my assets. "You're DISGUSTING" I scream at them mentally but judgementally, "STOP OBJECTIFYING ME". Then I go and adjust it in the bathroom.

Writer's Block

I have been losing myself lately, and finding it all back during conversations with the mother, the boyfriend and the best-friend- who are all back at home, all as lost as me. Some haven't yet moved from where I last left them, be it lying on the bed watching T.V. or angsting over their love lives, some have partly moved on.

"I have been watching the World Movies Channel, the Golden globes- Jennifer Garner's soooo skinny now", it is funny watching my mother talk about Hollywood and phoren cinema when I will always remember her as a hardcore Jagjit Singh fan.

My best-friend's still trying to find herself, I wish she'd just stop- because from where I stand- she's everything, even the things I want to be one day. (I'm not just talking about the fifty kilos.) But you know- the kind of person who walks into restaurants like she owns them, ("I lived in Prague for two years you have no idea how they look at a person with brown skin, that's when I decided to walk around the goddamn city like its MINE.)

Sometimes I find myself in pages of books. Hoping those words will validate me, let them be examples- I'd rather be remembered as a part of an archetype rather than as nothing at all.

I want to go home for sometime. The land of free laundry, never-too-broke-to-have-a-pizza and plenty of hugs (that choke and smother, but are so warm, and so much love that sometimes you're almost scared that you probably dont deserve it).

The place where he's just around the corner, and he'll sit across from you, the most goodlooking boy you have ever seen in your life, - with a voice so deep. Somedays he'll help you find yourself, and the days that you don't, he'll simply offer you plenty of golden packets, warm coffee and lots and lots of food (and tell you that you're pretty even though you look like shit.)

phone conversations.

Why did you cut your hair?, she thunders, that was the ONLY feminine thing about you!
Mother!
What! have you SEEN the way you walk?
MOTHER!

Speaking of childhood enemies.
"----'s mom is gonna start looking"
Be not confused my dear readers, there is but one thing that mothers of all daughters look for. A HUSBAND.
So, get this, she tells her mom, "Ma i don't trust my choice in men, since all my relationships have only ended the wrong way", maybe you should pick someone for me."
Seriously?
Seriously.
Is she CRA-
SUCH a nice girl.
-ZYY!

So Apoo and me are going to watch Valentine's Day together.
With whom?
Ummm...with... each other??
I hope you are not gay now. (jokingly)
What if I was though?(not so jokingly)
(Tragi-comically) Haha, no you would never do that to me.

Cancerous

We are the crabs. Linda Goodman says. And crabs, as we all know, are crabby. With shells. Ergo, don't mess with crabs, she warns, So they don't scurry away and retreat into "the shells".

Being a crabby crab I have a shell too you know. A fully furnished shell in fact, with a T.V. that plays Grey's Anatomy on loop, a couple of romance novels and lots and lots of food.

I invited you in and said, "Make yourself at home".

And now its lonely in here without you.