I was watching a Hindi TV show the other day and the heroine has very newly fallen in love with the hero of the show who isn’t aware of her feelings. Aah, new love. It’s a mature and modern show a compared to the other garbage on TV these days and shows relationships like they are in reality. She is a very hardcore, independent woman who is also a doctor and doesn’t take nonsense easily. But falling in love has made her, err, clumsy? The hero asks her “Ms. Bose aap aajkal itna girne kyun lagi hai? Pehle toh nahi girti thi.” It loosely translates to “ Why are you tripping so much these days, you used to be pretty steady earlier.” She is not as bad as other TV show heroines though. This is mostly a common scenario in Hindi Soaps where they try and show a girl to be very bubbly, cheerful, fragile, delicate and she is so careless in her excitement of chasing the invisible unicorn, that she keeps tripping into the waiting arms of the hero. Utterly ridiculous and far from cutesy if you ask me. First of all, who the hell is that bubbly, cheerful when I can see myself as dark and dreary as a storm cloud. Lenny, from the shopfloor who gets me pizza slices, disagrees vehemently when I say that, but nevertheless. Also, if I were a guy, I would get so irritated with such a clumsy person that I would drop them on the ground and move on.
There is a girl I know who is friends with my friends. I get a feeling that she is perennially sick and keeps fainting all the time. I feel harsh when I say this and I know it’s not her fault(entirely) for being so weak and passing out so much. But I can’t help feeling irritated with that. I feel like holding her shoulders and shaking her hard while yelling “Faint at your own time, girl!” Honestly, I don’t even know what that means and I know I am being mean.
But I don’t think I am any less. I have been known to sport gauze bandages when I and my close friends are aware that I have a millimeter size of cut on my finger. I had once stabbed my finger with a knife while opening a jar of jam in the hostel room. The stab was tiny but it was bleeding profusely. AM was quick to retort, “Uh oh, we need XXL bandaids for that!” All the pain was forgotten in the peals of laughter after that. My instagram also carries proof of the fact that I will advertise my injuries and create this air of hurt around it, rather than tending to it. I don’t know who is younger, a 2 year old, or me.
I cry easily when I get hurt. My threshold of pain is low and my first reaction is to cry or to shout at the person next to me. This happens often while I am cooking. A burn will make me irrationally angry, but of course, I will not clean it, dress it or apply ointment on it. I will only continue to be angry at the world. I had an oven burn when my parents were here and I got into an altercation with my dad because he was being a smartass and was trying to justify it by saying that if Chandler would have said the same, I would have laughed. But I did not take care of the burn and now I have a scar on my forearm. There is already one another burn scar forming an acute angle with it and I look like I am on my way to a branding of deathly hallows. Trust me, I am not.
One of my strangest desires has been to have a fracture on my left arm. I have always found arm casts to be very cool, specially when they are colored and have writings on them. I know I am a strange person to want a fracture. But a left arm will also be a lesser worry than a right arm, I think. Well, at least that would have been the case in school days when there was still a lot of writing involved. With typing and driving these days, I don’t know how bad it will be. But my biggest worry remains about washing my hair and salons here are not cheap. Again, I am not trying to give myself a fracture deliberately. Now I get old people injuries like a hurting knee, hurting shoulder after working out, lower back aches and feet that are falling apart.
One of my best/worst injuries have been on my right ankle that gave me a lot of glorious time off school, at the cost of being in pain for a long time. In Ahmedabad when I was in 4th grade, my school had been let off early for some reason and my dad sent the office helper to pick me up on his bicycle. He placed a mini me on the pillion seat and started to walk the bike. I don’t know what happened and my foot got into the spokes of the rear wheel and got twisted. I screamed and in the confusion, he ended up moving the bike backwards and the foot twisted in the opposite direction again. I had a massive wound with a lot of skin and flesh scraped off and a raptured ankle ligament that did not get detected for 3 days. I was given an L shaped cast that had to be removed everyday to dress my wound and was held in place by bandages. I still bear the scars on that ankle along with other scars from an accident in 2nd grade where a scooter hit me while crossing the road in front of my home in Delhi. My right foot has born 80% of the injuries I have had. I also have very battered looking knees that convince me that knees were created to get bashed up while riding bikes.
I have a very strange injury on my body that reminds me every once in a while of itself. While on a visit to India in 2013, I went with my dad to the bus service office to book seats for my parents for a trip to Mumbai. They were going for their Visa interview. Oh, that was also the epic trip where they met the xBF’s folks and tried to come to a middle ground but it became very clear to us that our ways are separate. Talk about actual scars, eh? I was going to stay home, taking care of Moony and Ani was supposed to come for a sleepover that day. It was the monsoons in India and it was raining that day. I was wearing my flip flops and as soon as I stepped out of the office, I slipped on the wet stone stairs on the door and landed firmly on the edge of the stair in a sitting position. My tail bone, yep, had made perfect contact with the sharp stone edge and I was delirious in pain. A 26 year old me broke down like a 6 year old from all the pain and the realization that so many people saw me fall. The walk from the shop to the car was beyond painful and I couldn’t even hold my b*tt and walk. I wonder if I aggravated it while walking my dog Moony and having to carry him for a bit because of his arthritic legs. There was no way my parents could cancel their Visa appointment, but at least their trip was successful. There are times when I can feel some hurt while doing deadlifts with barbells or while doing something as basic as sitting down on the restroom throne.
Well, at least some scars make a good talking point. I can sometimes pretend that I got into a bar fight in downtown Santa Ana, rather than admitting my idiocies.
“You should see what I did to the ‘other person’.”
A splash of my life... 