Saturday, April 23, 2005

Beat Boredom - turn cupid and nurture young love

I'd written this post a couple of years ago, but thanks to exams, I don't have time to write anything new. So something's better than nothing, I guess.

If you have copious quantities of water in your brain (like most poets who've written reams on love and romance), go fall in love. If you're just bored, well.... just play cupid!

Playing cupid is a highly entertaining and highly risky endeavour as well. If one manages to succeed in the onerous task of bringing two young hearts together, one reaps the rewards which come in the form of being known to all your classmates as ‘mama’ (which means little more than ‘pimp’) If one fails, however, one runs the risk of being accused of messing everything up because of one’s own romantic interests.

But, nothing fun is not risky. Or to put it another way, taking risks is half the fun.

My first attempt at playing cupid came upon me by chance. A male friend of mine requested me to help him with a love letter he was composing to a junior who’d just joined our college.

The junior was a religious Malayalee fresh out of some oilfield in Saudi Arabia and hadn’t seen a male (discounting her father, of course) for the first seventeen years of her life, having spent all of it under a burkha. But her prolonged stay at a nunnery like this had done nothing to diminish her feminine charms, which were considerable. My friend fell for her like fifty cycles in a cycle stand. Not particularly surprising becuase he is one of those fellows who is capable of falling in love even with a rhino dressed in drag.

My friend, however, had a problem. He was far from confident of his ability to compose paeans in her honour using the Queen’s language – and the girl was rather marked in her inability to read even a single sentence in Malayalam.

At that particular point of time, I was terribly bored and even more terribly broke. So I proffered my services as a ghost writer to my friend just as he was lamenting his utter inability to express his love for her in words.

‘Hey, thanks da...you’re a true friend...’, said he.

‘But there’s a catch...’, I said

He spent the next five minutes telling me how I had earned his eternal and everlasting gratitude by my act of mercy and how he was ready to hit anybody in the college who had been foolhardy enough to trouble a person as sweet, loving, caring and personable as me.

I did not interrupt him. I enjoyed every moment of it.

‘I was thinking more in terms of monetary remuneration, y’know...’ I said, broaching the subject of money in a gentlemanly way.

After a couple of minutes of bargaining, I realized that this chap was incapable of thinking of sums greater than 10 rupees if left to his own devices. So I suggested the nice round figure of 100 rupees.

‘One hundred bucks!!? Are you jokin’???’, he screamed incredulously and launched into another long monologue of how people had forgotten the value of friendship and how St.Peter would send me to the gates of Hell for attempting to fleece money off a man in perpetual penury.

I was about to tell him that the deal was off. It was then, on the spur of the moment that one of my devilish ideas struck me.

‘Okay, da... I don’t want to do anything. I have seen the light following your remarks. I am a changed man! I will help my friend with his true love!’

Oh yes, I shall, you stingy bastard, I thought to myself. I resolved to consult two thesauruses, three dictionaries and the Barron’s word lists and write a love letter so abstruse that even I wouldn’t be able to make sense of it the second time around. I also resolved to make it cornier than three of Bollywood’s mushiest romances.

I sat up all night, composing the labour of ‘love’ in the spirit of malice. When I displayed the finished product, my friend had five words to say –

‘Perfect da, Its so romantic...’

He seemed to have made his judgement based on the number of syllables in each word more than anything else. You can decide how romantic it was by reading it for yourself.


dearest ######, heart of my hearts

How are you? I guess you are sleeping, dreaming sweet dreams, as i type this... nay, write this letter with my lifeblood… after i had that enchanting talk with u. Words fail me when I try to describe the upheavals that shook my inner being as I conversed with you. I never thought you would talk to me this long. Though I feel, in my heart of hearts, you fail to realize the seriousness with which my heart palpitates at the sight of you, at the sound of your oh-so-sweet voice, and the wonderfully romantic way that your name rolls over my tongue.

I wish $%#* stayed inside her room( she interferes too goddamn much)...no, wait a sec, i have this niggling doubt, this iota of fear within a portion of my fervid lovestruck mind...was it a ploy you employed to disconnect the phone? Please say it wasn't so...

Hope you had as good a time at Pizza hut as your little heart could ever have wished for. May I call u the same time next week? I can't take no for an answer, for such a devastating verdict from your sweet lips could mean utter desperation, sorrow, pain, anguish, and heart rending distress to this lovesick swain. So, I take the answer to be yes. Please please wait for my call. I await the wonderful minutes that I shall fruitfully expend listening to your sugary voice.

Please, ######,. do not by any chance of fate, reveal what transpired in the mellifluous conversations that I have had with you to anybody, not even to &^$(*, or any of my other batchmates.

######, ( I love writing your name), when u go to kerala, brightening up by your lustrous presence any train that you may take, please get me the things that I so abjectly desire to receive from your dainty little hands. Anyway, I forgot to ask you, when shall Madras be deprived of your beauteous presence? The days that you are not in our college will be extremely dark ones for me...

Love

the one who adores you to the ends of the earth and beyond,

your lovesick swain,

&*^


*Names hidden to protect privacy (and author’s life and limb)

To be contd...



WHAT FOLLOWS ON THIS BLOG –
- What path will young love take after the receipt of the letter? Find out tomorrow...
- And more techniques which still remain too secret to reveal

IMPORTANT NOTE: THE LETTER IS ABSOLUTELY REAL, AND HAS ACTUALLY BEEN USED, iN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING!!
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