It was the early 1980s and this couple living in cool climes of a mountain town had come to the conclusion that getting hot and heavy wasn’t helping them issue a fresh member of the species.
Maybe they should’ve taken a hint from the general climate and simply chilled.
But producing a child in India is serious business. Especially if you’ve been married for a while (they had been).
Everyone from mothers-in-law to the conductor on your daily bus ride sees it their moral responsibility to get your reproductive organs working to an end that all religions unanimously agree on.
That they stop short of shouting instructions while taking notes as you go about a hobby that’s now turned into a job, is astounding.
You will get suggestions to get into a handstand so that gravity will do what the lazy swimmers refuse to. You will be told to consume exotic fruit items that might lure the alien to set up shop inside your womb.
Maybe that’s how organic food enthusiasts come about in the first place.
But nothing was working out for this couple. Until someone suggested taking the blessings of a particular lady saint in a city close by.
This particular lady was obviously better at getting done what this couple had been trying.
And all she had to do, is give my mother a mango.
And that’s the story of how this lemon came to be.
You, at this juncture, might wonder the whole point of having gone through another “origins” story, when there clearly are better ones that involves stars, kings, raging rivers, drops of sweat, spider bites and steroid overdoses.
“This one’s rather lame”, you might note.
And you’d be right. But when getting to know me, this is compulsory reading.
For it is one of those pieces that is rooted in fact.
Most of everything else is just opinion.
Early Years
I was cute. But then every baby is cute. Not everyone will agree that every baby is cute. But that’s the fault of the everyone in question.
The best way to approach such a situation is like a dog that’s shown a beautiful red rose. Just be happy and excited to see the grey rose.
You’re allowed to think why people are so amped about grey roses, but on the face of it, just wag your tail like a mutt. Exceptions aren’t viewed kindly.
Anyhow, this is about me, and not roses. Red or grey. (I was a red one).
I could spell an A-E-R-O-P-L-A-N-E earlier than most kids could do B-U-S. As you read further through this about me section, you’ll realise that this is where I peaked in life.
Everything here on went like cheese rolling and while I’ve gotten all the bruises and broken bones, winning doesn’t look like a remotely likely outcome.
I went to an all-boys convent school run by Irish missionaries. The sort where they’ll show you the gruesome output of a late term abortion, but skip the entire process of getting to the damn part. I still believe unicorns exist.
I mean, women turned out real, right?
There neither mandated text-books nor the playing field caught my fancy. The result was a vertically challenged wispy fellow whose hardest effort was employed imagining how tarts and scones looked like while he read more Enid Blyton than was good for him.
Of small mercies, there were no mobile phone cameras around.
But there were bullies. Some of them owe their life’s worth of confidence to me. I’d have kept a list of them, but I was too busy imagining how tarts and scones looked like.
And then came math. Especially the type which had alphabets and symbols beyond the already imposing numbers.
Listen, its already terrible having an endless number of numbers which can be split numberless times. Then someone goes ahead and throws in alphabets.
How the hell am I supposed to know what “x” is when “x” changes its value all the time? It’s like asking a person on the street what politicians stand for.
And who invented π?
Hope they were served a nice slice. And not of the edible kind.
An astute reader will be able to tell the depth of the keg of misery I am drinking from here.
For the not-so-astute, I failed.
And then barely passed.
And sometimes failed into the next year.
Moving on.
About Me As A Troubled Youth
Youth. It always is trouble no?
I for once decided to study hard and scored pretty well in my high school board exams.
BIG mistake.
My father, deciding to ignore my lifetime of academic failure decided that my high school passing out grades were a sign that I could make it into IIT.
I scored a 90% in biology and 63% in Math. But he probably assumed that I could simply shift the grey matter used in biology to the math section at will.
Cannot blame him for trying to clutch at the straws on the opposite shore though.
When you’re born in a lower middle-class family in India and have seen your best friend emigrate to the US (cuz engineer from IIT), and proceed to live the American dream, you’d want it too.
Failing that, you’d want your kids to extract themselves out of the hot mess that you weren’t.
But it was not to be.
The concept of numbers frolicking with alphabets and symbols still was to me what a pagan ritual is to a devout bible-belt Christian. I failed my classes. Again.
But youth is brash, and it has to make its presence felt. Cigarette and alcohol companies know a sucker for “presence” when they see him (or her). They got me hook, line and sinker.
I even bought a motorcycle.
I was a 5’4 tall 53kg specimen of pure machismo. And to stamp it further, I rode with no regard to self preservation.
Till I crashed my bike. And almost died.
I was reformed.
At least my left leg was. There was enough metal in me to single handedly sustain the Indian rock scene in those times.
Eventually breaking the surface, and gasping for air, I somehow got into hotel school. “The best hotel school in Asia” even.
Anyone who knows anything about me, will attest that anything I have with me at any point in time is never good enough.
That was the case with a career in hotels as well. The kitchen was too hot, F&B too abusive, housekeeping too girly and front office, too pretentious and boring.
So I broke the non-existent ceiling yet again, and scored a doozy in the general entrance exam for management schools.
But (and there always is a but) I had not expected that sort of result. So all the money that was supposed to be spent filling applications for top business schools was spent on drinking Smirnoff at a suspiciously cheap dive bar in Bandra.
About Me As A (Barely) Functional Adult
The most obvious thing about me on a physical level is my dad-bod.
I started working out when I shot up another three inches to reach a modest (but celebratory in my genetic pool) 5’7 height and could plant both my feet on either side of a Royal Enfield motorcycle.
These were the days before electric starts existed in Indian bikes. This particular type of bike was anyway hard to kick-start. Mix that with my 57kg frame that outlined my skeletal setup, and we were courting disaster.
I distinctly remember standing with both feet on the kick-starter while my batch mates (and juniors) watched from the hostel building with what I wanted to assume was muffled laughter, but wasn’t.
I could hear waves of uproarious mirth infect every balcony till the boys had to shift the batch asthmatic indoors.
So I decided to bulk up. But while everyone tells you how to start. Content about stopping is glaringly obvious by virtue of absence.
I now am a glorious 77kgs.
Sadly, it’s a gain of equal parts muscle and quick-service-restaurant fat.
But I persevere, and spend a fair amount of time in the gym about 3-4 times a week.
For I am secretly hoping to meet my childhood bullies and feed them tarts and scones filled with their own teeth.
The motorcycles that I ride now come with electric start anyway.
My Careening Career
This part of life started with cementing a hard contrast in my life. My girlfriend (now wife) and my cluster headaches.
It was after two years of fun (also known as a post graduate diploma in business management) that I got my first job in a low-key advertising agency.
People go through great pain while describing their careers. Firms, achievements, learning, growth, et. al.
Lemme run you through mine real quick.
It has been a flaming dumpster fire.
Fin.
I jumped from job to job like Mario on cocaine, rebelled against authority as if the alphabet that my name started with was fashioned the style of the anarchy logo.
I further steeped in the futility of jobs when one of the Ambanis or Adanis could have had that damn mango.
A lot of unsettling things about me as far as the work front goes, can be attributed to the handsome amount of drugs that I have been consuming to keep my cluster headaches at bay.
They make me anxious, irritable, short-tempered and sleepy.
I sleep enough for sloths to wanna get my face tattooed, only if they could wake up in time to get to the tattoo place.
So yeah. A 9-to-5? No can do.
A 9-to-2? No can do either.
Unless you allow for a nap around 12:30.
I have been lucky enough to have not starved and to even have bought a shiny thing or two. But if there’s one thing about me that is given, it is that I cannot, for the life of me, hold a job.
Cluster headaches, the scandalous amounts of medication I take to manage them, and inability to get my nose any brown-er than it already is, makes it nigh impossible to hold employment that stands on ground of regularity and / or writing peans of glory for my bosses.
Think I can write though.
Just hoping that pays the bills for the rest of my life (and that Indian Scout I’ve been eyeing).