It was a pleasant Sunday afternoon at a snack bar near my new home in Pune. I was sitting alone on a table, alone, thinking about the first three days of college. Bryan Adams was singing softly in the background. I was sitting on the table just near the entrance, thinking about my new college classmates. I chuckled to myself about how my eyes had lingered for an embarrassing moment too long on a girl in our college who had long hair right up to the middle of her back, bright doe-like eyes and a smile that was serene yet very jolly. Vrushali had stared back at me curiously as if to ask me why I was looking at her. Silly me, I thought.
And just then she walked in the restaurant.
~~ Dukaar! ~~
I choked on the glass of water I was sipping. Speaking about coincidences, this was just like in the Hindi movies. Redefining climaxes… I waved her hello. She excused herself from the gang of four other girls she was with and came to say hello to me. A strange bubble inside me swelled. Amol, I said to myself, what is with you?
‘Alone-alone?’ she asked me. Her English is incorrigibly Marathi.
‘Yeah,’ I shrugged.
‘Join us then,’ she said happily.
~~ Dukaar! ~~
I choked again. Now what did fate have in store for me…?
== Reviving: The Dukaar Monologues ==
It had taken my cousin a lot of convincing to wean me from Pepsi and bring me to try out Mountain Dew. I am a sucker for cola. Cola is the most beautiful flavour that ever happened and life is quite, quite worthless without it. Alok (cousin) made me look beyond the limitations of Cola. I salute his favour.
Mountain Dew is, as Vrushali would put it, little-little lime, little-little soda but mostly great. My reservations about Mountain Dew started with the ugly mudslinging that Sprite and Mountain Dew did to each other. But I reckon they were unfair prejudices. Mountain Dew was a wonderful change.
The speciality about Mountain Dew is how well its taste goes with its fizz. That is the problem with most soft drinks that their flavours don’t suit the fizz. You have the range of Orange sodas with a taste too sweet to suit well with the fizz. Apart from cola, there is no taste that does well with fizz, but for the Mountain Dew and Limca flavours. There is some natural tang to their flavour. Even without the bubbles of CO2 fizzing about inside them, they have that sharp tang. It’s tangy heaven with the fizz!
~~ Dukaar! ~~
Not only does Mountain Dew make for good refreshment typically when you’re low on fluid, it also makes for a great drink that you can sip at when you’re alone with nothing to do, especially if you don’t intend to get inebriated. (That point was, of course, unnecessary to make).
But its taste isn’t the only reason why I like Mountain Dew. You want me to finish the story?
Sitting on the table surrounded by five girls was an experience much more awkward than I could have bargained for. Each one of them had something to say and it came right up to their tongue, but they somehow pressed it down like it was an ugly belch. Finally, I said something. I wanted it to sound well, but I have a hunch it sounded more like two frogs mating in a sewage pipe.
‘Lemme buy you somefin,’ I said hurriedly, trying to sound cool.
Three out of five suppressed giggles, one let it out, while Vrushali glared at the laughing girl. What is it with these girls, I thought. Giggle if you want to giggle. What’s the big deal?
‘Whadrink?’ I mumbled again. There had to be something wrong with me. Why was I sounding only slightly better than a yawning camel?
‘Mountain Dew,’ said Vrushali, sounding excited. Funny girl, I thought, that she’s happy sharing a table who sounds like the cross of a frog and a camel. Imagine a camel that can breathe through the skin… Nevertheless, it boosted my confidence, which turned out to be disastrous.
‘OKAY!’ I agreed, loudly.
(Couldn’t the guys on the next table avoid jerking their necks towards us? Silly bozos… I was now sounding like a bathing hippo…)
The stupid waiter doled out six cans of Mountain Dew and told us that the table had been reserved and we would have to get off. Irritated, I asked if there was another one for us, to which Vrushali interjected saying that her friends fancied a walk instead. I felt stupid. Was I supposed to join? Or did that mean I’m to nerdy to be with? Or may be I was too obviously a mixture of numerous species and she only liked pedigrees? (Girls do treat you like pets, sometimes… even if you aren’t serious about her…)
‘Come along,’ she said, smiling sweetly. She seemed to know what I was thinking. Her smile meant: “Of course you’re supposed to join us! What a question, silly!” Strange, I thought, because girls always think that you’re up to something…
It turned out that it began raining and all of us had to hurry back home. Once again I was strongly reminded of Karan Johar when it turned out that Vrushali lived only four blocks away from my place. I had to drop her because she wasn’t on her own vehicle. (No, this is not a proposed story for a new Hindi movie, please; it’s a damned real story, really!).
I’d downed my can long before the rain had begun pouring down. Vrushali had, as usual, exchanged glances with her when I emptied the can in two gulps. As if to show me how it should be done, Vrushali pursued her soft-drink-sipping right till we reached her home, half drenched, on Paud Road.
When she got off, she tossed her can carelessly in the direction of the public garbage bin, narrowly missing it by about nine feet. She noticed my can was still in my shirt pocket.
‘Let me throw it for you,’ she said, holding her hand out for the can.
I don’t know why I replied the way I did. But this is what I said:
‘Lemme keep it, Vrushali. It’s a souvenir from my first outing with you.’
(And guess what? I sounded mostly human!)
I don’t know what it meant. But it seemed to strike a chord somewhere inside Vrushali’s feminine (read as ‘extremely complicated’) mind. I wish she hadn’t blushed. Because when she turned blushingly to the gate giving me a profusely blushing bye-bye, I turned to the street grinning like an idiot. No point beating around the bush- the lass had been lassoed for good… (Christ, forgive my cheapo language)… (Unbelievably, she lets me call her… otherwise, you know those girls… “don’t call me because then my papa will forget how to tie his pyjama strings…!”)
OK, wise guy… Can you do the dew like me?
~~ Dukaar! ~~
And that line, which I said to Vrushali, was the exactly the same line my ex-girlfriend Tina had used to make me fall for her, except that it was over a coke can… Jesus Christ blessed plagiarism for once!
~~ AHO! ~~
