Even the computer knows I have chicken pox

As I switched on my computer for the second time today, it unveiled a page that said ‘your computer might be at risk’ and I thought to myself, is it fair that even the computer feels scared of touching me or in this case, me touching the computer?

The smaller the pip, the louder the squeak

So today was a crazier day as compared to yesterday. I slept at three in the morning after having read half of the ‘A concise Chinese-English dictionary for lovers’ in which the third angle of the triangle seems to be ‘Chairman Mao’ who props up almost all through the book (well, the first half at any rate) in the mind of the female protagonist and mouths pearls like ‘A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery…’
The book almost read, I decided to tune into my channel (Meow) that was playing music that made me proud of working there. I mean, really. It’s the kind of stuff I have downloaded on my computer and that is saying a lot, though most people might well doubt my matchless taste in music (although I don’t quite understand opera much, how can a man get stabbed and then instead of bleeding like most people, he starts to sing!)
So, to cut a long story short, I slept at three and was woken up at nine by my friend and soul mate-Varun. He’s the kind of person who believes in solutions, not problems, which is why he reflects that the world’s problems would be solved if the hungry eat the homeless. Besides I adore him for making me realize that one never knows where to look while eating a banana. These are the things that enhance the knowledge of a therapist I am sure.
Ok, but now back to me, so I woke up and now after whiling away enough time figuring out how the sensex knows the waltz better than anyone I personally know, I was beginning to get restless and various home remedies for chicken-pox were pouring in from everywhere. All the relatives I had assumed dead for years were calling in to ask after my health and that only just added to my ire if anything.
At about noon, mom suggested I see her friend who is also a doctor (or so he claims, though I have never yet seen a certificate to support the fact) and I heartily agreed. Anything to stop me from getting into a fist-fight with dad, after all we were the kind of people, typical of my species I presume, to show our love by fighting it out.
In no time, I was sitting at the doctor’s stark clinic and thinking to myself that minimalism as a form of style should have died as ‘minimialistically’, without a fuss, but then again it’ll be like hoping for women to finally learn how to put on mascara without having to keep their mouths wide open.
The doctor seconded the earlier two doctors view of the dastardly pox (by his chronological number, he should have ‘thirded’ the opinion) and I came back home with not one but three medals of official recognition of my chicken pox. I felt like an achiever. I finally had what nobody else I know has, even if it is a lackluster chicken pox, it is better than being run-of-the mill. Mom, if you are reading this, I think it is time that you knew that I suffer from acute attention deficit syndrome. Knowing ma though, she’s bound to differ and call it ‘a-cute ADS’.
So what started as a small rash post my spa- session last Saturday has now garnered enough attention to be made into a reality show by itself. That is what the ‘snowballing effect’ is called I presume.

When you’re told you look like a peach, maybe they mean, all yellow and fuzzy

So after a gruesome ride all through the countryside, all thanks to an auto rickshaw dude who was high on cheap booze and life, I tumbled out of that green monster looking like I needed a morgue more than a doctor. My limp hair was now departed in the middle, clothes clung to me as if out of fright and my rash had gone berserk, I now looked like a plump tomato on sale at the grocery store next to my house.
I trotted to the doctor’s chamber and stood there motionlessly, waiting for something to happen. I was hoping she would ask me my name, that would help us break the ice but instead she too looked back inertly, the kind of look someone would have on their face if they forgot the ‘recipe’ to make ice-cubes.
And then suddenly I felt like Indiana Jones’ female version, out to save both our lives by resuscitation through conversation and I began in my radio practiced voice about how a common friend who happened to be a doctor and a host with us, referred me to this wonderful little doctor who was seemingly down to earth but definitely not enough.
Suddenly my speech got interrupted with the doctor’s wish to check the rash all over my body. It was an almost pornographic moment, standing in attention, stripping at the orders of the doctor, only that the lighting was too fluorescent and the room smelt of antiseptic. Also, one little glitch was that the doctor seemed least interested in anything but the fluid deposits in the blisters on my body. My moment of pornography died a premature, ugly and dreadful death.
I was marched off to the blood sample collection unit on the first floor and as vial after vial of my blood was being siphoned off, the dark almost intense red of my blood was causing me to have morbid thoughts. ‘It is fatal, whatever it is’, I thought to myself.
Blood sample collected, I was on my way back home. Surprisingly, I was in good spirits thinking about the time that I’d managed to get off from work, even if at the cost of what most probably was chicken pox. As I smiled to myself and hummed a faint Frank Sinatra tune in my head, I bumped into a rather handsome doctor who must’ve thought that I was on the wrong floor. By his reaction to me, I am presuming he would’ve personally delivered me to the fourth floor where the famed psychiatry section of the hospital is.
I finished the rendition in my head and went looking for an auto that would help me get back home in one piece. If a half-wit could work part-time for NASA then this was it, the man who drove me to madness and then my house. This auto rickshaw trip was even more ghastly than the previous. This one was driven by a man drunk on stupidity. He made me realize that talk is cheap. The supply surely exceeds demand and in this case, I was hoping we’d run out of stock forever.
By the time I reached home, I knew that auto’s in Delhi were shared by two or more drivers, that this particular gentleman disliked people who kept their feet up on the rods and that he learned how to dance in his childhood when he and three brothers would wait in line for the bathroom.
As I reached my house, I wished with all my heart that Id have chicken pox and that I’d be put under quarantine for a lifetime at least!

For a minute the team were in with a chance. But then the game started

So the blood sampling did the hospital some good and I was called back for further assessment today. I reached the hospital at twelve something and saw the familiar and charming face of Dr. Geeta, the one person I knew I could trust with my life (also because I know she’d have little use for it). She called me out of turn and asked to see my face. I did the honors, proudly as if I were the prized camel at the Pushkar fair and I was being bid for. I looked towards the ceiling and then to my right and then left, without the need to be prodded. As the doctor’s lips curled to echo out the words ‘ Chikky pox’ as she called it, I was overwhelmed with the thought of a compelled vacation. I almost heard mild applause in the background and began making plans right there.
Mom was with me in the tryst that today was, and as soon as got out of the hospital, we set out thinking what to do, since I could never bear to watch TV, we’d buy books, and of course, loose cotton clothing for the skin to breathe and not to forget, the new neem soap that promises to turn toads into princesses.
Shopping for chicken pox over, we were drinking watermelon juice at Full Circle and mom was chastising me for putting the café community at risk. She made me feel like a self-destruct nuclear bomb let loose.
I bought two books for myself at the book store downstairs and when I asked then for any available books on paranormal phenomenon, the blank stares I got in turn almost convinced me that my brain was so non-existent that they could make my eyes sparkle by shining a torch through my ear. I decided to thank my lucky stars for getting to lay my hands on a Woody Allen book and scamper out while I could.
But just before I could make my hasty exit, I saw this wonderfully stacked tray that carried small containers one on top of the other in a pyramid shape. On closer inspection, I found it to be flower essences. Made from specific fruit and vegetable blossoms, each essence came listed with the promise of adding enthusiasm, hope, mental vitality, cheerfulness and tender sweetness to the ones who tried it. The healer inside me needed some desperate healing, I had been losing the plot of life for a bit, so I called upon my instinct and it guided me to ‘Pear’, the essence that promises to bring peacefulness and emergency support (I’m not too sure what kind of emergency and consequently what kind of support but I am sure like most other things, life will lead me to find this one out for myself too)
And now here I am, one tablet of fexofenadine hydrochloride and one thousand, seven hundred and forty seven words down. My clock reads 5:20 p.m. and I still have at least four days of quarantine to go.
I can only begin to imagine how the rest of it will fare…

If you can smile when everything around you is going wrong, you’re probably in the repair business

It is sometime in the late afternoon and I recollect how just yesterday I was scurrying to reach work at that hour in the morning when most people are still snuggled in bed dreaming of an excuse not to go to work that day. My damp hair was just how it always was on most mornings, limp and facing extinction but at 7:30 in the morning, my only prayer was to be able to find that crazy access card that would allow me the key to the castle of radio madness.
As I entered I saw the ‘On Air’ sign, lit boldly up on the wall next to the studio and I knew that Seema ‘ji’ was singing sweet nothings to the listeners coaxing them to wake up. When she (Seema) had first walked in to work, my immediate reaction was to add the suffix of ‘ji’ to her name, not in an endeavor to make her sound elderly and worthy of the suffix, just out of sheer respect. Little did I know then, that it would become the proverbial albatross around her neck. Excess baggage. That is what I handed to her as she became a permanent resident of the hallowed halls of Radio Today.
The clock struck eight and my co-host was found bellowing from the insides of the washroom for me to scurry and that she would follow. The morning washroom visit; It has become a ritual for Jaishree (my co-host). No matter what time we arrive n the studio, she almost feels compelled to fulfill that rite before she takes on another kind of pressure starting eight o’ clock.
That is the time when the breakfast show comes in to play. The show we proudly call Meow Zindagi, which has been our playground, haven and sometimes even the squabble-zone. As we both rambled on and finally played a song at quarter past eight, I found myself rather itchy, as if I had accidentally rubbed myself against poison ivy. As the show proceeded, so did my itching. By the end of it, I resembled a raspberry cheesecake (not that delectable though). As we stepped out of the studio and exposed my cheesecake self to everybody, like a truly democratic society that we are, everyone used their fundamental right of free speech to mull over what the rash on my skin might be. Some jumped right to questions about who I was dating and if that person was hygienic. I was reminded of how sex is like air. Its really not important till you aren’t getting any. But of course, sympathy on that count from anyone was ruled out. Then of course I was told that I could be suffering from measles and not have known it (I was told even Aishwarya Rai has them, so its quite proper in that fashion to have measles and if it’s the German variety then better still, at least Id exhibit being a bit status conscious) or perhaps it was a rash from the thermal shock of being out in the sun and then coming back into a temperature controlled environment or as my Programming Head pointed out, it would probably be my desire for a vacation and her constant refusal to give it to me that had manifested in a fabricated disease to facilitate the much awaited holiday.
As speculation of my rash subsided with greater matters like the ‘viagra computer virus’, which threatened to turn the 3 ½, inch floppy into a hard disc, at hand, I was finally asked to hurry along to a doctor’s office and get a final opinion (I am sure people back at work laid bets about whose version the doctor would side with)