I am sick of being sick

As the wheels of my life rotate, they pretty regularly, for some karmic reason (I suspect) end up getting stuck at “falling ill”. And when I fall ill, it is not usually the standard flu, cough, food poisoning brand of sickness…no that IS NOT what my sickness is about. Well I get sick with perplexing and outlandish diseases of the following ilk:
- Its not a UTI. It has all the symptoms of a UTI. Its not IC (go google it!). It has all the symptoms of IC. The gynecologist, the urologist, everyone is baffled by what it is. Its making my life hell ‘cos I want to pee like “ALL” the time. Then after a year of it raising its queer head, me having popped a gazillion pills and basically having lost all hope in the magic of medical science (isn’t it a cute oxymoron!), it disappears as mysteriously as it had appeared.
- Its not flu, because I am not running any temperature. Its not thyroid, because the tests negate it. It’s the middle of April, and I am having shivering fits! My general physician (who CC thinks, should now start giving me reward points or entitle me to some such scheme considering how often I make a trip to him) gives me a tired smile and tells me to go home as nothing seems to be wrong with me. Then, as is the case with most of my diseases, this one also disappears after 2 months.
- Its not arthritis (even though I have gone ahead and sobbed the story of me having arthritis at such a 'tender' age to anyone who would care to listen!!). But this one most definitely has all the symptoms of it. All my small joints keep hurting and blah blah blah. But this is the seventh month of the mystery and sadly it has not disappeared till now.
- The current cause of my woes is this peculiar headache that I am getting. This is not a disprin-headache, but it is something that makes my head go dizzy, and it is (strangely at times) accompanied by temperature.

So this time my resolve weakened and I came running to Mommy Dearest. Yes I am back home!!
Being sick at home and being sick in Bombay are two totally different experiences. In Bombay, if you fall ill, you are holed up in one corner of your flat feeling sickly and lonely. By the time you battle traffic and reach the hospital, after a crazy 20 minute rickshaw ride, you think it is not possible for you to feel any sicker. But…BUT, nothing on this planet can make you feel sicker than that one moment , when you gingerly look at the amount left in your bank account after paying the doctor’s consultation fee and the bills for the umpteen tests that you are made to take…they take your blood, they take your p@#$$, they take your s!@#$ AND they take your money…they take away everything that you have ever called your own (ok..I will stop the melodrama, but then I am sick right now, so these spurts are discounted.right? right.)
Then the repulsive oil-dripping food your maid will cook, will make you want to puke and the thought of ordering from outside (because of health and financial aspects involved) will make you want to puke some more.
Then you will slowly and steadily become delirious, the lack of money, lack of food, lack of company will make you hallucinate and (mostly when you are alone at home..which you usually are, because everyone else is at work) you will hear sounds of water dripping from the tap in the bathroom and you will “feel” that someone is brushing their teeth in there (don’t laugh..I totally freaked yesterday..and YES it did happen to me). And then all you want to do is run..run as fast as possible and reach the safe havens of your own home, filled with the smells of home-cooked food and inane chattering of your mother.
And what a relief it is! The path-lab guy actually came home to take my blood sample! The doctor was an acquaintance and took time to be nice to me (unlike the Bombay lot of doctors- frigid asses! Except my GP, who is always ready with a smile!) and cracked jokes. I am getting cut-washed-seed-removed-fruits to eat. I don’t have to get up to heat my milk or even get a glass of water, I don’t hear any weird sounds except my mom generally talking away to no-one in particular (don’t be alarmed..that is usual for her)…. I actually cant think of one good reason to go back to manic Bombay and fall sick all over again!

The End of Dreams

I have always had this dream of learning the guitar. I would fantasize that I had become a pro at playing the guitar and have become all cool and a total babe with the guitar slung on one shoulder, chewing gum, messy hair, walking on the streets with that brooding solitary look which one finds ooohh-so-attractive. A part of such day-dreaming has also been about playing “Eleanor” for my friends and playing so well that all of them become moon-eyed and keep thinking “Oh my God…she is sooo COOL!!” Well I know these are all superfluous reasons for learning the guitar and maybe just jaded versions of my dreams as a teenager…but whatever.

So after much procrastinating etc…I decided to join this class which is conducted once a week. The first Saturday I went there, I was turned away because they didn’t have a spare guitar. The second Saturday I entered the class only to be surrounded by around 10 kids aging anywhere between 6 – 16. I went…WHATT!! I mean I thought the guitar class would be full of some really awesome types, but all I could see as far as my short-sightedness would permit me, were masses of human bodies reaching anywhere between my waist to my shoulder. That was the first dip in my enthusiasm level to learn the instrument.

Thereafter I was given this really shiny red guitar which I held on to awkwardly and I was shown to my group (the beginner’s group). Now my group consisted of 2 small kids and when I say small, I mean really small (when they slung the guitar on their shoulders, the guitar seemed taller than them!!..get the picture?) and a grandfatherly uncle! I again went…WHAT (second downer)!! Then the tutors…who were really..REALLY bad. They paid absolutely no attention to our group! I kept sitting there with the guitar for an hour and fifteen minutes while the two kids in my group kept fidgeting, fighting, whining and the grandfatherly uncle kept looking on patiently at the rest of the class. It was so putting off and torturous that I decided “No more guitar classes for me”.

How the dreams of a lifetime come to an end so abruptly!....Big HMPH!

Friends!

I am the sort of person who lives in denial. I like to think friends are .. yeah whatever..I am ok with or without them. But in my subconscience I know that, if even for a day I have to live without friends, I would most probably be running wild on the streets while pulling my hair apart.

So here is my friendistory..

Chaube. She is my closest friend. I have a lot of other very close friends with whom I can discuss most probably all the things that I can discuss with Chaube, but then she REALLY understands me. She understands my flippant/moody behaviour. She understands if I don’t reply to her smses (which by the way I rarely ever do!). She understands why I get irritated with almost everything around me. She understands why I need to act all Cool at times. She understands without me saying so that I really hate such and such person even though I am very pal-y with them. She understand why the hell am I still then friends with such and such person. She is just basically the closest that anyone has ever come to understand me. She does not ever EVER judge me (atleast not to my face). She will nod along whenever I spew forth my verbal rants and I think she pretty much gets where I am coming from and that I will forget about whatever it is that I am pissed off in about a span of 10 minutes (You see I am a very nice person at heart …who does not hold grudges for long). And yes she makes the best chai on this planet!

SA. She basically is my chaddi-baddi. We have been together for God-knows-how-many-years. We have literally grown up together and have been friends right from, I think, the first standard. She is like a mother-hen and gal-pal rolled into one. She will mother me to no end (Oh…to clarify..we have been flatmates for like 4 years now). She will ensure that I eat properly, that I take my medicines. She accompanies/offers to accompany me for all my doc appointments (and believe me…I have had loads of them). She has nursed me with khicdi, avomine and disprin through all my hangovers. The best that I have enjoyed shopping sprees..is with her…rasta shopping, mall shopping, boutique shopping…all sorts of shopping. We sort of have this pact..we very rarely go out on “sprees” with anyone else. Even if someone expressly asks us to take them along for shopping, we ignore them, because we hate shopping with other people (yeah..we are sort of weird that ways)! She brings out the feminine side of me. We like doing, spas, parlors and ofcourse shopping together. We luuurrrvvvee getting dressed up for occasions together. We love painting our nails together. And when Chaube, SA and me are together we can bitch and gossip and bitch and gossip like there is no tomorrow.

GA. Considering the fact that this guy is diametrically opposite to me in everything, its extremely surprising that we have been such close friends for so long. I started talking to him because a-once-upon-a-close-friend had a crush on him. But once we started down the road of friendship … there was no stopping us. Though apart from the college days, we have always stayed miles apart, when we catch up, on phone or personally, its like there was no interval in between. He is the most sorted person (apart from CC) that I know. And I say that we are totally different from each other precisely for such reasons..while I am maha impulsive, he thinks through everything. While I don’t fall for anyone easily (for me it’s a very very long journey to get comfortable with some one emotionally), he is a complete romantic at heart, while I was the sort who would have fun and then think about studies, he always studied and then thought of fun. Also, he being the only close/best friend/ sort of a boy around me in college, we both have had our share of crushes on each other and the fact that we overcame the awkwardness and became normal again and know that we now are friends for life, makes me even more fond of him.

VR. She is my “practical” friend. She tolerated (and participated at times) in my heavy college days hedonism, but she exactly knew what life has in the offing and never got carried away (unlike me) with all that you can get carried away in college years with. She has consoled me over thousands of cups of coffee and hundreds of packets of cigarettes, whenever I had SOSd her over “bf is a jerk” problem. She never gave me romantic solutions (and sometimes I hated her for that) for any of the problems in life. Her mantra was simple .. black is black and will always be black and likewise for white..now take your pick. Gawd…it was frustrating at times to unload off to her, but in retrospect I know now that she always made perfect sense. Though she is married now and settled in a far-far away land, I know she is and will always be there for me. And BTW she has a “rare” temper, rare in appearance and rare in intensity..she once threw GA and me out of her car (late night and god-knows-how-many-miles-away-from-the-hostel) just because we happened to make fun of her bag..thats VR for you!

SK and GN. Both school friends. Both not in the same city as me. Parents’ of both hate me for being “bad” influence on their daughters. Both part of the SS group. Whenever we touch base, we know exactly what the other’s about. This kind of friendship is difficult to find, easy to retain, comfortable to be in and lasts a longtime.

SK is the most naïve person I have met…one has to keep warning her about the big bad world outside. She cracks me up with her innocent one liners which she will deliver without even knowing how hilarious she is! With her I am always transported back to school, because we are always bitch without reason, we throw attitude without reason, we boss around without reason AND our mandate is to make fun of EVERYONE. We sort of lost touch in between but now that we are back on track there is no looking back and I am desperately hoping that she will come to Bombay soon sooner soonest.

GN always has always been wiser beyond her age (or so she likes to think). We were next door neighbors in school and covered up for each other’s amorous meetings. We have had a lot of our firsts together, the most interesting being the first flasher that we ever saw. She loves to give me heaploads of gyaan and I love listening to it. She is also the most headstrong and sensible girl that I know. She knows what she has and can have and she has made her peace with it and decided to be happy…and surprisingly things have always turned in her favor. I wish she too would relocate to Bombay….

TA. She is like my baby (though she likes to think it’s the other way around!). She is one of my youngest friends. She has a crazy and infectious laugh and no matter what mood you are in, once she starts laughing, you cant help yourself from joining in. We have had crazy nights in college hostel. I would kind of like to take credit for the way she is turned out to be (so much gyan I had given her during her formative (lol!) years on everything from jobs, studies, friends, lovers, sex, marriage, parents, college jerks and college bitches (whether or not I had any personal expertise in any of the above areas), and she has always heard me out seriously and i suspect (or rather hope) tried to adhere to it as well at times!. I still love sharing my wisdom with her …whether she wants it or not.

My list does not end there as I have loads of other close friends too from office, from college, including but not limited to Apurv (there you go…you made your debut!!) but my fingers are aching now.

Me as a friend…I would like to think I am a good, though absent-minded, friend. I would probably come across as indifferent towards my friends sometimes (because I don’t reply to messages, I hate having conversations on the phone, sometimes I would not even respond if my friend is sitting in front of me and chatting, I may forget b’days, I may forget to call up and ask after a friend’s health when I know they are sick etc etc), but then all my friends know (hopefully) that I am there and will always be there. And this post is just dedicated to all my friends for being there in my life, I cant imagine how dreadfully boring my life would without each single one of them (MD,SM, GR, SS, PS, DA, MP, RD,RS,Apurv,MM). I feel like I am giving a Filmfare award speech.

As they say…Old Friends Are Hard To Grow.

So long!